New York, 22 September 2026
President Donald Trump will spend Tuesday addressing the United Nations General Assembly and holding a tightly packed series of meetings with allied and regional leaders in New York, according to the White House timetable now circulating in Washington. A United States lobbying firm that has campaigned against Nigerian President Bola Tinubu used the release of that programme to claim that Abuja had failed, after what it said was a nine million dollar effort, to secure any encounter with the American president.
The published sequence begins at 9.55am, when Mr Trump delivers remarks to the General Assembly. At 10.40am he is due to take part in a trilateral signing with the prime ministers of Denmark and Greenland. The White House has previewed that event as a security arrangement intended to expand the American presence in the Danish territory. At 11.45am he holds a bilateral meeting with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. At 12.30pm he meets the Prime Minister of Japan.
At 12.45pm the First Lady is scheduled to deliver remarks on expanding the Fostering the Future Together initiative. Mr Trump then returns to bilateral diplomacy at 1.15pm with the President of Ukraine. At 2.15pm he takes part in a Shield of the Americas event, the administration’s Western Hemisphere forum on cartels and organised crime. At 2.45pm he holds a multilateral meeting with the Gulf Cooperation Council. In the evening he attends a United Nations leaders reception at 7.15pm and, at 7.40pm, a pull aside meeting with the Acting President of Venezuela.
Von Batten Montague York, a Washington policy advisory and lobbying firm retained in connection with Nigerian opposition politics, posted the timetable on Tuesday morning and said it was a shame that, after spending nine million dollars, President Tinubu and the Nigerian presidency had been beaten by its principal, Dr Karl Von Batten. The firm recommended that Nigerian Vice President Kashim Shettima pay a further nine million dollars and try to sneak in for a selfie. It added that Mr Tinubu, whom it described as a man alleged to have been instrumental in smuggling heroin into the United States, had no right to be in the same room or city as the President of the United States.
The firm has for months pressed American officials over a 1993 civil forfeiture case in Illinois in which four hundred and sixty thousand dollars held in an account in Mr Tinubu’s name was forfeited to the United States as alleged proceeds of narcotics trafficking or money laundering. Mr Tinubu was not charged or convicted. He has long denied any criminal role and has said the matter was a civil settlement that did not amount to an admission of guilt. Recent filings in a Freedom of Information Act case have recorded that the Federal Bureau of Investigation compiled records in furtherance of an investigation of multiple individuals for drug trafficking crimes and that a court had already determined there was an official acknowledgement of an investigation of Bola Tinubu. Those records remain partly withheld.
Separate reporting in Nigeria has linked a nine million dollar Washington contract, filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act through a different firm acting for the Office of the National Security Adviser, to a broader effort to improve Abuja’s standing in the United States. Von Batten Montague York has treated that sum as money spent in pursuit of a Trump meeting and an implied blessing ahead of Nigeria’s 2027 election. The White House list released for Tuesday contains no bilateral session with Mr Tinubu. Nigeria is listed among speakers in the General Assembly debate on Wednesday, not among the leaders granted formal time with Mr Trump on Tuesday.
The firm has stressed in other posts that it does not speak for Mr Trump or the United States government and that decisions rest with American officials. Its campaign sits inside a sharp contest over Nigerian politics, American records from the early 1990s, and who in Washington will be seen to confer legitimacy on the next presidential race in Africa’s most populous country. For Tuesday in New York the official programme is nevertheless clear. The American president will speak to the world body, sign with Denmark and Greenland, see Britain, Japan, Ukraine and the Gulf states, take part in the Shield of the Americas gathering, and close the night with a Venezuelan pull aside. President Tinubu is not on that list.
By John James
