In an hour-long speech before the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, President Donald Trump rebuked world leaders for embracing nonsensical, self-destructive policies, and he urged them to follow America’s lead in restoring prosperity. Since the wide-ranging speech issued challenges to which other nations must respond, it’s worth reviewing the main highlights.

Here are seven themes Trump emphasized in his mammoth speech.

1. Trump championed human rights, including religious freedom for Christians.

“Let us defend free speech and free expression,” Trump urged world leaders. “Let us protect religious liberty, including for the most persecuted religion on the planet today — it’s called Christianity.” Trump is correct that Christians face ongoing persecution around the world, from jihadist massacres in Africa to official repression in China, and from Hindu mobs in India to policing of social media in the U.K.

As one example of a policy that promoted human rights abroad, Trump referred to the stiff tariffs he placed on Brazilian imports “in response to its unprecedented efforts to interfere in the rights and freedoms of our American citizens and others with censorship, repression, weaponization, judicial corruption, and targeting of political critics in the United States.”

2. Trump chided Western nations who recognized Palestine.

Trump also responded to eight Western governments that chose, for the first time, to officially recognize a state of Palestine this week. “As everyone knows, I have also been deeply engaged in seeking a ceasefire in Gaza,” the president stated. “Unfortunately, Hamas has repeatedly rejected reasonable offers to make peace, and we can’t forget October 7th, can we? Now, as if to encourage continued conflict, some of this body is seeking to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. The rewards would be too great for Hamas terrorists. … Those who want peace should be united with one message: release the hostages now.”

“The only way you can see it any other way is deliberately not looking at it,” responded Dr. A.J. Nolte, director of the Institute for Israeli Studies at Regent University, on “Washington Watch.” “In September 2025, you’re recognizing something that doesn’t exist, that doesn’t have any governance capacity, where no Palestinian leadership has any legitimacy from the population they’ve actually governed, and no Palestinian entity has any ability to provide peace, order, and security over areas they have controlled thus far.”

“Also, you’d be empowering Hamas because the dispute in Palestinian politics is, do we pursue a negotiated peace? Or do we use violence to try to achieve our ends?” Nolte continued. “The Europeans, and the Canadians, and the Australians are essentially rewarding the pursuit of violence.”

3. Trump criticized European open borders and reliance on Russian oil.

Trump was not done criticizing the nations of Europe. Whereas Trump has “been working relentlessly stopping the killing in Ukraine,” he said, “inexcusably, even NATO countries have not cut off much Russian energy. … Think of it, they’re funding the war against themselves.”

Here again, Trump followed his criticism with a ready policy corrective. “In the event that Russia is not ready to make a deal to end the war, then the United States is fully prepared to impose a very strong round of powerful tariffs,” he said. “But for those tariffs to be effective, European nations, all of you are gathered here right now, would have to join us in adopting the exact same measures.” The European countries say they recognize the threat Russia poses, but are they prepared to effectively counter it?

Trump also rebuked European leaders for “destroying your countries” with open borders policies. “Europe is in serious trouble. They’ve been invaded by a force of illegal aliens like nobody’s ever seen before. Illegal aliens are pouring into Europe, and nobody’s doing anything to change it, to get them out. It’s not sustainable. … When your prisons are filled with so-called asylum seekers who repaid kindness … with crime, it’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders.”

But Trump’s attacks on Europe were more than venting. Instead, Trump shrewdly provided European leaders with both the vision and language for how to do better — following America’s lead, of course. “We have reasserted that America belongs to the American people, and I encourage all countries to take their own stand in defense of their citizens as well,” he urged.

4. Trump bashed the U.N.’s ineffective record, especially on climate change.

On immigration, Trump found blame enough to go around to the United Nations, too. “The United Nations is funding an assault on Western countries and their borders,” he complained. “The U.N. is supporting people that are illegally coming into the United States, and then we have to get them out. The U.N. also provided food, shelter, transportation, and debit cards to illegal aliens — can you believe that? — on the way to infiltrate our southern border.”

But that was only the tip of the iceberg. Trump alleged that the U.N. was failing at everything from its core purpose — preventing war — to proper building maintenance. “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,” said Trump.

Instead, Trump used his “run-ins with broken equipment at the United Nations” to “underscore deeper complaints about the efficiency of the United Nations,” summarized FRC President Tony Perkins. “All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle,” Trump added. “And then a teleprompter that didn’t work. These are the two things I got from the United Nations, a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.”

“The president is basically right,” Nolte argued. “The one thing that it could potentially claim credit for … is that the Cold War never turned hot,” although he added, “I think there [are] other factors as well.”

The U.N.’s mission to promote human rights was a failure from the start, Nolte added, because some of the world’s worst human rights abusers — Soviet Russia and then Communist China — held permanent veto power in the U.N. Security Council, where all real decisions are made. Likewise, the U.N. failed at peacekeeping and international development because “there were a lot of high, lofty ideals and no mechanisms for actually achieving that.”

