Melania at the UN

The Monstrous Absurdity of a War President's Wife Pleading for Children's Safety

First lady Melania Trump presides over a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, at U.N. headquarters in New York, on 2 March 2026. Photo credit: Angelina Katsanis

Former British Conservative politician and current pundit Rory Stewart thought it might have been a case of artificial intelligence. Many would have agreed. The US First Lady, Melania Trump, had chanced upon a situation where she was chairing the UN Security Council. It was the turn of the United States to assume the Presidency of the body, and Melania was there to preside. “Peace,” she said redundantly, “does not need to be fragile.”

The speech was both tedious and barely believable, addressing such notions as “democratizing knowledge” during this novel “age of imagination”. (Much was made of artificial intelligence, though counterfeit intelligence would be more accurate.) She asked Security Council members to “pledge to safeguard learning … to build a future generation of leaders who embrace peace through education.” Education is, indeed, something to safeguard. But that task has conspicuously failed to have any effect on that man in the White House and any number of his sycophantic and increasingly deranged employees.

With the war widening in the Middle East, the First Lady spoke of enduring peace arising only “when knowledge and understanding are fully valued within all societies”. (If only.) It was now the moment “for our generation to elevate our children above ideology through access to wisdom.” This bilge water was made ever more sour by remarks about the need for nations to protect their books, language, science and mathematics. Fine points, except that the Trump administration has waged a remorseless campaign against education itself, cutting or freezing billions of dollars in research grants and making the enrolment of students, notably international students, perilous. University grants have been terminated for reasons of advancing a corrupting “woke” agenda. The Transportation Department, for instance, terminated seven university grants amounting to $54 million in May 2025 for allegedly advancing “a radical DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and green agenda that were both wasteful and ran counter to the transportation priorities of the American people.”

The First Lady’s presence was most mocking, given that the Security Council has had little role to play in restraining the wars of late, not least the current illegal conflict being waged by Israel and the United States. But while the husband was in the White House maddeningly delirious with a new war, wife Melania could be telling the attendees that the United States “stands with all the children throughout the world.”

This was abundantly considerate of her, given that attacks by forces her husband commands, in league with Israel, had slaughtered 168 school children at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab in Iran’s Hormozgan province on February 28. Prior to the March 2 meeting, Iran’s ambassador to the UN, Amir Saeid Iravani, called it “deeply shameful and hypocritical that on the very first day of its presidency of the Security Council, the United States convened a high-level meeting on protecting children”. A group of UN experts versed in the fields of discrimination against women and girls, the human rights situation in Iran and the right to education, were unreserved in their condemnation of the attack. “A strike on a school represents a grave assault on children, on education, and on the future of an entire community,” they stated. “The reported destruction of a school and the killing of girls in a classroom is among the most flagrant examples of how conflict can steal girls’ futures in an instant, extinguishing not only young lives, but also the hopes, agency, and opportunities education makes possible.” First Lady, take note.

It was also wonderful of her to talk about the welfare of children given that Hubby Trump has also been complicit in Israel’s campaign of vengeful extermination in Gaza, which has seen the capital slaughter of children the envy of any aspiring psychopath. In a study published in The Lancet in February, researchers, using a population-representative household survey called the Gaza Mortality Survey, identified 75,200 violent deaths between October 7, 2023 and January 5, 2025. During that same time, 16,300 non-violent deaths were also identified. Of violent deaths, women, children (those younger than 18 years), and older people (those older than 64 years), accounted for 42,200 deaths. Such figures were even higher than those produced by the Gaza Ministry of Health, long maligned by Israel for placing propaganda before evidence.

The Trump administration has also shown its affection for children in abandoning humanitarian aid and international development assistance on a grand scale. Such programs were simply not in the spirit and purpose of “America First Foreign Policy”. Within his first month of office, the President signed an Executive Order suspending new international development assistance for three months, stating that the US “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases are antithetical to American interests.” As Leila Nimatallah of the advocacy group First Focus on Children wrote, such funding, vital to saving the lives of children through interventions in health, nutrition and food security, had already been accounted for by Congress. “This order literally could mean the difference between life and death for tens of thousands of children, depending on how long it continues and how strictly it is implemented by the new Administration.”

As the UN, with its viscera, becomes increasingly confined to sepulchral functions, eyeing the tomb of international institutions, the mad in power are showing, at least for the moment, that they are setting and settling scores. Laws are being breached with hearty relish, if not abandoned altogether. But the world can at least admire the First Lady for chairing a Security Council meeting, even if she failed to appreciate the monstrous absurdity of the situation.