By Todd Lassa
The United Nations’ 81st General Assembly consists of a different crowd than the Trump rallies the president still holds well into his second term. And so this time, there was no dancing to the Village People’s YMCA.
But President Trump did recount his long list of self-congratulated successes since retaking office in January 2025 to transform America from the “Dark Age into the Golden Age.”
“I do not believe in letting problems foster,” Trump said, “they are harder to solve.”
Therefore, the Trump administration’s latest ultimatum for the Islamic Republic of Iran is that it must reach a deal after the midterm elections.
“I believe we’ll make a deal after the election,” Trump told the General Assembly. “They’re waiting to see if I win the election, but I am not running.”
As a reminder, the Trump administration will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. If the US and Iran can reach a deal, the president said, there will be so much economic investment in the country so as to make it a premier state in the region.
If no deal? “Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic?”
With the contingent of the Nobel Peace Prize’s host nation, Norway, in the audience, Trump ticked off the eight wars he says he ended since retaking office and said once again he will soon end the Russian-Ukrainian war [or as it’s better-known, Russia’s war on Ukraine].
With Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the audience, Trump said if he has to impose tariffs of up to 100% on oil and natural gas allowed by the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 (the late senator, unlike the president, was an unwavering supporter of Ukraine), he would.
“We will get that one done,” he said of a resolution to the war. “It will happen more quickly than people understand.”
Trump spoke of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s (he was in the UN audience with First Lady Melania Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent) diplomatic efforts with Havana. The Cuban delegation stood up and left the General Assembly at that point in Trump’s speech.
The president said his agreement with Denmark and its semi-autonomous territory, Greenland, to build two “very major” military bases there would be signed later Tuesday.
Announced just last weekend, this could have been the centerpiece of Trump’s speech. But the agreement with Denmark and Greenland essentially extends a 1951 agreement to make Greenland a US/NATO bulwark against Russia and China. The agreement also prohibits US adversaries from making “sensitive” investments in Greenland, an island rich in minerals and other raw materials, but does not account for the possibility that the island’s citizens could in the future vote for independence from Denmark, according to The Atlantic.
Trump threatened what right-wing Republicans have long considered the UN’s globalist tendencies, such as “transgender mutilation of our children,” persecution of Christians “all over the world” and the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) “promotion of mass migration,” which he said is destroying greater cultures.
“We want to remain a sovereign nation, and so should you,” Trump said.
The US president Tuesday morning followed Brazil’s progressive President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who pre-emptively countered virtually all of Trump’s speech, point-for-point.
Quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, da Silva said; “I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up.”
In the US president’s speech, Trump said fear of artificial intelligence comes from the same people who once warned we’d be dead from global warming, since renamed climate change because, he claimed, the world is actually cooling down. He equated the “AI hoax” also with “Russia, Russia, Russia” and “Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine” as well.
As with the Gulf of America, Lake America the state of New America and the Comedy Central satirical animation South America, AI is due for a Trumpesque name-change.
And so, the president has renamed AI “Super Intelligence,” or “SI.” [Imagine what this might do for Sports Illustrated’s website, si.com.]
“We’re going to encourage super intelligence,” Trump said, “not reign it in.”
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Networks’ Boycott – After CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox ceased their pool coverage of the Trump White House in response to the president’s banning of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the press pool Monday, the administration announced its own television channel on YouTube. But it did not launch in time for Newsmax’s coverage to President Trump’s permanent helicopter pad on White House grounds, which had visuals but no audio.
Other networks, including PBS and NPR joined the five networks in solidarity and are not using White House-provided visual or audio assets (The Hustings also joins the boycott).
Newsmax, meanwhile, will have to rely on Trump TV: The Essentials Station for its White House coverage.
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Diesel is Up, Gas is Down – The national average for a gallon of diesel rose 1.69 cents Tuesday to $6.5276, AAA reports. That’s up 95.12 cents from August 21. Unleaded regular Tuesday is down 0.36 cents from Monday to $4.475 per gallon, or $1.495 higher than on February 27.
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Iran War, Week 24
MONDAY 9/21/26
UPDATE: The five networks that comprise the White House press pool – CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox -- have banded together to effectively boycott pool coverage of President Trump over his ban (per Mediaite).
THIS WEEK – The UN General Assembly meets in Manhattan. President Trump meets with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani Monday and attends a state dinner with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Washington this Thursday.
