Almost seven years ago to the day, Donald Trump addressed the General Assembly at the United Nations (UN) in New York. If it wasn't clear before the 25th of September 2018, America First – as a policy – existed at odds with the standards of multilateral diplomacy, then the first lines of Trump’s address very quickly left no doubt. The assembly's response was to laugh at Trump – almost to every full stop. Of all those laughing, the Germans were the loudest, breaking their sniggering occasionally to ask: “who is this uncouth hotdog eater?” before laughing again.

The laughing men and women of the UN would later turn to their media supporters. “Unhinged,” and “ranting” were what those college-educated teachers’ pets would publish in the pages of the country's most corrupted newspaper institutions. In particular, they seized Trump's claim about Germany's reliance on gas imports from Russia via Nord Stream 2, then his claim about the climate – for which he was slammed as a “denier”.

On Tuesday this week, Donald Trump returned to address the General Assembly. Here, the laughing was confined to his commentary on how useless the facilities in the building were, namely an escalator and the teleprompter.

Most ambitious assault

Trump didn't so much speak as lead the most ambitious assault on the decaying concept of modern western civilization in living memory. He attacked the United Nations under Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, for being limited to “strongly worded letters only” and for its role in supporting undocumented and dangerous illegal immigration. He attacked Western Europe for the same, but also for its green energy policies, which he described as a “scam”. As one of his advisors wrote in a message to a journalist following his address, “Zero F**** Given”.

It is not clear that Trump will ever see the General Assembly again. He must have known this, but instead of furnishing fake praise or exploding platitudes, he used the opportunity to expose its routine weaknesses. The truth is: it hasn't been fit for purpose for generations.

It is ideologically twisted, possibly corrupted and handicapped by reliance on explicit knowledge proponents. For nearly two decades this same criticism has endured to no noticeable reform. Yesterday the men and women who run the joint were humiliated for their judgement and intransigence: for South Africans watching, Trump's sentiments would echo their own discontent with the African National Congress (ANC) – both are structurally – and subsequently fatally – flawed institutions with diminished relevance.

Snobs

The effete, snobbish UN grasp of the world was on microscopic display before the General Assembly, in Bournemouth of all places, where the UK's Liberal Democrats held their Autumn Conference.

This was a political party conference that could have been themed either “More Failure – Just Harder and Longer” or “Failure – Our Way”. Official after official took the stage to condemn political hostilities pervasive through the current environment, before becoming politically hostile and attacking or slandering opponents. Seen another way, this was like the cast of Generations sending out rude letters to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences complaining that they’re sick and tired of being persistently overlooked for Oscars.

Central to the Lib Dem vision of future UK politics – and indeed the conference – was a pledge: we promise not to turn the UK into Trump’s America. In 2024’s general election, the Lib Dems secured 3 519 143 votes – 12.2% of the total vote.

Agreement template

Much more than UK’s Labour, the Lib Dems share an agreement template with the UN to absolutely everything, from immigration (free movement) to climate change (we’re all going to die tomorrow), the EU, Gaza, gender, race, and reparations, the legacy of colonialism, two tiers of justice, welfare, and crime.

Underwriting the party’s position lies a betrayal of purpose and thus an infraction of liberalism in its classic form. The party’s leader wants Ofcom to arrest Elon Musk for having the temerity to permit free speech on the platform he owns. Its MP for Twickenham claimed she was, as a “brown woman”, terrified to walk outside the day of London’s Unite the Kingdom rally, despite many other “brown” people attending that same rally, despite living some 12 miles from the action. Its spokesperson on immigration menacingly demands that people “just get on” with the implications of asylum seekers living near schools and its CEO has had to warn party members to stop sending death threats to gender critical profiles.

Double standards

Because the UN is so much more vastly complicated than the UK’s third largest political party, only someone like Trump could penetrate the fantasy bubble of the UN: it is not an organization that appeals to and advocates for human freedoms. It is not an organization that supports the idea of family or order.

It practises double standards when it comes to religion – as Trump has previously pointed out, it barely squeaks when Christians are massacred in places in Syria or Nigeria. With no mandate, it imposes historical grievance evaluation to its conflict missions that often conclude in spite of its participation.

Perhaps the only thing that the UN has accomplished is, just like the Lib Dems, perfecting political correctness and discovering new classes of victims to parade.

A dangerous world

In a world as dangerous as ours has so rapidly become, Trump’s words at the UN and the spectacle of boomers surrendering to their own perversions of an illustrious, rich perspective must be preserved in the event we are to survive the great violence that looks increasingly likely to be a part of our future.

Because they will be the evidence of how we moronized ourselves with impossible, counter-intuitive goals that defied basic sense and arithmetic, creating chains of incoherent groupthink, then opened the door to more problems – most of them unnecessary and illogical.

Close the building down. Cease operations. Archive the moments of excess – from the applause offered to the world’s great butchers to the prices they charge in the cafeteria. Aspiring “liberals” in the UK Lib Dem sense should be subjected to a tour of the place whenever they start exhibiting signs of Lib Dem-ness. Name the place, “The Museum of Arse”.