This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 23 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”

During an address to the U.N. General Assembly in 2018, Donald Trump said that his administration had “accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” In response, the crowd, full of world leaders and foreign dignitaries, broke out into laughter.

It was definitely not the reaction that a world leader hopes for when addressing the United Nations. But it was especially concerning for Trump, a man so thin-skinned and so obsessed with his self-image that he rarely lets any slight go unanswered.

And so on Tuesday, you could only imagine what was going through the president’s head when, in front of a gaggle of cameras at the United Nations, an escalator abruptly halted, leaving Trump and first lady Melania Trump flummoxed for a few seconds, before they ultimately decided to just walk up the immobile staircase.

Now, basically everyone who has ever used an escalator has had some version of this exact same experience. Sometimes, escalators malfunction and you are left to just treat them like a regular staircase. It happens.

But for Trump, the brief inconvenience of having to walk up a nonworking escalator while on camera was enough to provoke outrage. Moments later, the president took to the stage to address the assembly, and it was clear the incident was still on his mind.

“All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle,” the president said. “And then a teleprompter that didn’t work. These are the two things that I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.”

Yes, the president of the United States really did lash out at an assembled gathering of world leaders because the escalator didn’t show him enough respect. It was, to say the least, a ridiculous thing to bring up over and over again in a speech to the United Nations.

But the escalator crisis did not end there. Just a few hours after that speech, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on X: “If someone at the UN intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately.” The White House press secretary called for an investigation into the world’s largest intergovernmental organization because an escalator stopped working.

Now, for what it’s worth, The Associated Press reported that the U.N. “understands that someone from the president’s party who ran ahead of him inadvertently triggered the stop mechanism on the escalator.”

But that brief saga of Trump and the U.N. escalator is sort of a perfect encapsulation of what I like to call the Trump rage cycle.

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‘Disturbing’: Trump’s bizarre speech to UN and Tylenol tirade spark mental concerns  September 23, 2025 / 12:37

First, Trump decides he feels slighted by someone or something — it can be something as small as a minor technical malfunction — and then he lashes out, doing or saying something ridiculous and, in the process, calling even more attention to whatever has bruised his fragile ego. (I mean, would we really still be talking about a broken escalator if Trump had just walked up the stairs and moved on with his day?)

Then, Trump and his administration threaten to use the full force of the federal government to get payback, either through bogus investigations, troop mobilizations or threats from the Federal Communications Commission, all to avenge the Dear Leader.

This is what it is like to live in a country run by an insecure authoritarian bully, and we are all too familiar with it by now.

We are watching it happen again with the investigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James. Last year, James secured a civil fraud judgment against Trump for rampant fraud in his businesses. (In August, a New York appeals court threw out Trump’s half-billion-dollar financial penalty in the case, while upholding the finding that the president had engaged in fraud.)

In response, Trump lashed out publicly in ridiculous ways, yelling at his attorney general on social media for the entire world to see and demanding that his perceived enemies be prosecuted.

All of which culminated in the Trump administration forcing a career prosecutor out of office, one whom they themselves appointed, just so that the president could install an unqualified insurance lawyer to do his bidding and bring charges against his enemies.

We saw a similar dynamic play out with the suspension of late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel. First, Trump got offended by the kind of late-night comedy ribbing every American president has faced for the past half a century. Then, he lashed out and let the whole world know how ridiculously fragile he really is, with his handpicked FCC lackey making veiled threats to broadcasters, who then got scared enough to pull Kimmel off the air.

It’s the same story over and over again. Every time, it starts out feeling ridiculous and ends up feeling a bit terrifying. But it does not have to end that way.

On Tuesday, after a six-day standoff with ABC, Kimmel returned to the air. A big part of the reason Kimmel returned is because people across the country refused to let themselves be cowed into submission by Trump’s threats.

People showed up and protested outside of Disney headquarters, urging them to stand up to this administration. Calls poured out for people to cancel their subscriptions to Disney-owned streaming services and stop going to Disney-owned theme parks. Some Disney stars got in on the action, supporting the nascent boycott movement. Even some Trump allies, like Joe Rogan, criticized his actions.

In addition to all of that, Kimmel’s fellow late-night comedians stuck their own necks out to not just defend Kimmel, but also explain to their corporate parent companies exactly what is at stake.

“If we’ve learned nothing else from this administration’s second term so far, and I don’t think we have, is that giving the bully your lunch money doesn’t make him go away. It just makes him come back hungrier each time,” John Oliver said Sunday. “They are never going to stop. They’ve literally said that openly.”

That’s a pretty solid encapsulation of what every company, university, law firm and media organization should be thinking about right now: When you give bullies your lunch money, they come back.

So, after nearly a week of that kind of pushback, the executives at Disney finally came to their senses about Trump. They realized that despite his office and despite his threats, the president is not as big and powerful as he thinks he is — at least not compared with the throngs of people out there pushing back.

Now this story is not over; media conglomerates Sinclair and Nexstar are still refusing to air Kimmel’s show on the ABC stations they own, setting up the next battle over free expression in this country. But Trump’s threats do not feel as intimidating as they did last week because people stood up and fought back.

When Trump tried to take things from ridiculous to terrifying, when he tried to thump his chest and make himself seem big, people stood up and treated him like the small, weak and petty bully he is.