President Donald Trump’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly was always going to be a notable one. The global community was poised for a unifying factor that made every world leader join hands in dealing with our very similar issues — Trump was not that. In between complaining about escalators, he went on to blame China for the air pollution in the US.
Trump tried his best to tie in everything to his administration’s anxieties about immigration and landed on how his strong borders can’t prevent pollution. It’s worth noting that Trump also went on a diatribe about how climate change is a hoax — a claim he has repeatedly made, but on this particular point he was talking to the UN, explaining how the pollution in the air, which he still insisted was clean, was somehow not his fault.
Trump claimed that the US has the cleanest air it has ever had, but the air coming from other countries keeps polluting it — and environmentalists, he said, keep failing to acknowledge that. Then his tangent veered towards making weird hand gestures to explain the shape of America’s atmosphere and lament how the border doesn’t go into space.
Trump: But you know, we have a border, strong, and we have a shape and the shape doesn't just go straight up. That shape is amorphous when it comes to the atmosphere. pic.twitter.com/nJpQKxUSjm
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 23, 2025
The whacky description aside, his concern for the environment comes steeped in hypocrisy. according to The Guardian, in another one of his infamous executive orders at the beginning of his presidential term, Trump declared that the Environmental Protection Agency would scale back or completely eliminate 31 regulations that limit air pollution in the US. Lee Zeldin, a top administrator in the EPA, even went ahead to call that one of the “greatest days of deregulation” in American history. Users on X pointed out this hypocrisy.
He says we have clean air here yet he wants to go back to fossil fuels, specifically coal, and deregulate factory emissions and waste.
— Jane Spade (@JaneJanesp123) September 23, 2025
Clean air?
— Anna Baxter
Not anymore. pic.twitter.com/gGYonWtRRD(@MsAnnaBaxter) September 23, 2025
But the question does remain whether that truly benefits people who live in areas where air is polluted. Reportedly, air pollution brings forward respiratory issues, heart issues, and other health problems. In fact, some experts theorized that if the deregulations persist for the next 25 years, 200,000 lives could be lost as a result of these multiple health issues.
That being said, while Trump’s claim that China’s emissions could also lead to US air pollution sounds far-fetched considering how geographically separated the two nations are — it is still very possible. Long-range transboundary air pollution, while rare, does affect countries in Asia near the Chinese factories such as South Korea and Japan, and a BBC report in 2014 revealed that the emissions are now reaching the US, causing a change in weather patterns.
Since China’s rise in economic strength and its positioning as a direct rival to US business interests globally, Trump and China have been trading accusatory claims against each other. Toward the end of his first term, Trump accused China of environmental abuses, and China said the same of US emissions long term. But that used to be the point of the UN — dealing with issues using diplomacy. Trump is trying to turn it into a place where nations have to pledge allegiance to him or won’t get into his club.
The fact remains China does release a lot of air pollution — and that doesn’t just affect the US but the entire globe. But Trump trying to lecture them while also having just eliminated regulations on emissions won’t work. The idea that China or anywhere else has to abide by rules that the US refuses to follow makes no sense — you can’t do diplomacy through hypocrisy.
