The United Nations General Assembly became the stage for what Professor Jeffrey Sachs calls an unprecedented display of gangster diplomacy. In an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano on Judging Freedom, broadcast on 23 September 2026, Sachs reacted to President Donald Trump’s threat to annihilate Iran, describing it as a moment that made his skin crawl.

Sachs, speaking from a quiet corner of the UN building in New York, said he shuddered at the language used by a US president before world leaders. ‘It was ghastly, unprecedented, totally disgusting, disgraceful for the United States,’ he told Napolitano. He added that the speech was also ‘a measure of how broken the constitutional order of the United States is’.

According to Sachs, Trump presented himself as the sole decider of Iran’s survival. ‘He said that he has a big, big choice to make. Maybe Iran will be a great country. Maybe Iran will be annihilated. Maybe Trump will send it to hell,’ Sachs recounted. He stressed that such words violate ‘every religious, moral, ethical, and legal standard that we have in this world’.

The Columbia University professor and UN adviser placed the episode in a longer history of US imperial overreach. He reminded listeners that the US Constitution assigns the power to declare war solely to Congress, not to the commander-in-chief. ‘Is there a political system where one man decides the fate of another civilization? Is that how the American system works? Of course, the answer is no,’ he said.

Sachs noted that Trump has openly dismissed public opinion and congressional authority. ‘He doesn’t care what the public thinks. He doesn’t care what the vote is. He says doesn’t even cross my mind,’ Sachs said, quoting the president. He contrasted this with the founding fathers’ rebellion against King George III, whose alleged crime was putting military rule above civil authority.

The silence of Congress, Sachs argued, is as alarming as the president’s words. ‘What did our speaker of the House say? Well, he said, nothing, of course. What did our Senate Majority Leader say? He said, of course, nothing,’ he said. ‘This is worse than the Roman Empire. There was a Senate that actually still said something. Our Senate says nothing.’

Sachs insisted his criticism is not partisan. ‘I am not partisan. And a Democratic president who dared to be as absolutely mad and deranged as this president would probably find subservience in that party, too,’ he said. He described Trump as ‘utterly incompetent, utterly sociopathic’, citing the killing of 150 schoolgirls and the president’s casual response.

Napolitano noted that only Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska had spoken out, and even she expressed fear of retaliation. Sachs responded that Trump ‘horrified the whole world’ and ‘disgraced the United States of America’. He recalled the UN’s founding purpose, championed by Franklin Roosevelt, to end the scourge of war and replace annihilation talk with diplomacy.

For Global South News, this interview matters because it exposes the contradiction at the heart of US power: a president who threatens a 5,000-year-old civilization while Congress abdicates its constitutional duty. Sachs’s warning is a reminder that the multipolar world must defend international law against the whims of a single man in Washington. The full interview is available on the Judging Freedom YouTube channel.