The White House has demanded an investigation into what caused an escalator at the UN headquarters to fail the moment Donald Trump stepped on it.
The US President and First Lady Melania Trump were forced to walk up the motionless escalator when it stopped moving.
Trump addressed both the inoperable escalator and a defective teleprompter when he delivered a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday.
“All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle,” he said.
He added: “If the first lady wasn't in great shape, she would have fallen, but she's in great shape."
The White House called for a probe into whether the moving stairway was stopped on purpose to humiliate the US president.
“If we find that these were UN and 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,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Fox News on Tuesday evening.
Leavitt also posted to X after the incident: “If someone at the U.N. intentionally stopped the escalator … they need to be fired and investigated immediately.”
In what appears to be a remarkable coincidence, UN staff members had been overheard joking about turning off Trump’s escalator days before his visit.
The Sunday Times reported at the weekend that staffer “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.”
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said a videographer from the US delegation who ran ahead of him may have triggered the stop mechanism at the top of the escalator.
“The safety mechanism is designed to prevent people or objects accidentally being caught and stuck in or pulled into the gearing,” Mr Dujarric said in a statement. “The videographer may have inadvertently triggered the safety function.”
