It was the kind of moment that would have made Kafka blush and Fellini reach for his camera. Donald Trump, President of the United States, Nobel Peace Prize, practically in the bag and self-styled saviour of mankind, was ascending, literally, to the sacred floor of the UN General Assembly, where leaders speak in measured tones about peace, famine, and the rapid death of coral reefs.

But Trump does not speak. He rants. He hectors. Not only that, he bloviates, digresses, riffs pure bullshit and goes batshit crazy. And on this day, he is ready to do it all, convinced he is U Thant 2.0, come to save the world from at least seven wars, possibly eight if you count the one against wind turbines.

Then the elevator stops.

Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. Mechanically. The escalator; not even a proper elevator, just a moving staircase; comes to a screeching halt the moment Trump and Melania step on. The First Couple freeze. Melania, in heels and a sheath dress, grips the rail like a gymnast. Trump, padded and stiff, blinks into the middle distance. For a moment, the world holds its breath. Then they walk; up the frozen escalator, step by step, like shell-shocked penitents ascending a broken ziggurat.

🎭 The Theatre of Malfunction

The incident, captured in grainy footage and shared across social media, is instantly mythologised. Trump calls it “triple sabotage.” His press secretary demands arrests. Fox News floats the idea that UN staff had conspired to humiliate the President by “turning off the escalators and telling him they ran out of money.” Jesse Watters suggests the UN building should be “destroyed.”

But the truth, as ever, is more banal and more damning. According to UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric, the emergency stop mechanism was triggered by a videographer from Trump’s own delegation, a scout with a snout full of nose candy, running backwards up the escalator to capture the perfect shot of the President’s ascent. Perfect? Images of the Trump arse, his tiny, bruised hands or his lurching stumbling drunken hulk are verboten. A lens man has to flatter. In his zeal, Trump’s photographer trips the safety sensor. The machine did what machines do. It stopped.

📺 The Teleprompter That Went Dark

Then came the speech. Or the attempt at one. Trump slouches before the General Assembly, ready to whinge his gospel of grievance, and the Teleprompter goes “stone cold dark.” For fifteen minutes, Trump riffs a stream-of-semi-consciousness, non-sequiturs and flatulent garrulity, that veers from self-congratulation to veiled threats to a complaint about the escalator. “All I got from the United Nations was a bad escalator and a bad Teleprompter,” he says, chopping the air like a man trying to swat a swarm of botflies off his incontinence jodhpurs.

Or that cute little hand jive all the cute little College Kirkophiles are copying.

Later, a testy UN official clarifies: the Teleprompter was operated by Trump’s own staff. The UN provides the stage. The speaker provides the script. The malfunction, like the escalator, was homemade.

🧠 The Hunt for a Scapegoat

Trump’s administration, true to form, launches a hunt for someone to blame. Someone to sue. Someone to fire. Horsewhip. But the culprits are already inside the tent; a videographer too eager, a staffer too careless, a President too convinced of his own grandeur to notice the gears grinding beneath him.

This is not new. It is the eternal return of the strongman undone by his own machinery. Like Nixon sweating under the lights. Berlusconi caught in his own bunga-bunga loop. Lear raging on the heath, blaming the storm for his own folly.

🎨 Iconography of the Fall

The image of Trump walking up a dead escalator is pure visual poetry. It belongs in a triptych with:

Napoleon crossing the Alps, with the horse missing and the snow replaced by steel.

Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images”, because this is not a leader.

A scene from *Brazil, where bureaucracy and malfunction conspire to swallow the protagonist whole.

Melania, poised and silent, an unwilling hostage, long inured to farce and fiasco, becomes a cipher. Trump, padded, puffed, and huffing, The Incredible Sulk, becomes a bad parody of The Ascent of Man. The UN, with its earpiece translations and malfunctioning optics, becomes, as ever, a theatre of the absurd.

⚰️ The Death Beneath the Comedy

We laugh. But beneath the comedy lies a deeper tragedy. A man who cannot speak without a screen. A movement that cannot function without a myth. A republic that cannot climb without tripping its own sensors. A UN that even lets a Trump in.

Trump did not fall. But democracy did; a little more, a little faster, a little deeper into the machinery of spectacle, scapegoating and persecution.

Old Joe Stalin would have loved it.