During his address to the United Nations, President Donald Trump’s teleprompter appeared to stop working, an incident that followed his ride on the building’s escalator, which also stopped working. The President mentioned both challenges during his remarks, but later, the White House suggested there could have been foul play, and demanded an investigation.
“The teleprompter was broken and the escalator came to a sudden hault as we were ridding [sic] up to the podium, but both of those events probably made the speech more interesting than it would have been otherwise,” the President later wrote on social media.
The White House Press Secretary, however, had a different take.
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“If someone at the UN intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately,” Karoline Leavitt wrote on Tuesday afternoon. She pointed to a report in The Times of London that claimed, “UN staff members have joked that they may turn off the escalators and elevators and simply tell him they ran out of money, so he has to walk up the stairs.”
The United Nations is not taking the blame, but reportedly passing it back to the White House.
The United Nations correspondent for the Associated Press, Farnoush Amiri, reported that a “U.N. official said the UN understands that someone from the president’s party who ran ahead of him inadvertently triggered the stop mechanism on the escalator. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the White House was operating the teleprompter for Trump.”
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