President Donald Trump kicked off Tuesday by delivering an impassioned speech to delegates from the 193 member states of the United Nations.
Among other things, Trump lashed out at North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and denounced “the scourge of our planet,” which he described as a “small group of rogue regimes that violate every principle on which the United Nations is based.”
Trump said in the speech that if North Korea didn’t back down from its nuclear aggression, the US would “have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”
Trump also singled out Iran, calling the US’s nuclear deal with the country, brokered by President Barack Obama, an “embarrassment.”
At one point, Trump said, “Major portions of the world are in conflict, and some, in fact, are going to hell.”
John Kelly, Trump's chief of staff who has a reputation as a strict disciplinarian, was also at the UN when the president delivered his remarks. This was his reaction:
It's unclear what exactly Kelly thought of the speech, which Trump and his team had prepared ahead of time. Other photos of Kelly watching the speech show him looking alert and attentive.
But the photos are reminiscent of Kelly's reaction to another Trump event: his freewheeling press conference in Trump Tower in August after the white-supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia. Kelly was pictured looking especially displeased with how that panned out.
