by WorldTribune Staff, October 26, 2025 Real World News
In the early 2000s, then-master builder Donald Trump had offered to renovate the United Nations building in Manhattan, promising to create a “beautiful” structure with mahogany walls and marble floors.
The UN rejected Trump’s offer. Then when he returned to speak last month as U.S. President, the escalator suddenly stopped as he and First Lady Melania Trump were ascending which could have caused them to fall. Furthermore, neither the teleprompter nor the sound system were working when he delivered his remarks.
The president was no doubt steamed about this series of seemingly deliberate miscues but took advantage of the opportunity to veer off script and jab his hosts about the “deal” they had dodged at great expense to their financial backers (a list headed by the United States).
Trump recalled the decades-old snub to accentuate his message of the mistakes the international organization continues to make:
“Many years ago, a very successful real estate developer in New York known as Donald J Trump bid on the renovation and rebuilding of this very United Nations complex. I remember it so well. I said at the time that I would do it for $500 million, rebuilding everything. It’d be beautiful,” Trump said.
“I’m going to give you marble floors, they’re going to give you terrazzo,” he recalled saying at the time. “I’m going to give you the best of everything. You’re going to have mahogany walls. They’re going to give you plastic. But they decided to go in another direction, which was much more expensive at the time, which actually produced a far inferior product.
“And I realized that they did not know what they were doing when it came to construction, and that their building concepts were so wrong, and the product that they were proposing to build was so bad and so costly, it was going to cost them a fortune.
“I turned out to be right, they had massive cost overruns and spent between $2 billion and $4 billion on the building, and did not even get the marble floors that I promised them! You walk on terrazzo, do you notice that? As far as I’m concerned, frankly, looking at the building and getting stuck on the escalator… they still haven’t finished the job!”
Currently, Trump said: “Unfortunately, many things in the United Nations are happening just like that, but on an even much bigger scale.”
“What is the purpose of the United Nations?” Trump asked. “It’s not even coming close to living up to [its] potential.”
The president noted that he’s worked to end “seven wars” without any help from the UN.
“It’s too bad that I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing them,” Trump said. “I ended seven wars, dealt with the leaders of each and every one of these countries, and never even received a phone call from the United Nations offering to help in finalizing the deal.”
“Not only is the UN not solving the problems it should. Too often it’s actually creating new problems for us to solve,” Trump said.
Former builder Donald Trump took advantage of UN snafus to drive home message added by Editor Two on
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