But President Trump reserved his harshest criticism for the U.N.’s absurd record of climate alarmism. “In 1982, the executive director of the United Nations Environmental Program predicted that by the year 2000, climate change would cause a global catastrophe… [as] irreversible as any nuclear holocaust. … Another U.N. official stated in 1989 that within a decade, entire nations could be wiped off the map by global warming,” listed the president. “It used to be global cooling. If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said global cooling will kill the world. … So now they just call it climate change because that way they can’t miss.”

Dr. Cal Beisner, president and founder of the Cornwall Alliance, defended what some might call Trump’s “climate skepticism” on “Washington Watch.” “While human contribution to climate change is real, it is not catastrophic,” he argued. “The benefits that we get from the energy we take from fossil fuels far outweigh any of the harms that come from the warming. And the added benefits to all plant growth, especially to crop yields from the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, also far outweigh the risks from climate change.”

5. Trump endorsed a return to conventional energy sources.

Trump explained that the U.N.’s alarmist climate predictions were used to badger rich nations to pursue expensive forms of renewable energy, while others were held to a much lower standard. Renewable energy sources are “a joke. They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They’re not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great,” Trump charged. On energy, he said that “the United States is now thriving like never before. We’re getting rid of the falsely-named renewables.”

This provided yet another point on which Trump criticized European leaders. “Europe, on the other hand, has a long way to go, with many countries being on the brink of destruction because of the ‘green energy’ agenda,” he warned. “I love the people of Europe, and I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration. This double-tailed monster destroys everything in its wake, and they cannot let that happen any longer. You’re doing it because you want to be nice, you want to be politically correct, and you’re destroying your heritage.”

“I think he was dead right on that,” Beisner analyzed. “Europe has seen skyrocketing energy prices as it’s tried to replace extremely energy-dense, power-dense hydrocarbon fuels — that’s fossil [fuels] (coal, oil, natural gas) — with wind and solar, which are very low-density energy sources. And of course, when you’re trying to go from low-density [sources] to the extremely high densities that we actually need to power our electrical devices to move our vehicles down the road and so on — the more you have to go from low-density to high-density, the more it’s going to cost.”

If repetition provides emphasis, then Trump emphasized in closing that open borders and green energy — topics on which he criticized both the U.N. and Europe — were the primary emphasis of his speech. “In closing, I just want to repeat that immigration and the high cost of so-called green renewable energy [are] destroying a large part of the free world and a large part of our planet,” Trump repeated. “Countries that cherish freedom are fading fast because of their policies on these two subjects. You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.”

6. Trump committed to enforce an existing treaty against bioweapons research.

However, one other policy issue did attract Trump’s attention: “ending the development of biological weapons once and for all.” Trump narrated how, “Just a few years ago, reckless experiments overseas gave us a devastating global pandemic, yet despite that worldwide catastrophe, many countries are continuing extremely risky research into bio-weapons and man-made pathogens.”

Who could forget the COVID-19 pandemic? Notably, Trump’s description presented the lab-leak theory as fact, discrediting the theory of animal transmission promulgated by China.

For China was the true target of this agenda item. Having bashed the U.N.’s incompetence and denigrated the poor decision-making of European leaders, Trump implied that the world should look elsewhere for effective leadership. The nations that stand out as obvious options are China and the U.S., and the creation of the COVID-19 virus provided an excellent reason for nations to not trust China.

7. Trump touted his own record and promised American global leadership.

This all contributed to the real purpose of Trump’s speech, positioning the United States, and himself specifically, as the undisputed world leader. “This is, indeed, the golden age of America,” Trump declared. He boasted of “rapidly reversing the economic calamity we inherited from the previous administration,” having “successfully repelled a colossal invasion” at the southern border, and having “ended seven unendable wars” in just seven months.

Perhaps Trump was overselling his case, but some significant accomplishments of his administration are undeniable. For instance, “the previous administration also lost nearly 300,000 children,” said Trump, “and we found a lot of these children, and we’re sending [them] back … to their parents.”

Most relevant to the audience at hand, “on the world stage, America is respected again,” Trump declared. After four years of President Biden stumbling from weakness to folly, President Trump has indeed projected strength on the world stage, and world leaders have noticed. In his first weekend as president, Trump forced Colombia’s socialist president into abject submission. By June, nearly every NATO country had agreed to more-than-double their defense-spending commitment, “making our alliance far stronger and more powerful than it was ever before,” said Trump.

“I’ve come here today to offer the hand of American leadership and friendship to any nation in this assembly that is willing to join us in forging a safer, more prosperous world,” Trump declared. “And it’s a world that we’ll be much happier with.”

All in all, Trump delivered a “pretty strong message,” said Perkins. “I wonder how that will resonate with the member countries.” Beisner believed that “the European countries are going to have to be learning lessons … from President Trump … and I think that he was right to say that.”

Now that Trump has delivered his challenge, however, it is ultimately up to other governments to decide how they will respond. “I think countries that have retained a sense of self-confidence and national identity and desire for independence will receive it well. I think that countries that are struggling with those issues will not receive it,” predicted Nolte. “And so it will end up being a Rorschach test. It will say less about Trump and more about actually where everyone else is.”

Whatever the result, President Trump has seized the initiative, and the rest of the world must decide how to respond.