Decoding Trump’s UN Speech: Part 6 — The UN as Boondoggle and the Politics of the Security Council Veto
- john raymond
- Sep 24, 2025
- 2 min read
Trump’s September 23 UN address included a lengthy tirade against the institution itself. He mocked the organization as feckless, deriding it for issuing “really strongly worded letters” while failing to resolve wars.
He complained about the headquarters renovation, calling it a $2–$4 billion boondoggle with “terrazzo floors” instead of marble. He even reduced his personal encounters with the UN to anecdotes about broken escalators and malfunctioning teleprompters.
On its face, the argument was that the UN is irrelevant, incompetent, and wasteful.
There is truth in the charge of UN ineffectiveness—but Trump deliberately omitted the cause. The paralysis of the United Nations is not because of the weaker nations or the Secretariat. It is because of the veto power wielded by the permanent members of the Security Council—figures like Trump, Putin, and Xi Jinping.
It is precisely autocrats and veto-holders who ensure that the UN cannot function when their interests are at stake. Russia’s veto has blocked accountability for its invasion of Ukraine. The United States has used its veto to shield allies from censure. The weakness is structural, designed to paralyze action when the powerful are guilty.
The Raymond Method helps decode the maneuver...
Pillar One (Regime Security): Trump attacks the UN as a way of delegitimizing any external check on great-power authority, reframing institutional constraints as failures.
Pillar Two (Asymmetric Warfare): he transforms structural paralysis—caused by veto powers—into a weapon against the very nations most reliant on the UN for protection.
Byzantine Traitor-General paradigm: by shifting blame to the institution itself, he absolves the veto-wielders, including himself and Putin, of responsibility for its paralysis.
The real danger lies in how this rhetoric reshapes perception. Weaker nations, especially those outside NATO, rely on the UN as their only formal shield against aggression. When Trump calls the organization a joke, he strips those nations of hope, leaving them more vulnerable to the predations of stronger powers.
By obscuring the role of veto-holders, he converts an autocrat’s deliberate sabotage into a populist talking point. The message is that the UN is useless and that only strongmen can deliver results.
For Moscow, this framing is ideal. Putin has exploited his veto to wage aggressive war without consequence. When Trump joins in attacking the UN’s legitimacy, he gives cover to Russia and China while undermining weaker states’ confidence in multilateralism.
The UN may indeed be broken—but it is broken by the very men who wield the veto, not by the smaller nations Trump mocks.
His attack on the UN was not a plea for reform. It was another cudgel to delegitimize collective security, to normalize great-power impunity, and to fracture the West’s commitment to multilateralism.
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