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Trump delivered an embarassing performance at the UN general assembly | Mohamad Bazzi

For almost an hour on Tuesday, Donald Trump stood at the podium of the UN general assembly, where presidents, kings and statesmen have delivered some of the most important and moving speeches in modern history. But Trump delivered a long and humiliating rant, filled with personal grievances and attacks on the UN, European leaders, migration policies and clean energy.

Trump set a low bar with his often rambling and incoherent campaign speeches, but it was still an embarrassing performance for the US president on the global stage. In his past appearances before the general assembly, Trump generally stuck to his prepared remarks and did not hector US allies sitting in the audience. But this was Trump unfiltered and unleashed – as he has been since the start of his second term, with no domestic or international restraint on his power and no need for even the mildest diplomatic niceties.

Early in his speech, Trump complained that his teleprompter had malfunctioned and that a UN escalator had stalled when he and the first lady, Melania Trump, stepped on it on Tuesday morning. “These are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter,” Trump joked, drawing laughs from the audience. But it quickly became clear that Trump was nursing a decades-old grudge against the UN: In the early 2000s, he had been denied an opportunity to rebuild the organization’s New York headquarters.

“Many years ago, a very successful real estate developer in New York, known as Donald J Trump, I bid on the renovation and rebuilding of this very United Nations complex,” Trump told his fellow world leaders – in a digression that would have been ridiculed if any other leader had done it. “I remember it so well. I said at the time that I would do it for $500m, rebuilding everything. It would be beautiful.” Trump went on to muse that he had promised UN officials marble floors and mahogany walls, while other contractors would ultimately deliver terrazzo and plastic, as part of a massive renovation that ended up costing over $2bn.

Even at the height of his power, Trump can’t resist being an insecure businessman who whines about losing a construction contract more than 20 years ago.

And that wasn’t the most cringeworthy part of Trump’s performance at the UN. He went on several lengthy tirades against immigration, calling on European countries to emulate US policies and close their borders and expel migrants. He accused the UN of leading a “globalist migration agenda”, and told western leaders that the organization was “funding an assault on your countries”. As he lectured other leaders about how they’re failing, Trump bragged about his own immigration crackdown and foresight as a populist demagogue. “It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now … I’m really good at this stuff,” he said, adding nonchalantly: “Your countries are going to hell.”

As part of his attack on migration, Trump also insulted Sadiq Khan, who was elected London’s mayor in 2016 and became the first Muslim leader of a western capital. “I look at London, where you have a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been changed, it’s been so changed. Now they want to go to sharia law,” Trump said, falsely claiming that Khan wants to place the British capital under Islamic religious law.

While Trump’s insult seemed ad-libbed, it’s another example of the president using his platform to settle petty political scores. Trump has held a grudge against Khan since late 2015, when Khan (then a member of parliament and candidate for mayor) called Trump’s campaign pledge to ban Muslims from entering the US “divisive and outrageous”. The feud between the two politicians has continued for years. In an article for the Guardian published last week, shortly before Trump’s state visit to the UK, Khan wrote the US president has “perhaps done the most to fan the flames of divisive, far-right politics around the world.”

As he flew back to the US, Trump said Khan was “among the worst mayors in the world”, and claimed that he had asked UK officials not to invite Khan to a state dinner hosted by King Charles in the president’s honor.

Unfortunately, the long list of grievances Trump laid out in his UN speech was not limited to politicians and global institutions that he believed had wronged him. Trump spent about a quarter of his speech undermining UN-led efforts to address climate change and ridiculing renewable energy policies. He denied the scientific consensus that humans, through the burning of fossil fuels, are causing global warming, calling it “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”. Trump added that warnings of severe floods, widespread droughts, extreme heat waves and other climate-related disasters “were made by stupid people”.

Trump also celebrated his decision to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement, which committed nearly all countries in the world to reducing greenhouse emissions and limiting global warming below levels that could lead to catastrophe. He denounced renewable energy sources like solar power and wind farms as a “joke” and praised “clean, beautiful coal”.

By the conclusion of his meandering and unhinged speech, Trump tried to advance a dark narrative: that immigration, along with reliance on clean energy sources, posed an existential threat to Western nations. “Immigration and the high cost of so-called green, renewable energy is destroying a large part of the free world and a large part of our planet,” Trump said, warning his fellow leaders that, if they don’t emulate his policies restricting migration and expanding the use of fossil fuels, it would “be the death of western Europe”.

In the end, Trump wanted what he always craves: attention and adoration – even if he has to unleash fear and chaos to get it.