"Fox & Friends" hosts agreed the U.S. Secret Service should investigate an apparent escalator malfunction that forced President Donald Trump and his wife Melania to walk upstairs to his widely criticized United Nations speech.
Trump complained about the escalator and a glitchy teleprompter, among many other topics, during his admittedly "braggadocious," 55-minute harangue, and Fox News broadcaster Ainsley Earhardt said she'd heard from viewers and acquaintances who said the malfunctions had overshadowed a speech that drew condemnation from veteran diplomats.
"This is what people are talking about, not his speech," Earhardt said. "The Secret Service is now investigating."
"There were talks in the press that UN workers in advance were joking they were going to turn off the escalator before the meeting, and so the Secret Service is investigating whether or not Trump was deliberately sabotaged by the UN staff," she added.
The show's producers played a 26-second clip of Trump suggesting during the speech that the first lady could have been injured when the escalator ground to a halt, and co-host Brian Kilmeade delighted in the president's complaints.
"Think about this," Kilmeade said, grinning. "He also in the speech, and he was going to bring this up anyway, said, 'I bid on refurbishing this place when I was a contractor in the '90s, you went with somebody else and ended up with plastic and Lucite or something, instead of marble.' So, meanwhile, they want to get to the bottom of this."
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the Secret Service was looking into whether the escalator or teleprompter had been tampered with, but UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said an examination showed the escalator’s central processing unit stopped after a built-in safety mechanism was activated.
"If you're trying to mock the president by screwing with his teleprompter and the escalator, it's not going to go unpunished," Kilmeade said, paraphrasing the White House press secretary.
Kilmeade read the UN spokesperson's statement aloud, pronouncing the technical terms for the escalator's components as if incredulous they had individual names, and both he and co-host Lawrence Jones cast doubt on the explanation.
"No way, no way," Jones said. "By the way, the intent may have been to annoy the president or embarrass the president, but that's a major security failure."
"I know," Kilmeade agreed. "It could have been a setup."
"I was more stunned at the reaction," Jones added. "Like, the leader of the free world is on the escalator, and the Secret Service is looking, like, what do we do?"