On September 19^th, President Donald Trump addressed the UN General Assembly for the first time of his term. Judging by YouTube comments and central to right leaning news articles, you’d think this was one of his best speeches. After sitting through all of it, I’d say this speech was the start his poor second half of September.

Trump began his speech in a tame manner. He touched on important topics in a mature way (which unfortunately isn’t even expected of him), such as hurricanes Harvey and Irma. He then states a claim that the country has been doing “very well” since election day. His evidence for this claim is sufficiently sound, saying that the stock market is doing well and unemployment is incredibly low (4.2%, which he doesn’t say). He surprisingly doesn’t attribute this to himself. Trump frequently and ironically cites “the people” and how this country is great because of how it views “the people”, but if “the people” had their way he wouldn’t be giving this speech. He lost the popular vote by an astounding 3 million, and his approval rating is about 38% at the time of giving the speech. He continues on this clearly scripted and tame style for about 15 minutes, but he eventually loses his calm tone and goes full Donald ™.

As fun as it is to simply repeat each of his sentences, it’s more important to look at the broader ideas he presented in this brutally long 41-minute speech. It goes downhill when North Korea becomes his focus. Trump explains all of the undeniably terrible things the North Korean regime has done (controlled media, executing dissidents, not feeding its citizens, etc.), and then attempts to warn their nation of the strength of the US. After stating that the US is ready for conflict at all times, he says “We will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea” and “Rocket Man [Kim Jong Un] is on a suicide mission for himself”. Who else would a suicide mission be for? Isn’t it always for the person on said mission? These both come a few minutes after the President said, “We want harmony and friendship, not hardship and strife”. It’s hard to understand how the President can try and flex his overwhelming strength to scare the world, and proceed to say he wants harmony.  He says he hopes war won’t be necessary, but it wouldn’t be surprising if this man plunged the U.S. into one on a whim. It’s through this part of the speech that it becomes dark, dismal, and pessimistic. All he does is state problems in the world (including the crises in Venezuela) without any actual solutions other than US military intervention.

North Korea isn’t his only excuse to brag about our military. He tells the Assembly that Iran fears the US military second behind only the Iranian people. His point could’ve been made by simply saying that the Iranian regime does not have more power than its people, but he decided to throw a jingoistic add-on to his sentence. A lot of this speech is spent trying to convince the world that Trump is at the helm of the biggest and scariest army in the world. While may be true, he uses it to instill fear rather than a sense of security.

Some of his military claims aren’t even true- in an effort to place himself above Obama, he says that our country has done more against ISIL in 8 months than in “many many years combined”. While it’s true that ISIL is on the decline and will be gone in the foreseeable future, it’s not accurate to give this credit to Trump, or Obama for that matter. ISIL’s downfall should be attributed mostly to the Kurds, Iraqis, and Syrians risking their lives and homes to combat this threat.

There is a lot wrong with the speech, logically, factually, and simply on common sense terms, that cannot fit in under 800 words (this piece hits 826). He does that stupid thing with his hands the entire time- where he makes an “OK” kind of gesture, and then opens his hand and bounces it in the air for every syllable he says. He used struggles in other nations to try and prove that he is better than his opponents. He called one of the world’s most dangerous people a childish nickname. He, again, called terrorists “losers” as if that does anything other than make himself seem immature. And perhaps most unsettling- this was one of his most sane speeches.

His campaign and presidency to date have set the expectation that he will just go anywhere and yell at an audience about things he doesn’t like. Consequently, when he stays on script and forms coherent sentences, people celebrate him as a charismatic genius for elevating his presentation even the slightest bit; but as time passes, he proves he’s still the same Donald.