By Asawin Suebsaeng|Zeteo
Photos: YouTube Screenshots|Wikimedia Commons
If you didn’t tune into Donald Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly in Manhattan, the president played the hits – meaning, it was a disgusting carnival of self-aggrandizement, flailing bullyboy nonsense, and mindless bloodlust masquerading as MAGA-fried realpolitik.
He threatened the Cuban delegation, at a time when his government is brutally asphyxiating that nation. As he often does, he threatened the Iranian people with genocide, “annihilation,” and “hell,” because he can’t face the fact he’s badly losing a war he started. He bragged about his boat bombing campaign and boasted of his invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of its leader, openly telling all nations, democratic and not, that the United States is now fully, openly in the business of pillaging, looting, and extra-legal killing.
No more plausible deniability. No high-minded nods to “spreading democracy” or “human rights.”
The Trump doctrine is just a new version of his old remarks about sexual assault on the Access Hollywood tape; When you’re America, they let you do it.
“In January, at my direction, the United States military conducted a massive military operation penetrating deep into the Venezuelan capital,” Trump told the UN on Tuesday. “Last month, we signed the largest oil deal in history [with Venezuela’s leadership] … It was a war … To the victor belong the spoils, you’ve all heard that.”
Trump loves to talk about the “victor” taking the “spoils” of war by force. The president brings it up fairly regularly, publicly and privately, as a preferred policy of the U.S. government. His top White House policy aide, Stephen Miller, also uses the phrase often, when discussing foreign policy and the “politically correct” critics of this brand of large-scale looting, according to sources who’ve been in the room with him since the start of Trump 2.0.
Zeteo@zeteo_newsTrump’s speech at the U.N. checked all his usual boxes… ✅Warmongering ✅Islamophobia ✅Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric ✅Election lies We watched it so you don’t have to. Here are some of the lowlights (we couldn’t fit them all.)
9:45 PM · Sep 22, 2026 · 3.48K Views2 Replies · 23 Reposts · 58 LikesHands down, this was the worst speech an American president has ever given at the UN. I cannot think of one that was dumber or more pathetically depraved. Under a variety of presidents, the U.S. has attacked civilians, caused immense harm, and waged wars of aggression and stolen resources. Trump is not only continuing the tradition – he’s exacerbating it, finding novel, lawless, and reckless ways to go about his bumbling imperial misadventures. And while standing on perhaps the most global of all stages, he announced that America was officially out of the freedom business. We are now in the We Take It If We Want To business. The Bush administration at least managed to publicly deny that it launched a war to steal oil. In Trump’s administration, you aren’t doing your job right if you aren’t telling everybody: Yeah, of course we’re doing wars for oil.
Some on the anti-imperialist left will be tempted to say (and boy, have I heard this numerous times in private conversations with writers and activists who shall go unnamed): At least Trump is saying the quiet part loud. What do you think the American empire is? At least Trump is admitting it! Isn’t it better that way?
It’s not.
The version of the U.S. empire that Trump is ringleading – mask ripped off, clumsily expansionist, proudly lusting for wars waged for oil, nihilistically murderous – is an objectively worse standard than the ass-covering alternative of yesterday’s USA. The Trump White House’s version has already led to significantly more bloodletting and misery than would have occurred had we elected a custodian of empire who pretended to care about human rights and dignity.
“Trump says the quiet part out loud. He doesn’t have a modulator, so that’s part of it,” Mark Pfeifle, formerly deputy national security adviser for strategic communications and global outreach in George W. Bush’s White House, tells me. “He is the ultimate transactional leader. This is not your normal politician by any stretch … He’s struggling and lashing out. So he gets to the UN, and first thing he does, he goes back to that transnational nature, and that bombast. He wants to look like he’s strong and victorious, even if the headlines don’t show that right now … He is now 42 days out from the midterms, and he’s like a blind boxer trying to hit something.”
I’m not asking you to feel hints of nostalgia for the horrific and warmongering Bush era. What I am saying is that what President Trump has birthed – and what he declared to be official American policy at the UN – is somehow darker and menacingly worse. There’s not a ton to be grateful for nowadays, but thank whatever god you pray to that Trump wasn’t in power on 9/11.
We are suffocating on the dual legacies of Bush and Trump… which would partially explain why the former Republican president (for all his wincing at Trump’s crude behavior) is now trying to help the sitting president preserve his power on Capitol Hill.
Imagine that!
