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He devoted much of a 40-minute press conference on Wednesday to condemning an investigation he characterized as another witch hunt, even as he ticked off the number of meetings he’d held (with leaders of New Zealand, Pakistan, Poland, Singapore, the U.K., and many others). Standing alongside the President of El Salvador discussing border security, he called the Ukraine-call controversy “a hoax” and said Pelosi had been taken over “by the radical left.” Announcing the U.S.-Japan trade deal, he joked that maybe Pelosi wouldn’t have time to sign the deal: “She’s wasting her time on a—you know, let’s use a word they say a lot: a ‘manufactured crisis.’” Speaking with members of the U.S. mission to the UN, he mused that whoever provided information to the whistle-blower was “almost a spy.”

Then he went home. The General Assembly carried on.

Non-U.S. delegates I spoke with were following news of the impeachment saga, but were busy with their own meetings and trying not to comment on U.S. politics. The U.S. mission to the UN did not respond to a query about what effect, if any, the impeachment story was having on their own goals for the General Assembly. But as one UN official told me: “The biggest crisis is where you’re sitting. If you’re in Aden, it’s Yemen. If you’re in the Central African Republic,” it’s the ongoing violence in the country despite a February peace deal. (The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to give a candid assessment.) CNN played on a television in the background, with a triple-split screen of reporters discussing the impeachment and the whistle-blower.

For many countries, the official said, the General Assembly is “their country’s, their crises’ moment in the sun.”

To some degree, the General Assembly and the confabs around it are structured to absorb the outsize attention any U.S. president naturally attracts there, as the leader of the world’s most powerful country, which also happens to host the UN’s headquarters. For the past several years, the secretary-general has spent days ahead of the annual gathering pushing his priority issues before the U.S. president even shows up—this year it was climate, and Thunberg’s much-covered carbon-neutral boat commute, capped off by her rebuke to the world (“How dare you!” and “You are failing us”), ensured it stayed on the news agenda in the lead-up to the meetings.

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And there was plenty of actual policy drama to go around. French President Emmanuel Macron implored Rouhani to meet with Trump—he did not succeed—and the U.K.’s Boris Johnson contended with his own hybrid domestic-international political struggles as his government falters and his country hurtles toward leaving the European Union.