White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said the U.S. Secret Service is among the agencies investigating whether the escalator at the United Nations was deliberately turned off before President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump got on.
Trump and the first lady suffered an embarrassing moment Tuesday when the escalator came to an abrupt stop as the couple stepped on ahead of the president’s address to the UN General Assembly in New York.
Leavitt shared a snippet of an article from The Times of London on X earlier Tuesday in response, which reported UN staff members “joked that they may turn off the escalators” and “tell him they ran out of money so he has to walk up the stairs.”
Appearing Tuesday on Jesse Watters Primetime on Fox News, the host asked Leavitt whether it was an act of “sabotage.”
“That’s definitely what it appears to be to me,” Leavitt replied on his show Tuesday. “There was some concerning reporting over the weekend that UN globalist staffers were basically plotting to set up the President of the United States.”
“First it was the escalator, then it was the teleprompter,” Leavitt added.
The press secretary said that conservative commentator Katie Pavlich claimed to notice “that the audio inside of the room was much lower and different” for Trump than the previous speaker.
“When you put all of this together, it doesn’t look like a coincidence to me,” Leavitt said. “We have people, including the United States Secret Service, looking into this to get to the bottom of it.”
“If we find that these were UN staffers who were purposefully trying to trip up—literally trip up—the president and the first lady of the United States. Well, there better be accountability for those people, and I will personally see to it,” Leavitt threatened.
However, according to Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for UN Secretary General António Guterres, Trump’s own videographer may have been responsible.
The U.S. delegation videographer ran ahead of the president and could have triggered the stop mechanism at the top of the escalator, Dujarric said.
“The safety mechanism is designed to prevent people or objects accidentally being caught and stuck in or pulled into the gearing,” Dujarric said in a statement. “The videographer may have inadvertently triggered the safety function.”
Trump’s appearance at the UN was blighted by technical difficulties, including the teleprompter which wasn’t working as he began his address.
The president joked that whoever was running the teleprompter “is in big trouble.”
“These are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter,” he grumbled during his near hour-long speech to world leaders.
A UN official said that the White House was responsible for operating the teleprompter for the president, according to the Associated Press.
