President Donald Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, but his real audience was the American people ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Calling this the “Golden Age of America,” Trump rehearsed his achievements from his 21 months back in office. “Two and a half centuries after the cause of Liberty found its home on this continent,” he said, “I can report to you with pride that America is back, and our country is stronger today than ever before.”
The president hit various themes in the speech, but let’s consider just a few things.
Regarding the war in Iran, President Trump posed a binary choice, prompting Iranian delegates to walk out: “I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”
Americans are generally tired of Trump’s vast rhetorical swings on Iran, but it’s just how he operates.
In a remarkable moment, the UN audience applauded his assertion that “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.” The world doesn’t exactly love Trump or the way he does things, but at least the gathered diplomats sent a message of approval that Iran must be prevented from possessing nuclear weapons.
Oil is closely related, and Trump hit that too. With a bit of global unity, he promised, “oil prices will come plummeting down even lower than they were at the start of the conflict.” The Leftmedia loves to “fact-check” statements like that, but his point is solid: Settling things with Iran will calm oil markets and stabilize supplies. American voters, he implies, need to hold on, knowing that $4.50 gasoline and $6.50 diesel aren’t here to stay.
Part of his pledge rests on future investment from his oil deal in Venezuela. That will take years to pan out, but Trump is certainly banking on it.
Speaking of the Western Hemisphere, Trump touched on Cuba, with which Secretary of State Marco Rubio is “handling a negotiation.” He called Cuba an “absolutely failed state,” and the regime “will fall.” That provoked the island’s diplomats to walk out of the room.
“The Cuban regime has ... spent decades coordinating with the left-wing radicals and communist networks here in the United States,” he added. “As our State Department has detailed, they’ve cultivated ties to subversive and radical groups such as the Communist Party USA, Antifa, and the Dumocrat Socialists of America. Communism will never be coming to America — but freedom will be coming to Cuba and safety and security will be coming to Mexico.”
He also noted his new deal with Greenland and Denmark. “We will have the complete ability to do what is necessary to defend the American continent, and also Europe and other places,” Trump said of the agreement, which he and the other leaders signed yesterday. He said that the U.S. will have “permanent control over security” on the island.
Finally, I’ll note Trump’s remarks about the AI panic. As the White House styled his comments, he said, “The United States ... totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the Artificial Intelligence being spoken of so much now — hereinafter officially called ‘Super Intelligence.’”
“The word artificial makes intelligence ... sound fake, and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing,” he explained. In any case, “We’re going to encourage it, not rein it in.”
That’s certainly not the direction most politicians are headed. But Trump knows this is not a competition in which we ought to disarm unilaterally. As he put it, “Whoever wins super intelligence wins.” With that in mind, he argued, “I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution, many say bigger than the Industrial Revolution or the internet itself.”
Zooming back out, Trump loves America, and he worked hard to sell it to the UN delegates and to American voters.
“Our economy is the envy of the world,” he said. “Our military is the most powerful on Earth. Our technology is second to none, and we are leading in virtually everything.”
And he’s a doer, not an empty suit or an autopen. “As president of the most extraordinary nation in history, I have no interest in leaving dangers to grow for another day,” Trump asserted. “I do not believe in letting problems fester. They only become harder to solve. So while others have talked, I have acted.”
For better or worse, that is entirely true.
