The US president, who has long viewed international forums as extensions of his personal brand rather than venues for multilateral engagement, found himself upstaged not by world leaders or policy debates, but by the very infrastructure meant to elevate him — literally and figuratively — above the diplomatic fray.

The day's tribulations began in the U.N.'s modernist lobby, where Mr. Trump approached the building's central escalator with his customary theatrical flair. The moving stairway, which has ferried countless heads of state to their appointed rounds of speechmaking, chose that moment to exercise what might charitably be called mechanical discretion.

Halfway up, the escalator shuddered to a halt, leaving the former president suspended in a tableau that seemed to capture the broader trajectory of American global leadership: moving upward with great confidence, only to find itself mysteriously stuck.

"All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle," Mr. Trump later complained, transforming a routine safety mechanism into evidence of institutional hostility. The reality, as United Nations spokesman Stéphane Dujarric patiently explained, was rather more prosaic: a member of the American delegation had triggered the automatic safety stop while rushing ahead to film the president's entrance.

The irony was not lost on veteran U.N. observers. An escalator designed to prevent accidents had done precisely that, albeit at considerable cost to presidential dignity. Yet rather than acknowledge the mundane nature of the mishap, Trump aides whispered darkly of "deliberate" sabotage, as if the building's maintenance staff had conspired to embarrass American power through strategic escalator manipulation.

The mechanical rebellion continued inside the General Assembly hall, where Mr. Trump's teleprompter — that essential crutch of modern political performance — chose the moment of his address to stage its own revolt. The device, which has guided presidents through countless speeches, flickered once and died, leaving its user to improvise before an audience of world leaders accustomed to more polished presentations.

"Whoever is running the teleprompter is in big trouble," the former president declared, transforming technical failure into public theatre. The comment carried particular irony: according to U.N. officials, the prompter was being operated not by international staff but by the White House's own technical team.

The moment encapsulated a broader pattern in Mr. Trump's approach to international engagement — the reflexive assumption that any malfunction, any difficulty, any moment of less-than-perfect stagecraft must be the work of hostile forces rather than simple human error or mechanical failure.

Yet perhaps no incident better captured the surreal nature of the day's proceedings than the temporary detention of President Emmanuel Macron of France, whose motorcade found itself frozen in Manhattan traffic at the whim of New York's traffic enforcement officers.

The French leader, en route to deliver his own remarks on Middle Eastern diplomacy, discovered that his convoy had been halted to accommodate Mr. Trump's passage through midtown. What followed was a scene that might have been scripted by a satirist with a particularly acute sense of irony.

Mr. Macron, according to witnesses, rolled down his window, got out of the car and addressed a bemused police officer in accented English: "What is happening?" Upon learning that Mr. Trump's motorcade required clear passage, the French president placed a phone call to his American counterpart with characteristic Gallic directness: "Monsieur le President, I am blocked. Because of you." He got out the car and walked to avoid delays.

The exchange, conducted with what observers described as good humour tinged with exasperation, highlighted the peculiar dynamics of Trump-era diplomacy, where traditional protocols bend to accommodate the president's preference for grand entrances and theatrical gestures.

These incidents, individually minor and collectively absurd, revealed something more significant about Mr. Trump's relationship with international institutions. Rather than treating mechanical failures and scheduling conflicts as routine irritants of public life, he transformed them into evidence of systematic persecution.

The escalator malfunction became proof of United Nations incompetence; the teleprompter failure demonstrated institutional hostility; the traffic arrangements confirmed American priority. Each mishap was reframed not as an accident but as meaning — either validation of American dominance or evidence of foreign conspiracy.

This interpretive framework has characterized Mr. Trump's approach to multilateral engagement throughout his political career. The United Nations, in his telling, is simultaneously too weak to manage basic infrastructure and too malevolent to be trusted with global governance.

For U.N. veterans accustomed to the measured rhythms of diplomatic discourse, Tuesday's proceedings offered a reminder of the institution's capacity to absorb even the most unconventional theatrical flourishes. The building that has hosted everyone from Nikita Khrushchev's shoe-pounding histrionics to Muammar el-Qaddafi's marathon speeches proved equally capable of accommodating presidential complaints about escalator reliability.

Yet the day's events also underscored a more troubling trend: the gradual transformation of international diplomacy into performance art, where substance increasingly yields to spectacle and policy debates become secondary to the drama of their presentation.

As world leaders returned to the serious business of addressing global crises — from climate change to regional conflicts to economic instability — Mr. Trump's mechanical tribulations served as an inadvertent reminder that sometimes the medium truly is the message.

In the theatre of international relations, Tuesday's performance at the United Nations offered all the elements of classic drama: a protagonist undone by hubris, supporting characters caught between loyalty and bewilderment, and a setting that seemed almost designed to highlight the gap between aspiration and reality.

The only question now is whether the audience was entertained or merely exhausted by the spectacle. (IPA Service)