White House says broken escalator at the U.N. may have been ‘sabotage’

UNITED NATIONS – White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the broken escalator at the U.N. that forced President Trump and first lady Melania Trump to walk up it may have been the result of sabotage.

Ms. Leavitt said the Secret Service is looking into the matter, and if anyone is found to be responsible, there will be “accountability.”

“So when you put all of this together, it doesn’t look like a coincidence to me. And I know that we have people, including the United States Secret Service, who are looking into this to try to get to the bottom of it. And if we find that these were U.N. staffers who were purposely trying to trip up, literally trip up the president and the first lady of the United States, well, there better be accountability for those people,” Ms. Leavitt said late Tuesday on Fox News’ “Jesse Waters Prime Time.”

The president and first lady were riding the escalator Tuesday when it jolted to a stop. After a few moments of Mr. Trump looking around, Mrs. Trump began walking up the escalator. The incident happened when Mr. Trump arrived at the U.N. to address the General Assembly.

He complained about the broken escalator multiple times in his speech.

“All I got from the United Nations was an escalator on the way up that stopped right in the middle,” he said, adding that Mrs. Trump would have fallen if she were not in great shape. 

A U.N. spokesman said Tuesday the escalator may have suddenly stopped because a White House videographer, who was traveling backward up the escalator to film Mr. Trump, may have inadvertently set off the escalator’s safety alarms.       

“A subsequent investigation, including a readout of the machine’s central processing unit, indicated that 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 from accidentally being caught and stuck in or pulled into the gearing,” Stephane Dujarroc, a spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said in a statement.

Some conservative media personalities have also suggested that the broken escalator was the result of sabotage.

“They sabotaged him, and they could’ve hurt the first lady,” Mr. Watters said on his program.

In the wake of the tensions, the New York State Conservative Party called on the U.N. on Wednesday to relocate its headquarters outside of the U.S., saying the world body has declined from a once-hopeful postwar organization into what party leaders describe as a “bureaucratic shell hostile to America and its values.”

“New Yorkers once took pride that our city hosted the United Nations,” New York State Conservative Party Chairman Gerard Kassar said. “It was a symbol of hope after World War II, and it gave New York a special distinction as the ‘Capital of the World.’ Sadly, the institution has since devolved into a body dominated by anti-American, antisemitic, career bureaucrats. It is no longer a source of pride but of embarrassment.”

Mr. Kassar pointed to decades of complaints about U.N. diplomats routinely ignoring New York City’s traffic and parking laws, undermining the rule of law in the city that hosts them. 

“The U.N. has long treated New York with contempt, even as we house and protect it. The brazen disregard its diplomats show toward the laws of our city is symbolic of the organization’s larger failings.”

The U.N.’s location in New York City has long been a topic of debate as U.N. diplomats have ignored tens of millions of dollars in unpaid city parking fines, and the U.S. taxpayer carries the heaviest burden to maintain the headquarters.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, every member of the U.N. is required to contribute to the organization’s budget, and the U.S. has been the largest donor since the body’s founding in 1945.

The U.S. contributed close to $13 billion in 2023, accounting for more than a quarter of funding for the body’s collective budget.