Cat-like Melania seemed to be purring

ON his Twitter feed it could have been discounted as mere late-night bragging. But Donald Trump was at the cathedral of international affairs, the United Nations general assembly hall, in front of 192 national delegations. Diplomatic prime-time.

If ‘Rocket Man’ Kim Jong Un forced America to defend itself, said Mr Trump, he would ‘have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea’.

It was odd to hear the words, odd that they generated so little reaction in the chamber. It was odd for a US president to use that mocking nickname in a forum normally so tight-buttoned.

Odd, too – eerie – to hear nuclear attack threatened in such a matter-of-fact way.

He was not shouting. He was speaking off a script and could have been telling a shoplifter not to re-offend.

And yet this was the most electrifying moment at the UN since the USSR’s Nikita Krushchev banged his shoe on a desk in 1960. The sheer magnitude of Mr Trump’s threat took a few seconds to register. Then you realised, gulp, yes, he really had just forced us to contemplate the obliteration of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

You need not be a Trump supporter to admit that his shoulder-shrugging bluntness is rhetorically effective. The general assembly chamber is supposedly a place for consensual internationalism. Over the decades the UN elite has developed conventions of nuance and formulaic phrasing. Mr Trump blew them apart. Diplomatic procedure took one right down the chimney.

He opened his speech by saying how strong the American military was. You’re not really meant to do that.

Then he made plain what he thought about various ‘rogue nations’ responsible for ‘chaos, turmoil and terror’. Bellicosity, at the UN, tends to be uttered by dull-eyed officials hunched over conferences tables and wearing translation-headphones. But here was New Yorker Trump at a home-town lectern with his celebrated hairdo and distinctive hand gestures. His critics have so persistently and loftily cartooned him that they have made the man himself somehow semi-real and rather riveting. Frightening though this speech may have been, it was also remarkable for its directness.

DELEGATES were present from the nations he criticised. An expressionless chap on the North Korea desk took a handwritten note as he heard his regime decribed as ‘this band of criminals’ ripe for nuclear apocalypse. File under D for Doomsday, Miss lee.

The Iranian delegate fiddled with a mobile telephone while Mr Trump demanded an end to Teheran’s ‘pursuit of death and destruction’.

A Syrian envoy clutched his head when Mr Trump deplored that country’s use of chemical weapons.

And when the president tore into Venezuela’s ‘socialist dictatorship’, a woman in the Venezuelan delegation stared at him, transfixed, even though she was still writing on the paper in front of her. The words must have all run together on the page. More enthusiastic reactions came from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who nodded in agreement to part of the speech.

The hall laughed with Mr Trump when he said Venezuela’s problem was ‘not that socialism has been wrongly implemented but that socialism has been faithfully implemented’. Socialism invariably led to ‘anguish and devastation and failure’, he said.

To one side sat Melania Trump, cat-like, her elliptic eyes closing slightly as though with creamy pleasure. Was she purring?

When Mr Trump praised Russia and China for helping with the North Korean problem, a Russian delegate was to be seen chuckling.

And when Mr Trump complained that America paid too much to keep the UN in clover, a Zimbabwean diplomat leaned back and patted his large tummy.

In the British seats: Industry minister Claire Perry, a sporty lass not beyond her own explosions – Trump might admire her.

Beside her was Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt, a europhile watery as melon.

let us hope he noted Mr Trump’s repeated proclamations about the virtues of sovereign nation states – the very opposite of the european Union.