On Tuesday, Donald Trump “addressed” (nay, assaulted) the United Nations General Assembly in a rambling and accusatory 55-minute rant. It was even more berserk and egocentric than usual for him.

He blamed the U.N. for wasting billions of dollars by choosing a contractor that wasn’t him to conduct updates on the group’s headquarters many years ago.

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He reiterated his claim that climate change is a hoax and called it “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He chastised countries for investing in what he called “renewables” – like windmills and solar panels. He went further by stating that coal was much better and said he only refers to it as “beautiful clean coal.”

(Let’s remember that Trump and his GOP co-conspirators referred to the tax measure they recently passed in Congress as “The Big Beautiful Bill,” which awarded additional tax breaks to the mega-wealthy while cutting Medicaid benefits from millions of US citizens and making major cuts to critical safety net programs.)

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During his U.N. speech, he also lectured other nations on their dangerous immigration policies.

“You’re destroying your countries,” he harangued, admonishing leaders to embrace his approach on immigration. He added, “I can tell you I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.”

He boasted about strikes he ordered on boats that were “smuggling poisonous drugs” from Venezuela, and bragged about dropping 30,000-pound bombs that he claimed totally destroyed Iran’s nuclear program, though Pentagon assessments contradict Trump’s claims of the enormity of the mission’s success.   

He called out the mayor of London and his own predecessor in the White House, former President Joe Biden, as awful and corrupt people.

Trump talked about what he considered the failure of the NATO alliance. He criticized the U.N.’s feeble response to global conflicts and asked rhetorically, “What is the purpose of the United Nations?” He then said, “It’s not even coming close to living up to [its] potential.”

Then he attacked the very concept of globalization.

“It’s too bad that I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing them,” Trump said, claiming “I ended seven wars, dealt with the leaders of each and every one of these countries, and never even received a phone call from the United Nations offering to help in finalizing the deal.”

In addition to praising himself for supposedly ending seven wars and touting that people say he should receive the Nobel Prize, he asserted that he had eliminated all crime in Washington, D.C.

Toward the beginning of his diatribe, he laid the predicate for his remarks, claiming that he “was right about everything,” a phrase which he had previously embroidered on MAGA hats.

Even with all of these false declarations, one in particular left me gasping for air over the magnitude of his fabrication. With deep sternness coming across his face, he said religious liberty must be protected for the most persecuted religion on this planet.” He then held silent for a second or two to increase the impact and said, “It’s called Christianity.”

Which planet is he talking about?

A (long, long) history of Christian dominance

Obviously, Trump has no understanding of world or U.S. history. Even a cursory historical overview of religious oppression would begin centuries before the colonization of the Western Hemisphere with the “Doctrine of Discovery.” That so-called doctrine strengthened Christian domination, but it came after centuries of oppression that had already taken place in the name of Christianity

A series of papal bulls (decrees or edicts) in the 1100s began sanctions, enforcements, authorizations, expulsions, excommunications, denunciations, and expressions of territorial sovereignty in the name of Christianity.

These bulls established what would come to be known as the “Doctrine of Discovery”: a spiritual, political, and legal justification for colonization and seizure of territories not already inhabited by Christians.

Two of these papal bulls stand out in particular.

1. Pope Nicholas V issued his “Romanus Pontifex” in 1455, granting Portugal a monopoly trading status with Africa and authorizing the enslavement of indigenous populations.  In 1455, Pope Nicholas V called his Christian followers to “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans,” take their possessions, and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

2. Pope Alexander VI issued “Inter Caetera” in 1493 to justify Christian European explorers’ claims on land and waterways they “discovered,” and to promote Christian domination in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas. This edict gave license to the genocide of Black, Brown, and Asian people, as well as any other non-Christians across the world. In fact, Columbus’s travels were based on patriarchal Christian white supremacy.

The United States justified its “Monroe Doctrine” in the 1820s – which declared U.S. dominion over the Western Hemisphere – based on the concept of “Manifest Destiny,” a belief in the God-given right to expand westward and control all land from the Atlantic to the Pacific and beyond.

U.S. legal doctrine is based on the Doctrine of Discovery. In the 1823 Supreme Court case of Johnson v. M’Intosh, the Doctrine of Discovery became part of U.S. federal law used to dispossess Native peoples of their lands. In a unanimous decision, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that “the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands” and Native peoples only certain rights of occupancy.

In the 1835 Tennessee Supreme Court case Tennessee v. Forman, the court ruled: “The principle declared in the fifteenth century as the law of Christendom that discovery gave title to assume sovereignty over, and to govern the unconverted natives of Africa, Asia, and North and South America, has been recognized as a part of the national law, for nearly four centuries.”

What democracy demands

Democracy demands an educated electorate. Democracy demands that the electorate take responsibility to critically examine their politicians and the issues of the day, enabling them to make truly informed decisions.

Democracy demands that we never relinquish our freedom and authority for some promise of comfort or security by returning to a fairytale past. Patriarchal heteronational Christian white supremacy is a major threat to democracy, and democracy is the primary cure for patriarchal heteronational Christian white supremacy.

Democracy also demands a president who does not lie to the people of their country and to the people of the world.

Trump has forever damaged our nation with his lies, anger, ego, lust for attention, and his unrestrained obsession with wealth and power. He has also further separated the U.S. from the world community.

Trump is a very dangerous man who is destroying our nation and our standing in the world.

If I had the power to apologize to the delegates in attendance at the United Nations who sat stone-faced in opposition to his tone and the content of his remarks, I would readily do so. I would make it clear that not everyone in this country stands behind this president.

But I have virtually no power, and if I had, my apology would seem hollow anyway as Trump continues his quest toward a fascist takeover of the United States. I know, however, that we, the people, will not allow that to happen.

We will save our country. We will save what remains of our democratic institutions.

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