- Donald Trump threatened a crew member over a faulty teleprompter during a televised UN General Assembly speech.
- After he said the UN gave the prompter to him, a UN rep tells EW the White House “was in charge” of the device.
- “Please ask them about what happened with their teleprompter,” a rep says in an email to EW.
A representative for the United Nations Secretary General has challenged President Donald Trump’s incendiary comments about a teleprompter he used Tuesday during a live, televised speech to the UN General Assembly.
After Trump threatened during the speech that a crew member responsible for the allegedly faulty teleprompter would be “in big trouble,” UN representative Farhan Aziz Haq provides an exclusive reaction statement to Entertainment Weekly.
Trump said elsewhere in his speech that, “All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle,” he alleged, later adding, “These are the two things that I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter. Thank you very much.”
ABC
“The White House, not the UN, was in charge of the teleprompter that was used,” Haq says in the statement. “Please ask them about what happened with their teleprompter. Thanks.”
EW has reached out to the White House for a response.
After ABC cut away from its morning block of programming to broadcast the live shot, Trump, 79, began his speech in New York City with a dig at the event’s behind-the-scenes operations.
“I feel very happy to be up here with you,” he told the crowd. “I can only say that whoever’s operating this teleprompter is in big trouble.”
The audience laughed, but Trump remained silent for a few beats as he looked around the room before collecting himself and moving on.
Later, after criticizing the teleprompter, Trump told the audience that, “by the way, it’s working now, it just went on,” and further criticized the alleged elevator stoppage he referenced earlier in his remarks.
“If the first lady wasn’t in great shape, she would’ve fallen, but she’s in great shape, we’re both in good shape,” Trump said, referencing Melania Trump watching from her seat in the crowd. “We both stood, and then [we got a] teleprompter that didn’t work.”
ABC
Trump’s comments about the teleprompter came after he recently threatened ABC’s Jonathan Karl, who during a recent White House press conference inquired about Attorney General Pam Bondi’s spoken intention to “go after hate speech” in the United States following the assassination of far-right, controversial conservative Charlie Kirk.
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“We’ll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart,” Trump told Karl.
ABC later courted controversy after temporarily suspending talk show host Jimmy Kimmel following his comments about Kirk’s alleged assassin, with Trump taking digs at Kimmel ahead of the network eventually reinstating the talk show host’s program.
