President Trump on Tuesday started his address to the General Assembly by saying to an unidentified teleprompter operator: “You’re in trouble.” The near hour that followed must have been a torture for UN supporters, and especially for Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. 

A malfunctioning teleprompter and a failed escalator were far from the only UN dysfunctions Mr. Trump highlighted in his speech. On the institution’s 80th birthday, Mr. Trump assailed the fundamental sensibilities that have guided the UN through its several decades. 

Critics say that Mr. Trump typically strays from facts. Some in the building compared his rambling style to that of past UN speakers like Muammar Qaddafi or Fidel Castro. Yet a comparison of the so-called facts that Mr. Guterres claims to have established and Mr. Trump’s speech might ultimately favor the latter.

“We must choose peace rooted in international law,” the secretary-general said in opening the annual UN general debate, during which country leaders typically highlight their successes. Among those, Mr. Trump listed ending seven wars in his second term as president. “And sadly,” he said, “the United Nations did not even try to help in any of them.” 

Mr. Trump spoke of his diplomatic efforts in Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo and Rwanda, Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan. Some of these wars might yet reignite, but Mr. Guterres could only offer a lamenting of the wars raging around the globe.  

“In Gaza, the horrors are approaching a third monstrous year.  They are the result of decisions that defy basic humanity,” Mr. Guterres said. For the first time, he came close to accusing Israel of committing genocide by citing South Africa’s allegation in the International Court of Justice. In Gaza, he said, “The scale of death and destruction are beyond any other conflict in my years as secretary general.”

In reality, since Mr. Guterres’s tenure started in 2017, the UN Development Program has clocked 377,000 deaths in Yemen. The war in Sudan, which Mr. Guterres mentioned in passing in his speech, has exacted an estimated 150,000 deaths since 2023. During the same timeframe, according to Hamas’s likely inflated figures, 70,000 Gazans were killed. 

A day after France and Saudi Arabia convened an international conference to promote a Palestinian state, Mr. Guterres and many other speakers mentioned that goal as a fait accompli. After some condemnation of the October 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities, Mr. Guterres mostly berated Israel over its Gaza war conduct and its refusal to end the war.

Mr. Trump, in contrast, stressed the need to release all the hostages, rather than a small number at a time, and said he was working hard to end the war. “Unfortunately, Hamas has repeatedly rejected reasonable offers to make peace,” he said, adding, “as if to encourage continued conflict, some of this body are seeking to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state.”  That, he added, would amount to rewarding Hamas “for their atrocities.”

Following his speech, Mr. Trump is expected to meet with the leaders of several Arab countries in the hope of promoting an end to war. He is also scheduled to host Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House next week. Mr. Guterres, in contrast, is now seen by the sides as irrelevant to any peacemaking process. 

As in many of his domestic speeches, Mr. Trump noted the sharp reduction in migration into America. Mr. Guterres headed the UN refugee agency before he ascended to the top job. His tenure, coinciding with a Mideast upheaval known as the Arab Spring, was marked by the largest refugee crisis since World War II, and the UN was largely absent as European countries took in a vast number of migrants. 

Mr. Trump said that while he had stopped illegal entry into America, European prisons are filled with migrants. The refugees that European countries have taken in, he said, “repaid kindness with crime. It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now.”

For most of his tenure, Mr. Guterres has promoted environmental causes. “Fossil fuels are a losing bet,” he said Tuesday. “Renewables are the cheapest and fastest source of new power.” Not so Mr. Trump, who called the demand to limit the use of oil a “hoax.”

Communist China, he said, exports most of the “pathetic,” expensive, and ineffective windmills that are in use around the globe. “So why is it that they build them, and they send them all over the world, but they barely use them?” He said that Chinese use of coal offsets all the “sacrifice” Europeans have made to their economies by reducing fossil fuels. 

While Mr. Guterres highlighted the UN’s 80th anniversary, Mr. Trump wanted the world to marvel over next year’s celebrations of America’s birth on July 4, 1779. The contrast between the two has never been starker.

Yet, in a meeting with Mr. Guterres afterward, the president said, “I’m behind you” because “the potential for peace with this institution is so great.”