Khrushchev Threw a Shoe; Now The Bar’s A lot Lower
On September 9, 1960, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev boarded a ship for America, en route to becoming a vozhd, a Supreme Leader, and the undisputed centre of world attention. At the UN General Assembly, he preached "peaceful co-existence," assuring the audience that the peoples of the world, including workers, peasants, and the bourgeoisie alike, wanted peace, not war.
A lovely sentiment. He almost sold it.
Then Cuba came up, and the peace mask slipped. Furious at the American stranglehold on Havana and the humiliation of a downed U-2, Khrushchev did the only reasonable thing a nuclear superpower's leader can do when words fail: he took off his shoe and banged it on the desk, like a man trying to finish off a cockroach that had crawled under his bed.
His own delegation wanted to die. History, however, remembers him fondly for it. Turns out a well-timed tantrum outlasts a well-crafted policy paper by about sixty years.
Which brings us to Tuesday, September 22, when Donald J. Trump took the same podium for the UN's 81st session, in front of 130 heads of state, and went one better than Khrushchev 66 years later; it would seem the bar had noticeably lowered. No shoe required.
He opened with "America is back and stronger than ever," then paused for the anticipated thunderous applause. What landed instead was silence, not polite, but that specific dead-air silence of a room that has just watched someone walk into the wrong funeral and start eulogising the wrong corpse.
From there, gravity took the wheel.
He drifted like a man who'd forgotten why he’d entered the building in the first place, threatening to annihilate Iran, then pivoting to guarantee, not predict, that the Cuban government "will fall."
Seasoned Khrushchev aficionados braced for the shoe. Alas, the ankle cankles said no, and Natalie Harp, his loyal footwear attendant, wasn't there to help. A missed opportunity for symmetry, frankly; history was practically begging for the callback, yet he stiffed it.
Still warm from threatening two countries, he suddenly switched, unprompted, to announce that the United States would no longer use the term "artificial intelligence", and then, chef's kiss, declared trans people a national security risk.
Two sentences, no connective tissue, both delivered with the same flat conviction he'd just used to promise Havana's collapse. It's less a speech than a ransom note assembled from magazine clippings, with every word a threat.
The AI rebrand deserves its own paragraph, because it's the most honest thing he said all day, honest in the sense that a smoke alarm you've muted is still, technically, a smoke alarm.
He called AI "fake," a curious diagnosis given that the people building it keep warning that it might end humanity by the end of the decade, and that every major lab has called for a slowdown. His counterproposal wasn't to regulate the technology. It was to rename it: "Superintelligence." SI. Because nothing defuses an existential threat like a sleeker acronym, and besides, doesn’t SI sound sexier?
He didn't rename the danger; he renamed it into something it categorically isn't, which is either branding gone astray, like a man refusing to leave a burning building because he's named fire "Ambient Warmth."
By this point, the Iranian and Cuban delegations had already walked out, heading straight for the lunch buffet, which, to be fair, was more appealing than the next agenda item.
Back in the ‘big’ room’, the ‘big decision’ on Iran arrived with all the gravity of a game-show reveal. Behind door number one: a deal so good that Iran becomes "one of the greatest countries in the Middle East," maybe even the world. Behind door number two: "annihilate the Islamic Republic" and "drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness."
This threat of Armageddon was delivered, without apparent irony, even though he was in a building specifically constructed so that nations don't have to settle disputes by threatening to erase an entire population and then, for good measure, salt the earth.
Wrong venue. Wrong century. Wrong spokesman.
The war in the Middle East has run for nearly eight months, sending American gas prices to record highs and pricing groceries out of reach for exactly the voters who tend to end administrations.
He narrated the suffering he's causing to a room that, unlike the electorate, has no way to vote him out, which may be the only honest reason to give a speech there at all.
Meanwhile, off to the side, Steve Witkoff, the questionable real estate guy and now the chief negotiator, held indirect talks with Iranian diplomats. These were presumably centred on reconstruction contracts for the country his boss had just threatened to vaporise.
Never let ethics interfere with a great deal.
At the podium, the man delivered his pièce de resistance.
The planet, he informed the assembly, is cooling. Someone should mail that part of the speech to Europe, which has just lived through its hottest summer on record. The WHO, an organisation he pulled the US out of last year, projects roughly 250,000 climate-linked deaths annually between 2030 and 2050. The rebuttal writes itself: fake news, probably ghostwritten by a wind turbine with an agenda.
And finally, the numbers, my favourite genre of Trump fiction, because the man lies the way most of us exhale. $21 trillion in "committed investments," a figure roughly double what the White House's own website claims and well short of the $232 billion that is actually traceable.
It is always good to end an epic speech with a few war stories, and Trump delivered in spades. He boasted that his military had blown up "lots and lots" of drug-running boats, supposedly choking off over 90% of narcotics arriving by sea. To verify this astonishing feat, I looked for the Sinaloa cartel's latest quarterly earnings to confirm a drop in inventory, but it turns out they're a bit behind on their SEC filings.
As major speeches at the UN go, Khrushchev, at least, had the decency to be embarrassed about something specific, banging a shoe on a table, a moment you could point to and say, there, that's the madness.
Trump didn’t need a prop; he simply opened his mouth and the madness poured out fully formed: countries vapourised, a cooling planet, a rebranded apocalypse, and P&Ls that double in transit.
Sixty-six years apart, one man had to remove his shoes to make a fool of himself; the other just had to show up. Nikita is finally at peace, no longer the most embarrassing man to have addressed the UN.
He's just the first.
