Trump Upbraids U.N. in Speech, Claiming ‘Your Countries Are Going to Hell’

The Washington Post

12:08 JST, September 24, 2025

UNITED NATIONS – President Donald Trump on Tuesday called for fellow leaders to halt global migration and end the fight against climate change, taking aim at two of the United Nations’ core issues as he sought to elevate his domestic agenda into a playbook the whole world should follow.

In an address from the biggest international stage, Trump took aim at the organization’s priorities but said it had “tremendous potential.” But the message he delivered in unusually stark terms at the annual gathering of world leaders rebuked the values of the organization that seeks to reduce suffering from global conflicts, famines and persecution and address climate change by reducing emissions and the burning of fossil fuels.

Trump has long sought to reduce immigration and abandon climate commitments inside U.S. borders but has spent less time advocating that other countries do the same thing. In the nearly hour-long speech Tuesday – nearly four times the official 15-minute time limit – he globalized those priorities, declaring that individual nations need to put their own interests ahead of a broader cooperative agenda.

“Immigration and the high cost of so-called green renewable energy is destroying a large part of the free world,” Trump told leaders in the soaring U.N.’s General Assembly Hall. “Countries that cherish freedom are fading fast because of their policies on these two subjects. You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.”

Trump took special aim at the leaders of wealthy European nations that have long been Washington’s closest allies, many of whom are facing right-wing challengers who model themselves after the U.S. president.

Europe “has a long way to go, with many countries being on the brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda,” Trump said. “Both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe.”

In a winding address that hopped across hot-button issues – including a long-held grievance over the organization’s rejection of his bid to renovate its headquarters and his efforts to promote world peace – Trump claimed that without swift action on immigration, “your countries are going to hell.” And he called to protect Christianity, which he called “the most persecuted religion on the planet today.” He also forcefully challenged the science of climate change.

“It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” he said. “The carbon footprint is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions, and they’re heading down a path of total destruction.”

The United Nations helps fund an international migration system that provides support and shelter to refugees and migrants around the world, promoting an asylum system that advocates that people who face war at home have the right to seek protection outside their borders.

And in recent decades, world leaders have also used the United Nations to build a global system to fight the climate change that is coming from greenhouse gases trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere, heating the planet. Both stances conflict with Trump’s agenda, but he has more often declared that the United States would go it alone.

The president has held back funding for the United Nations, causing a budget crisis for the organization. His reception on Tuesday after a six-year hiatus marked a significant shift.

In Trump’s first term, leaders who opposed his policy stances held out hope that his election was an aberration and that the United States would soon return to its more familiar internationalist role. Now they recognize that Trump is speaking on behalf of a strong constituency in his country – and that the changes he is bringing to the international system could outlast his presidency.

There was notable laughter in the room when Trump in 2018 delivered a familiar line from the campaign trail, telling world leaders that he “has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.”

This year, the room was largely silent as Trump cycled through grievances: a malfunctioning escalator that forced him and first lady Melania Trump to climb stairs; a false claim that Muslims want to impose sharia law on Western cities; and that “radicalized environmentalists” in the United States want to “kill all the cows.”

He trumpeted an ever-growing list of conflicts he says he has resolved, now up to seven, including tension between India and Pakistan and 12 days of fighting between Israel and Iran.

Some of Trump’s claims about peace are exaggerated, including in Africa, where the leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo said Monday that much remains to be done before peace is achieved with Rwanda. And Trump has gained little traction with the two highest-profile wars he declared he would end, in the Gaza Strip and in Ukraine. But other leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize he openly covets, in hopes of securing his favor.

The president styled himself as a world peacemaker but said the U.N. was doing little to help him. The United Nations “has such tremendous, tremendous potential, but it’s not even coming close to living up to that potential,” Trump said. “All they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up. It’s empty words, and empty words don’t solve war.”

Still, resolution to key global conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine has remained elusive.

In Gaza, a resolution to the war seems to be getting further away, as Israel escalates its bombardment of the territory after nearly two years of conflict, frustrating the U.S. president. Several Washington allies have recognized a Palestinian state in recent weeks, over sharp U.S. objections that doing so benefits Hamas.

During their speeches on Tuesday, three leaders Trump has embraced in the Middle East, the emir of Qatar, the king of Jordan and the president of Turkey, sharply criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza and urged major powers to bring an end to the war.

In Ukraine, meanwhile, Trump had stepped back from his most active efforts after meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska last month, but on Tuesday he made sharply pro-Kyiv comments that called Russia’s military a “paper tiger,” suggesting that Ukraine should reclaim its full territory from Moscow. Putin has refused to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky despite Trump’s push, and he has increased strikes on Ukraine in the weeks since.

The annual gathering of world leaders always sets the stage for unusual and sometimes awkward encounters. Trump’s visit put him on the podium directly after Brazil’s leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose government the Trump administration has blasted and sanctioned for its conviction of Lula’s predecessor, a far-right Trump ally.

Lula stood as a counterweight to the U.S. president’s right-wing populism, hailing the conviction of his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, for attempting to overturn the country’s 2022 election, a fate Trump avoided after federal prosecutors dropped charges against him last year.

Lula, who has sought to speak for the developing world, placed blame on the West for the protracted conflict in Gaza, saying it exposed the “myth of ethical exceptionalism of the West.”

“This massacre would not have happened without the complicity of those who could have prevented it in Gaza,” he said.

Trump said that he and Lula ran into each other just before his speech. “He seemed like a very nice man, actually. He liked me. I liked him,” Trump said. “At least for about 39 seconds we had excellent chemistry.”

Trump planned to host a dinner for world leaders Tuesday evening.

Ahead of Trump’s speech on Tuesday, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres decried funding cuts to the United Nations, an implicit reference to the Trump administration’s rescission of $1 billion in congressionally appropriated funding for 2025 U.N. dues and peacekeeping operations and its refusal to pay money still owed for 2024.

“Cuts to aid are wreaking havoc,” Guterres said. “They are a death sentence for many. For so many more: a stolen future.”

Guterres, like the wider U.N. community, is still trying to learn Trump’s plans for the international body. Trump has ordered a review of all U.S. funding that has not yet been released by the White House – a decision that is holding many diplomats in a state of suspense.

“No one in New York has really had a sense of whether there is a Trump strategy and what U.S. red lines might be at the U.N.,” said Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at the International Crisis Group, who noted that Trump’s ambassador to the organization, former national security adviser Michael Waltz, had not been confirmed by the Senate until Friday.

In a Fox News interview ahead of Trump’s speech, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the institution as ineffectual and “feckless.”

“In a place like Haiti, that’s been overrun by gangs that control that country and has destabilized the region, the U.S. is asking for the U.N. to step up and play a very important role,” Rubio said on “Fox & Friends.” “We have a lot of support, but it looks like China might stand in the way of this effort to bring that about. The U.N. will play no role if they do that.”