A Vast Conspiracy of Moderate Incline: The UN Escalator Plot that Nearly Toppled the World Order

3 minutes read time.

In the annals of international espionage and covert warfare, few events have posed such a grave and sudden threat to the stability of the free world as the harrowing incident at the United Nations on Tuesday. In a brazen assault that left global leaders reeling, the very machinery of diplomacy was turned against the President of the United States. A diabolical plot was hatched, a nefarious trap was sprung, and for a few terrifying moments, President Felonious Punk and the First Lady were forced to… ascend a flight of stairs under their own power.

The crisis began as the presidential couple stepped onto a mechanical staircase, only to have it jolt to a sudden, malevolent halt. Was this a mere mechanical mishap, or the opening salvo in a new, kinetic phase of diplomatic warfare? For the President’s valiant press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, the answer was clear. Springing into action with the righteous fury of a seasoned geopolitical operator, she immediately called for retribution against the shadowy cabal responsible. “If someone at the U.N. intentionally stopped the escalator,” she declared with heroic gravitas, “they need to be fired and investigated immediately”.

As the world held its breath, Leavitt escalated her warnings, suggesting on Fox News that the incident was far from a coincidence and that UN staffers may have sought to physically injure the President. This was sabotage. This was an attack. The United States Secret Service, she assured a grateful nation, was “looking into this to get to the bottom of it”. One can only imagine the coded, frantic radio traffic as elite agents were redeployed from counter-sniper positions to secure the perimeter around the offending Schindler product. Leavitt, demonstrating a level of authority previously unseen in a press secretary, vowed to personally see to the accountability of these rogue maintenance technicians.

The President himself, a master of understatement, seemed to take the life-threatening ordeal in stride. While he bemoaned the “bad escalator” in his speech, he later mused on social media that the event “probably made the speech more interesting”. This calm, however, did little to quell the righteous panic among his praetorian guard. Jesse Watters of Fox News, correctly identifying the gravity of the situation, declared, “They sabotaged him, and they could’ve hurt the first lady”.

Then, after a harrowing one-day investigation that surely involved intelligence assets from across the globe, the UN delivered its shocking findings. The dastardly culprit behind the now-international incident was unmasked: a White House videographer. According to the UN’s painfully detailed and reality-based explanation, the American cameraman, while walking backward to capture the President’s grand entrance, likely triggered a built-in safety mechanism at the top of the stairs. In a devastating blow to the conspiracy, the same was true for the teleprompter that also failed during the speech; a UN official confirmed that the White House was, in fact, operating its own teleprompter. The calls, it appeared, were coming from inside the house.

The tragicomedy is only deepened by the mundane context. It is a well-known fact among UN staff that the escalators are frequently out of service, not due to sabotage, but because the organization is facing a “liquidity crisis” in part from the United States being billions behind in its dues. The greatest threat to the UN’s vertical transport is not a shadowy assassin, but a budget spreadsheet.

In the end, a crisis that demanded the attention of the Secret Service and the personal vengeance of the White House press secretary was resolved when a UN technician simply reset the escalator after the American delegation had completed their perilous trek to the second floor. The world can now breathe a collective sigh of relief, secure in the knowledge that our bravest agents are on high alert, ready to protect our leaders from the ever-present threat of malfunctioning public conveyances.