Watched by the world, President Donald Trump returns to the United Nations on Tuesday to deliver a wide-ranging address on his second-term foreign policy achievements and lament that “globalist institutions have significantly decayed the world order,” according to the White House.
World leaders will be listening closely to his remarks at the U.N. General Assembly as Trump has already moved quickly to diminish U.S. support for the world body in his first eight months in office.
“President Trump will be taking the stage shortly at the United Nations General Assembly,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on X. “This will be one of his biggest foreign policy speeches yet. The world is going to see what American Strength looks like. The globalists will be on notice. TUNE IN!”
After his latest inauguration, he issued a first-day executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization. That was followed by his move to end U.S. participation in the U.N. Human Rights Council, and ordering up a review of U.S. membership in hundreds of intergovernmental organizations aimed at determining whether they align with the priorities of his “America First” agenda.
Global leaders are being tested by intractable wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan, uncertainty about the economic and social impact of emerging artificial intelligence technology, and anxiety about Trump’s antipathy for the global body.
After the remarks to the United Nations General Assembly, Trump will then take part in a series of bilateral meetings with world leaders across the late morning and early afternoon.
In the evening at 7:20 p.m. ET, he will attend and give an address at a U.N. reception – and reportedly meet with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy at 8 p.m. ET – before returning to the White House.
Trump will address the annual UN General Assembly later Tuesday and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the president would call for it to act on various crises instead of just debating them.
“I think what the president’s going to do is challenge the U.N. to find its meaning and its purpose and its utility as an organization because it doesn’t seem to be doing the job,” Rubio said in an interview.
Rubio noted that in his private life, Trump had once offered to help renovate the U.N. headquarters in New York but had been turned down.
“I think it’s emblematic of how feckless the U.N. has become as an organization,” he said. “It’s just a place where once a year a bunch of people meet and give speeches and write out a bunch of letters and statements but not a lot of good, important action is happening. The U.N. has a lot of potential but it’s not living up to it right now.”
Information from The Associated Press was used to compile this report.
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