How long, oh Lord, how long? I endured Trump’s UN speech so you don’t have to

That’s a first: He buttoned his suit jacket!

How many more times will we have to untangle and debunk another lip-wagging screed of Donald Trump like the one he blubbered through at the United Nations today? I just went through, line by bloody line, that interminable jumble of lies, exaggerations, pure gibberish, and unmitigated hate, 57 minutes of it. I don’t even know where to begin. So, I’ll just randomly scroll through it and stop and see what he’s saying. Here we are, around minute 48:

Clean. I call it clean, beautiful coal. You can do things today with coal that you couldn’t have done 10 years ago, 15 years. So I have a little standing order in the White House. Never use the word coal, only use the words clean, beautiful coal. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?

What can you say about something as infantile as that? He’s standing in the United Nations, in the well of the General Assembly no less, and he’s treating this gathering of diplomats from almost 200 member nations as if he’s speaking to a rally of the MAGA faithful in Iowa or Alabama or Tennessee. Those last two sentences could have flown from his mouth as little red hats rather than sound. And that’s not even close to the worst of it.

Trump stood up there this morning and told the U.N. that he’s taking on drug smugglers “using the supreme power of the United States military” because “we lost 300,000 people last year to drugs. 300,000.” Not even close. His own CDC, what’s left of it anyway, reports that the real number of drug overdose deaths for last year is 80,391. That’s a big number, for sure, but why does he have to exaggerate it all the way up to 300,000? Because he’s Donald Trump, that’s why.

He seemed fixated on the number, 300,000, today. Listen to this: “The previous administration also lost nearly 300,000 children. Think of that. They lost more than 300,000 children, little children who were trafficked into the United States on the Biden watch, many of whom have been raped, exploited and abused and sold. Sold. Nobody talks about that.”

Nobody talks about it, because it didn’t happen. There is a figure of 291,000 that represents the number of children who have not made asylum court dates because their paperwork has yet to be filed. The children are not “missing.” They certainly have not been raped and abused and “sold.” In fact, they are known to immigration officials by name and country of origin. It’s hard to figure what Trump seems to think, but it’s likely that because the children are not in ICE custody and on their way out of the country on charter flights, they are missing.

Where else shall we stop in our torturous journey through Trump’s toxic waste dump of a “speech?” You’ve read that he told the gathered officials from nearly 200 states that “your countries are going to hell.” Yep. That’s what you call diplomacy from Donald Trump. And you’ve read that he screeched and moaned about clean energy, calling it the most expensive form of energy on the planet. Yes, he said that.

Here’s another good one: He said that “millions and millions of people were pouring in, 25 million altogether over the four years of the incompetent Biden administration.” Again, not even close. But this statement and maybe a dozen like it sounded like claims he made during the campaign, wildly exaggerated figures and charges that Joe Biden did this, he did that, he was the worst this, the most incompetent that. As if the delegates to the United Nations wanted to hear Donald Trump relitigate the election of 2024, which they are all aware that he won.

He can’t let anything go. Speaking of Ukraine, he told the U.N. “This war would never have started if I were president.” Because of course he had to tell them that. He had to put some Mar a Lago gold leaf on that transparent lie by claiming how much better things would be if he had been elected in 2020. “It shows you what leadership is, what bad leadership can do to a country. Look what happened to the United States and look where we are right now in just a short period of time.”

He did everything but pound the podium with his claim that he had ended seven wars in seven months. He was claiming it was seven wars in eight months last week, but for the U.N., he chopped off a month, because if he made the eight-month claim, it wouldn’t have sounded good.

Everything has to sound good to Donald Trump, because listening to his own voice is what he does. It’s his job. He makes a claim, then he savors it for a day or two, then he exaggerates it because it sounds better. Speaking of his seven wars, Trump came up with this: “Some were going for 31 years, two of them, 31, you think of it, 31 years. One was 36 years, one was 28 years.” Which wars were these? He didn’t say. He probably doesn’t know. I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that he didn’t claim the wars he “ended” totaled 300,000 years of fighting.

Trump called the presidents of a few countries, there were a couple of cease fires, some of the fighting has resumed here and there, or it never even stopped, but who knows? The front lines are inaccessible, nobody is reporting body counts, and Trump knows he can say anything and the mainstream media will write it down like his words are carved into stone and carried down a mountain in the arms of Steve “Moses” Witkoff.

Trump has another U.N. General Assembly speech coming up next year, and he’ll have new wars to brag about by then. He’ll be crowing that drug deaths in the United States are down to zero, and crime will have been “ended” in four or five cities other than Washington D.C., where, he claimed today with a smile of self-adoration, “after 12 days, it’s a totally safe city.”

See how easy that is? Twelve days to solve the crime problem in the nation’s capital. Think of what he’ll be able to do in Memphis and New Orleans and Chicago, if he carries through with his threats to deploy soldiers to those cities.

After running down Biden ad infinitum, Trump couldn’t leave President Obama out. He was making fun of the very idea of a “carbon footprint,” which he said was a “hoax made up by people with evil intentions and they’re heading down a path of total destruction.” He couldn’t resist a lie about Obama, that he “would fly from Washington to Hawaii to play a round of golf, and then he’d get back onto that big beautiful plane and he’d fly back and he’d talk about, again, global warming and the carbon footprint. It’s a con job at extreme cost and expense.”

Obama, of course, never flew to Hawaii for a round of golf. Trump, on the other hand, regularly flies to New Jersey and Palm Beach to play golf. He has blown through several hundred million tax payer dollars on Air Force One golf trips, and who knows how much “carbon footprint.”

But these are niggling details, and as we all know, Donald Trump doesn’t do niggling details. By this time next year, he will probably be bragging that he has ended six more wars, that windmills are blowing up off the coast of Great Britain and Massachusetts spewing pollution into the air, and that the problem of drugs in America is over and that overdose deaths are at zero because he has blown 50 or 60…or who knows, maybe it will be 300,000…drug boats out of the water.

For now, I’m going to seek respite. I’m headed into the kitchen to take two Tylenol, then I’m going to get in bed and cover my head with two pillows and try to calm myself with the idea that I won’t have to endure another U.N. speech for 12 months.

Glory be!