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In mid-June, Donald Trump announced, apropos of nothing beyond stroking his own ego, that he had only agreed to be photographed with the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at the G7 summit because she “begged me” to do it, and that he had agreed because he “felt sorry” for her.

This may have been Trump’s usual misogynistic, self-aggrandizing patter. Or it may have been an expression of pent-up frustration with a European leader shaped in Trump’s same nationalistic, anti-immigrant mold who has increasingly aligned herself with EU positions in a series of growing spats with the Trump administration.

Meloni was the only EU leader invited to Trump’s 2025 inauguration. But, since then, the relationship between the two leaders has very publicly soured.

Trump initially gravitated to Meloni due to their shared right-wing politics: Her Brothers of Italy party is in some ways an heir to Mussolini’s Fascist Party, and it generally allies itself with hard-right populist parties and movements in Europe, including France’s National Rally party led by Marine Le Pen. But when Trump announced, early in 2026, that he wanted to take over Greenland, and then threatened to slap tariffs on countries that rushed forces to the ice-bound island to deter a potential U.S. landing, Meloni called his actions a “mistake.” And while she has opposed European Union approaches to the climate crisis, she has also made it clear in her speeches that — unlike the U.S. leader — she doesn’t reject the basic science of global warming.

When Trump went to war with Iran — without consulting his European allies and inexplicably without planning for what would happen if Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz — Meloni joined other European countries in denying the U.S. access to jointly controlled military assets for the purpose of launching bombing raids. Polls in Italy showed this was in line with public opinion — nearly 80 percent of Italians surveyed in April disapproved of the Trump administration’s handling of the situation.

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More recently, after NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte announced that hundreds of U.S. flights had, in fact, taken off from Italian bases during the fighting, Meloni’s administration quickly contradicted him, stating that these flights were only for “technical and logistical” purposes and were not used to directly drop bombs.

Meanwhile, when Trump and his........

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