Macky Sall, former president of Senegal and one of the leading candidates to become the next United Nations secretary general, has endorsed Donald Trump's drive to overhaul the sprawling international body, and he did it using the president's own language. In an exclusive phone interview with Breitbart News, Sall called Trump "a peace builder" and declared his support for "MUNGA", Make the UN Great Again.

That a former African head of state running for the top job at Turtle Bay would openly align himself with Trump's reform agenda tells you something about the shifting landscape at the United Nations. For decades, the institution has operated as a self-perpetuating bureaucracy insulated from accountability, flush with American taxpayer dollars, and resistant to any serious audit of its mission. Now a serious candidate for secretary general is saying, in effect, that Washington's complaints are legitimate.

Sall did not hedge. He praised Trump's record on global peace, endorsed deep spending cuts, called for eliminating overlapping mandates, proposed relocating expensive New York-based staff to cheaper cities, and backed the use of artificial intelligence to strip out redundancies. He also took direct aim at the UN's failure to combat terrorism and illegal migration, two issues that sit at the center of the Trump administration's foreign policy.

A résumé built for the moment

Sall governed Senegal for twelve years across two terms. His first term ran seven years; he then pushed through a reform shortening presidential terms to five and served a second. Before the presidency, he held the offices of prime minister and speaker of the house. On the continental stage, he led the Economic Community of West African States in 2015 and chaired the African Union from 2022 to 2023.

During his AU chairmanship, Sall spearheaded the campaign to win Africa a permanent seat at the G20, an effort he says succeeded because of the continent's demographic and economic weight: 1.5 billion people, a $3 trillion GDP, and a projected population of 2.5 billion by 2050.

His pitch for the secretary general's office rests heavily on personal relationships with the leaders of every permanent Security Council member. He told Breitbart News he co-chaired the China Africa Forum alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping for six years and maintains a working relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has visited French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris multiple times in recent months. Senegal, he noted, is very close with France, and he has French support.

The administration's broader foreign policy posture, from pressuring Cuba's communist regime into releasing prisoners to confronting hostile actors abroad, has signaled that Washington expects results from its leverage. Sall appears to have read the room.

'I can be secretary, but also general'

Sall framed his candidacy as that of an outsider who knows the institution but has never been on its payroll, and who therefore has no vested interest in protecting the status quo. His language was blunt by UN standards:

"It is possible, with the support of the member states, to make this reform. I have the capacity as a political leader. I can be secretary, but also general if necessary to bring the big powers to talk together."

He went further, pledging to work with the United States as the institution's founding power and largest funder. He described a willingness to open the UN's books with the P5 and the broader Security Council, going "chapter by chapter" to identify where the secretary general can cut costs and improve accountability.

That kind of talk has been almost unheard of from secretary general candidates, who typically court the General Assembly's developing-world majority with promises of expanded programs and higher spending. Sall is running in the opposite direction.

The mandate problem

One of Sall's sharpest critiques targeted the UN's mandate system. He claimed the organization has issued more than 40,000 mandates since its founding, a staggering accumulation of directives, programs, and missions that overlap, duplicate, and persist long after their original purpose has expired.

"The UN is not able to even stop some mandates to make the evaluation and maybe to kill the mandate and to have a new something."

He pointed specifically to peacekeeping operations, some of which he said have dragged on for forty or fifty years. Having watched these missions operate across Africa during his presidency, Sall said the waste is visible and the results are poor.

"We, because I was in Africa, I saw how sometimes these peace operations are wasting money, and they have no efficiencies. We can really redefine the way this can be done, and we can optimize the budget and do more prevention to avoid crises so that means big diplomacy in the front before the crises are starting."

This tracks with the reform vision U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz laid out in a November 2025 interview with Breitbart News, in which he described the MUNGA agenda as focused on "spending cuts and eliminating woke or redundant mandates." Waltz, the man Trump charged with leading the UN reform effort, conducted that interview on the floor of the General Assembly.

