The United Nations, that venerable institution Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to humiliate into irrelevance, may soon be run by a man who campaigned for the job by promising to Make the UN Great Again. Yes, MUNGA. That is a real thing that is happening. A leading candidate for UN secretary general has adopted a Trump slogan, called Trump a peacemaker, and is pitching himself to the world body by promising to be exactly what the guy who hates the UN most wants him to be.
Meet the Trump of Turtle Bay
Macky Sall is the former president of Senegal and one of the top candidates to replace António Guterres as UN secretary general when Guterres leaves office in 2027. He served as Senegal's head of state for 12 years and as president of the African Union from 2022 to 2023. On paper, a serious guy with serious credentials.
Then he sat down with Breitbart. In that interview, Sall called Donald Trump 'a peace builder,' praised the US as 'the first power in the world to be with the UN,' and pledged to 'Make the UN Great Again.' He didn't just use the phrase once. He spelled it out as an acronym: MUNGA. He committed to the bit fully and without apparent embarrassment.
Sall also told Breitbart he has seen UN waste firsthand, saying: 'Because I was in Africa, I saw how sometimes these peace operations are wasting money, and they have no efficiencies.' That's a fair point, actually. The UN does have serious efficiency problems. The question is whether the solution is to rebrand it as a Trump subsidiary.
Where Did 'MUNGA' Come From?
The slogan did not originate with Sall. According to Hugh Dugan, a former US delegate to the UN who served in that role for 26 years and advised 11 US ambassadors, 'MUNGA' was first coined by Trump's current UN ambassador Mike Waltz. Dugan told Fox News it has since become a familiar rallying cry inside the organization.
Dugan runs a nonprofit called Multilateral Accountability Associates and served on the National Security Council during Trump's first term. He is not exactly a neutral observer. But his read on the internal mood at the UN is worth taking seriously, because he argues the MUNGA sentiment is feeding on something real: a long-simmering frustration among member states that the UN is buried in bureaucracy and failing at its core jobs.
'It's a clever slogan to say MUNGA,' Dugan told Fox News, 'but I think the fact is that there's been a long-time dissatisfaction among the broader membership at the U.N. on this very matter.' He compared the current organization to 'still operating with an abacus when everybody else is on a supercomputer.' That is a genuinely good line, even if the source is a Trump-aligned think-tanker who very much wants you to vote for his guy.
Trump's Complicated Relationship with the Thing He Pretends to Hate
Here is a tension worth sitting with. Trump has spent years performing contempt for the United Nations. At the UN General Assembly last September, he stood before the body and asked, out loud, 'What is the purpose of the United Nations?' He told them they mostly just write 'a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up.' Classic Trump: a burn that is also, honestly, not entirely wrong.
But Dugan pushes back hard on the idea that Trump is trying to walk away from the institution. He pointed to Trump's decision last week to resume US funding for UN humanitarian operations to the tune of $1.8 billion as evidence that the administration remains engaged. 'He sent his very strongest team he could there,' Dugan told Fox News, arguing that the 'distancing' narrative is something Trump's opponents want to promote.
So what's actually going on? Trump withholds money, screams about the UN being useless, gets some reforms and attention, then sends the check. Rinse. Repeat. It's less a foreign policy doctrine and more a protection racket with extra steps. The UN pays up, metaphorically speaking, and the lights stay on.
The Math on Actually Getting the Job
Wanting the job and getting the job are very different things at the UN. The next secretary general has to survive the Security Council, which means avoiding a veto from any of the five permanent members: the US, Russia, China, France, and the UK. That is a genuinely brutal gauntlet.
Sall told Breitbart he believes he can thread that needle. 'I am able first to talk to all the leaders from the West, and from the East,' he said, pointing to his 12 years leading Senegal and his AU presidency as proof he can work across divides. He specifically said he would need US support to push through reforms, and that with it he could 'work very closely and put them together with the other partners, particularly Europe, Asia, China and Russia and Africa.'
That is a long list of parties who don't particularly agree with each other about anything right now. But Dugan frames the secretary general selection as 'the most consequential decision for the future relevance of the UN.' Hard to argue with that. If the next head of the organization is someone who already speaks fluent MAGA, it tells you a lot about which direction this whole thing is headed.
The Dingo Take
Let's be precise about what is happening here. A man who wants to lead the one institution theoretically designed to represent the entire planet has decided his best pitch is to cosplay as a Trump ally in a Breitbart interview. And it might actually work. That's the part that should keep you up at night. Not that someone is cynically flattering a powerful country to get a job, because that has been happening at the UN since 1945. But that Trumpism has now spread far enough that 'Make the UN Great Again' is a viable electoral strategy for the leader of the global diplomatic order.
Sall's critique of UN waste isn't wrong. The organization does have serious structural problems. Peacekeeping operations have eaten money with embarrassing results for decades. The bureaucracy is legendary in the worst way. Reform is genuinely necessary and long overdue. But 'MUNGA' as a reform agenda isn't a plan. It's a branding exercise designed to signal loyalty to one member state's current political leadership. The UN's problems need someone willing to make hard structural changes and take the diplomatic heat for doing so. A guy auditioning by adopting Trump's catchphrase in a Breitbart interview is not obviously that person.
The real story here is what it says about American influence under Trump. For all the noise about the US walking away from multilateralism, the actual effect has been the opposite: the entire world is now scrambling to figure out how to tell Trump what he wants to hear. The UN, the institution he mock-eulogized at UNGA, may soon be run by someone who adopted his slogan to get the job. Trump didn't weaken the UN. He just made himself the only person who matters inside it.