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•Military base use for the Triumphal Arch?
•ICE shooting in Austin
•Diesel tops $6.50 per gallon
Arming the Arc d’Trump – Drones and ammunition will be stored within and snipers will ‘protect’ from above President Trump’s triumphal arch to be built, whether Congress and the District of Columbia want it or not, between the Lincoln Memorial and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s home – now Arlington Cemetary – across the Potomac River. The president announced the military/security justification, which recalls the need for a security bunker beneath his White House East Wing ballroom, in a Truth Social post over the weekend.
Trump Truth Socialed that military leaders asked him for the Arc d’Trump arsenal. But Major Gen. Randy Manner of the US Army (retired) and acting vice chief of the National Guard Bureau told NPR’s Michel Martin on Morning Edition Monday that Trump’s claim the military “begged” for it is an insult to the military, which already has a heavily guarded arsenals in the area, including Fort Myer, next to Arlington.
“This is absurd,” Manner said. “The president of the United States is trying to say we need this sniper stand so we can kill Americans.”
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Trump Assaults First Amendment, Again – President Trump on Friday announced that CNN, MS NOW and Politico are banned from White House access, meaning primarily regular press conferences, for disseminating “fake news.” More such bans of other fact-based news organizations are forthcoming, Trump said.
On Saturday morning, journalists for the three outlets were denied access to the White House.
“A few minutes ago, our colleague Cheyenne Haslett attempted to enter the White House to do her job as a political reporter,” Politico Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Greenberger wrote in a newsroom-wide email Saturday. “Secret Service denied her entry to the complex and confiscated the pass that allows her access to the White House. We stand by her and all reporters here covering the White House. As we said yesterday, we will vigorously defend our First Amendment rights.”
MS NOW, formerly MSNBC, also reported that some of its journalists were denied access to the White House last Saturday morning.
“The White House belongs to the American people,” MS NOW said in a statement, “and the decisions made inside are funded by the American people.”
CNN, MS NOW and Politico Monday sued the Trump administration over the president's ban.
“The president is absolutely within his rights to limit journalists to government facilities, particularly when, in his opinion, they’re not behaving as good faith journalists and that’s just not his opinion,” United Nation’s Ambassador Mike Walz told CNN’s Dana Bash on State of the Union Sunday. “That’s the Supreme Court’s opinion.”
Walz was referring to the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling in Zemel v. Rusk, in which Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote “the right to speak and publish does not carry with it the unrestrained right to gather information.”
But that SCOTUS decision would seem to regulate, say, whether or not RAND Corporation military analyst Daniel Ellsberg had the right to hand over The Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, not whether the president could restrict journalists working for fact-based news organizations could be kept out of the White House to make room for MAGA-right podcasters and influencers who never will publish anything critical of Trump.
And it cannot go unmentioned that it’s typical for governments in Moscow and Beijing, to name two, that choose which news media outlets cover their leaders.
Asked which news stories published or broadcast by Politico, CNN and MS NOW the president found to be fake, Trump responded there have been “cumulative stories over the past few years.”
Meanwhile … The Associated Press’ suit seeking to be allowed back into the White House is still under appeal. The news organization has had access to some White House events, but the administration has kept its journalists out of specific restricted spaces since April of last year, according to factually.com. Trump banned the AP from the White House for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
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Another ICE Shooting – An ICE agent shot and wounded 28-year-old Venezuelan immigrant Wilber Garces Perez in Austin, Texas, Sunday as he apparently was making DoorDash deliveries.
Neither Austin police – which stated it was not involved in the shooting – nor ICE released Perez’s name, though Austin immigration attorney Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch identified him for The Texas Tribune. The attorney said Perez has a valid work permit and entered the US legally and was released from the hospital into federal custody Sunday evening. Perez called his wife from inside his car to say he was shot, Lincoln-Goldfinch said.
Department of Homeland Security officials said its investigation department along with the FBI will probe the shooting, which comes more than two months after an ICE agent fatally shot a man in Houston.
Biden! … Without naming Perez, DHS said he entered the US illegally under the Biden administration.
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Diesel tops $6.50 – The national average price of a gallon of diesel fuel is $6.5107 Monday, AAA reports, up 6.31 cents over Friday and up 93.43 cents from one month ago. Unleaded regular is $4.4786, up 0.99 cents over Friday and $1.4986 more than it cost on February 27. –Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa