During his ridiculous address to the U.N. General Assembly, Donald Trump covered quite a bit of ground, but his speech included a curious reference to, of all things, an escalator.
“All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that, on the way up, stopped right in the middle,” the president said, before twice more repeating the same complaint. He stressed the same issue soon after in a social media item.
While his remarks included a dizzying amount of lies, this part was largely true: The president and first lady Melania Trump were on an escalator on Tuesday, which came to an abrupt halt. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote online that this might’ve been intentional.
Hours later, Leavitt appeared on Fox News and suggested that United Nations staffers might have been trying to injure Trump. “When you put all of this together, it doesn’t look like a coincidence to me,” she said.
Evidently, the truth was more benign. NBC News reported:
The United Nations has concluded its one-day investigation into the mysterious halting of President Donald Trump’s escalator Tuesday as he arrived at the U.N. General Assembly. The accidental culprit? A White House videographer who most likely tripped a safety mechanism.
A U.N. spokesperson explained: “The escalator had stopped after a built-in safety mechanism on the comb step was triggered at the top of the escalator. The safety mechanism is designed to prevent people or objects accidentally being caught and stuck in or pulled into the gearing. The [White House] videographer may have inadvertently triggered the safety function described above.”
As incidents go, this will likely soon be forgotten, but it’s worth noting that some Republicans seized on this “controversy” in rather outlandish ways — before the facts were available.
Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, for example, who has a deeply unfortunate record when it comes to peddling misinformation online, published a message that said: “The UN deep state tried to embarrass Trump and make him less safe.” The Utah Republican, in related items, said that the U.N. might’ve been “trying to give us a hint” by “orchestrating” the escalator malfunction, adding that he wants to “defund” and withdraw from the international institution. All of this, of course, came before the public learned that it was a White House videographer that apparently triggered the escalator’s safety measures. Kevin Kruse, a historian at Princeton University, noted soon after: “This is the perfect encapsulation of Trumpism — because of its obsession with imagery, the White House crew caused a problem but blamed it on other people, leading to MAGA making threats against the United Nations for their own screw up.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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