When a man angling to run the United Nations starts quoting Donald Trump’s reform agenda back to him, something has shifted in the gravitational field of global diplomacy. Macky Sall, the former president of Senegal and one of the contenders to replace António Guterres as Secretary General, told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview that he not only supports the president’s push to overhaul the body but is happy to adopt the slogan the administration coined for it. He wants, in his words, to “Make the UN Great Again.”
That is not a phrase a career multilateralist utters by accident. It is the language Trump’s ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, has used for months to describe a reform plan built on spending cuts, the elimination of redundant bureaucracies, and the gutting of ideological mandates that have nothing to do with peace or security. Sall heard that vision and decided to run toward it rather than away from it.
He went further, calling Trump a peace builder. “He’s a peace builder, even if sometimes we have some problems today with Iran, but what he did is huge on one year of peace in the world,” Sall said, urging the president to stay the course.
Coming from a man courting the votes of all five permanent members of the Security Council, the flattery is transparent. But the substance underneath it is what matters, and the substance is an admission that the institution he hopes to lead is broken.
Sall did not soften that diagnosis. He described a body drowning in its own paperwork, more than forty thousand mandates issued since its founding, with no mechanism to retire the ones that have outlived their purpose. He pointed to agencies duplicating one another’s work, peacekeeping missions that linger for forty or fifty years with little to show for the money, and a payroll concentrated in Manhattan, one of the most expensive cities on earth.
His proposed fixes read like a conservative reform memo: cut staff, relocate offices to cheaper hubs like Nairobi or Bangkok, consolidate redundant systems, and let artificial intelligence absorb the administrative bloat.
“We, because I was in Africa, I saw how sometimes these peace operations are wasting money, and they have no efficiencies.”
None of this guarantees Sall would actually deliver. The UN has spent decades absorbing reform rhetoric the way a sponge absorbs water, growing heavier and slower the whole time. A candidate who needs American goodwill to survive the Security Council gauntlet has every incentive to tell Washington exactly what it wants to hear, and the gap between a campaign promise at Turtle Bay and an institutional change is measured in years and vetoes.
The complications run deeper still. Sall’s candidacy is not the consensus African bid it is sometimes portrayed to be. The African Union declined to formally endorse him this spring, his own Senegal objected, and he sits in the race largely on the nomination of Burundi. He claims warm relations with Paris, but France has not publicly confirmed it is backing him. He is a contender, not a coronation, and the field around him remains crowded.
Which is precisely what makes his embrace of the MUNGA framing significant. A man without the unified backing of his own continent has read the room and concluded that the path to the top job runs through Washington and through the language of reform, not through the tired internationalism that has defined the building for a generation. The reform pressure Trump has applied is now shaping how the next leader of the UN talks about the UN, regardless of who wins.
Scripture warns against trusting the smooth speech of those who want something from us. “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them,” Christ told His disciples, and the standard applies here without modification.
Sall has said the right words. Whether he, or anyone, can drag a sclerotic bureaucracy into accountability is a question only fruit can answer.
For now, the headline writes itself. The president who was mocked from the General Assembly podium has watched his reform vocabulary migrate into the mouths of the very people who want to run the place.
That is not nothing. It is the sound of an institution beginning to sense that the old way of doing business is no longer safe, and that the man in the White House meant what he said.
