What began on an escalator, ends on an escalator
By Michael Moore
When the escalator at the United Nations came to a wrenching and sudden stop this past Tuesday as soon as Trump stepped on it, I would like to believe that future historians will record that as the pivotal, split-second moment which marked the beginning of the end of the Trump Reign of Terror.
A Terror that began — and ended — on an escalator.
June 16, 2015, at Trump Tower — to September 23, 2025, at the United Nations.
When the escalator at the UN came to that sudden and unexpected halt, was that the sign we had been waiting for? The escalator! Is it possible that the escalator’s complete loss of power, its instant paralyzation, its seemingly abrupt and total collapse meant that this too was the end of the Reign of Donald J. Trump?
Go with me on this. I want us to imagine what life might look like in a Post-Escalator, Post-Trump World.
But you’re asking, how can I say we are in “Post-Trump” when right now you can turn on any TV and see him pouring the final load of concrete over the Rose Garden?
But what if from that instant forward on Tuesday, from the moment that escalator ground to a stop and he was frozen, stuck, unable to move, stripped of his strength and his powers to demolish the government, no more swinging that big black pen to sign hateful executive orders, incapacitated, emasculated, no idea what to do, immobilized, impotent, crippled, neutered — oh no, there goes Melania! — Trump’s deer-in-headlights look on his face — and all of a sudden millions of Americans everywhere took to the streets in a historic wave of protests and mass civil disobedience!
By the next week, a General Strike was called and the country was shut down!
Then a thousand “Mamdanis” across the nation took out petitions to run for office in the 2026 elections, many of them seeking to primary the Terror Reign’s chief enablers: the elected Democratic Party hacks who were incapable of fighting and representing the true will of the American people!
It didn’t stop there! More and more judges began ruling against fascist edicts. Out of work journalists in nearly every state announced they were starting worker-owned media outlets that would cover the real news. Numerous citizens from every region launched creative mass actions to disrupt the oligarchy, doing everything from cancelling their Disney+ and Paramount+ subscriptions, to offering car rides to women in red states in need of reproductive health care, to doing locally whatever the equivalent was to nonviolently sabotaging the teleprompters of a compliant media and shutting down the escalators of politicians on their climb to the top where they sought to crush our Democracy for good.
Yes, it was a new day in America! All it took was somebody hitting a panic button or pulling a plug. “You’re all going to hell!” he barked at the gathered nations on First Avenue.
But nobody heard him say anything as someone had cut the speaker system in the UN Assembly’s auditorium! The world had silenced him. 157 countries now recognize Palestine as an equal nation with full rights. The UN sent a strong message to the United States: We know who you are. You are the bank that funds and arms a horrific genocide. History will remember that about you.
Although this decrepit state we are in did not start with Trump — its origins can be traced back to the election of Ronald Reagan (and specifically, to August 5, 1981, when he fired all 11,345 striking air traffic controllers) — I, for now, will skip taking us further back to the founding fathers declaring that Black human beings were only 3/5 of a human being, and then, these wise old white men, they made sure women went entirely unmentioned in the Constitution as if they didn’t exist at all (which was essentially reaffirmed in 2022 by Alito, Kavanaugh & Co. in the Dobbs decision, stripping all women of their reproductive rights).
Yes. Imagine! The crash of a teleprompter, a sound system and an escalator, all within minutes of each other, brought an end to all the madness. Trump would never recover. As the great poet T. S. Eliot once wrote in his epic poem “The Hollow Men”:
“This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends:
Not with a bang
but a whimper.”
I used to find hope in your writing, commentary, and film. I am so discouraged now, that your writing only brings me closer to despair. Where are the measurable results of your work? Is your cleverness just a distraction from a far worse scenario that holds us captive and exploited? I can’t pretend I know anything about the wheels of the world, but I am beginning to think that these huge cultural challenges are beyond repair and community building is our best chance for survival. I also think that even though Trump is not the leader we wish for, he is definitely the leader we deserve.
But 4 out of 10 Americans think he’s doing fine. He’s more popular than most European leaders are. That’s the reality. When he won a second term, when famous universities and big law firms rolled over at his command, when the Democrat leadership said nothing, did nothing, when there were no strikes, that told us we’d been wrong about Americans, perhaps we’d always been wrong. Trump is not the scary story here: America is.
Who could forget King Charles III’s theatrical sulk when a fountain pen dared offend his regal fingertips?
Trump, too, wore that same wounded expression — this time courtesy of a mutinous escalator that declined to do its duty. Strip away the pomp and the bluster, and monarchs — whether in ermine or in fake tan — are merely dangerous toddlers in oversized thrones.