WASHINGTON (The Thursday Times) — US President Donald Trump shared an 87-second clip of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s address to the UN General Assembly on his Truth Social account, posting the video without a single word of his own commentary, a silence that has said as much as anything he could have written.
In the clip, Sharif told the 81st session of the UN General Assembly that “a year ago, Pakistan faced external aggression from India under a false pretext,” describing India’s Operation Sindoor, launched after the April 2025 Pahalgam attack, in those terms before crediting Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir’s “courageous leadership” for Pakistan’s response. Sharif then turned directly to Trump, thanking him for his “resolute and visionary leadership” and “timely intervention,” which he said helped prevent further loss of life in South Asia. Trump posted the excerpt on Friday, September 26, choosing to let Sharif’s own words carry the moment rather than adding his own gloss.
The gesture followed remarks Trump himself had made at the same General Assembly three days earlier, on September 22, when he claimed credit for helping settle eight separate wars, including the India-Pakistan confrontation, and said that Sharif had personally credited him with saving 30 million lives in South Asia. Trump added that nearly all the countries he referenced in that speech had sent him letters of thanks for his role.
India has rejected the framing, maintaining the ceasefire came through direct communication between the two countries’ Directors General of Military Operations rather than American mediation. That has not slowed the traffic in the other direction: Trump chose to personally platform Pakistan’s account of events to his own audience, unprompted and uncommented, which reads less like a passing gesture and more like a deliberate signal of whose version of the story he is willing to amplify.
This is not an isolated moment in the relationship. Trump has repeatedly gone out of his way to praise Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership together. At their White House meeting following the ceasefire, he called Sharif a “great leader” and Munir a “great guy,” and he had separately hosted Munir at his official Washington residence in June, doing so even as Indian officials alleged Munir had provoked the Pahalgam attack itself through inflammatory rhetoric against India beforehand. Taken together with Friday’s Truth Social post, the pattern is one of a US president consistently choosing to elevate Islamabad’s account and its leadership on the international stage, rather than a single gesture that can be read in isolation.
For Pakistan, the optics of the moment are difficult to overstate: a sitting American president, addressing the world body himself, then reposting a foreign prime minister’s own words thanking him, unedited and unqualified, to his own followers. Whatever the underlying facts of how the ceasefire was actually reached, the story now being told loudest on the world’s largest social media megaphone is Pakistan’s.∎