The Trump administration has shown it is willing to act decisively on multiple fronts, whether that means conducting joint military operations against transnational criminal organizations or restructuring how the federal government handles immigration enforcement. The same instinct for accountability now extends to Turtle Bay.

Terrorism, migration, and the case for a global platform

Sall did not treat the UN as a sacred cow. But he argued the institution remains the only universal platform capable of addressing threats that cross borders, and that the answer is reform, not abandonment.

On terrorism, he was direct: the UN is "doing some but not enough, not enough, of course." He called for the organization to become "the first platform around the world working with the member states to have the clear mission to fight against terrorism, particularly in Africa and Middle East, but everywhere in the world."

He linked terrorism to illegal migration in terms that would sound familiar to any conservative policy maker. Violence and instability, he argued, drive people onto irregular migration routes toward the United States and Europe. The solution, in his telling, involves keeping people in their home countries by creating economic opportunity, transforming raw materials locally, creating jobs, and adding value in developing nations so their young people do not "take the illegal migration ways."

"It will be not us who is fighting only or alone against illegal migration. It will be a global fight, and we see how to organize this fight. I think it is something we can do together."

The administration has made clear through its own actions that it expects allies and institutions alike to share the burden on immigration enforcement. The firing of immigration judges who dismissed deportation cases sent an unmistakable signal about the standard Washington now demands.

Cost-cutting by the book

Sall's reform proposals extended to the operational guts of the UN bureaucracy. He endorsed reducing staff levels, noting that some reduction has already begun, and proposed relocating personnel from New York, which he called "a very expensive place," to existing UN offices in Nairobi and Bangkok.

He flagged the use of AI as a tool to consolidate the patchwork of software, procurement, and payment systems that different UN agencies currently run independently. With six official languages, the translation burden alone represents a cost that modern technology could shrink dramatically.

"I think it's time to optimize all this to have the same procurement system and the same payment system for all the organization wherever the agencies are. It should be the same one, same platform."

None of this is radical by private-sector standards. But inside the UN system, where budgets grow, mandates multiply, and headcounts rarely shrink, it amounts to a direct challenge to institutional culture.

The election ahead

The UN General Assembly is scheduled to elect the next secretary general this fall in September. Any candidate must first survive the veto power held by each of the five permanent Security Council members, the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom, before securing broader support from world leaders. The winner takes office in January for a five-year term, succeeding current Secretary General António Guterres.

Sall's candidacy carries a distinct advantage in that gauntlet: he claims personal relationships with the leaders of every P5 nation. Whether those relationships translate into the votes and veto restraint required to win remains an open question. Several other candidates are reportedly in the race, though they were not named.

During his recent Washington trip, Sall met with State Department and Trump administration officials. He expressed a desire to sit down with both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Ambassador Waltz, though whether those specific meetings took place was not confirmed.

The broader context of Trump's foreign policy, including the high-stakes negotiations over Iranian assets, suggests the administration is willing to engage with international frameworks when doing so serves American interests. A reform-minded secretary general who takes Washington's concerns seriously would fit that calculus.

What it means

Sall's endorsement of MUNGA does not guarantee American support for his candidacy. But it marks something worth noticing: a veteran African head of state, running for the most prominent post in multilateral diplomacy, has concluded that aligning with Trump's reform agenda is not a liability. It is a selling point.

For years, the UN's defenders have dismissed American calls for accountability as isolationism or hostility to international cooperation. Sall's interview punctures that narrative. He is not an American conservative. He is a former leader of a Francophone West African nation who chaired the African Union and co-led forums with Beijing. And he is saying, plainly, that the United States is right, the UN needs to be reformed, its costs need to be cut, its mandates need to be pruned, and its peacekeeping missions need to stop running on autopilot for half a century.

When even the candidates lining up to lead the institution admit the building is broken, it gets harder to pretend the people demanding repairs are the problem.