After presenting herself as a bridge between U.S. President Donald Trump and Europe, hard-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is suddenly at the forefront of the continent’s pushback against the U.S. leader following an extraordinary war of words between the two on social media.
It is a remarkable shift for Meloni, the only European head of government to attend Trump’s inauguration last year at the president’s invitation. The two share similar ultraconservative agendas, vowing to combat illegal immigration and defend what they see as the West’s Christian roots. Meloni had long touted her personal and political closeness to Trump, despite a growing list of differences between the United States and its European allies—on everything from tariffs to the U.S. push to acquire Greenland and the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran, which has sent global energy prices through the roof.
The spat has implications far beyond Italy, delivering a blow to the prospects of a far-right alliance spanning both sides of the Atlantic. It might also reshape political dynamics within the European Union by pushing Meloni closer to Brussels.
The row started in June, when Trump told an Italian journalist that Meloni had “begged” him to take a picture with her at a G-7 summit in France, to which she responded that “Italy and I never beg.”
The next day, Trump repeated his claim while also lambasting Italy for its reluctance to grant the United States full use of its military bases for the U.S. air campaign against Iran and suggesting that Meloni is slipping in opinion polls. She fired back that, with regard to her popularity, “being your friend certainly has not helped it. … I suggest you focus on yours.”
The spat is widely seen as a turning point for Meloni’s on the international stage.
“The incident perfectly illustrates the failure of a strategy that Meloni openly pursued throughout her years in government: positioning herself as a broker and mediator between Europe and the White House,” said Francesco Vittonetto, a researcher on the far right at Griffith University in Australia.
Meloni worked hard to carve out such a role for herself, visiting Trump on multiple occasions over the past year and a half. Since being reelected in 2024, Trump has repeatedly praised Meloni as a “fantastic woman” and a “very successful politician.” A few months after his inauguration, amid tense trade negotiations between European leaders and Washington, Meloni scored a diplomatic win by inviting U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to a trilateral summit in Rome, which Meloni said she hoped would mark “a new beginning” in trans-Atlantic relations.
In recent months, however, ties between Washington and Rome have become increasingly strained. In April, Meloni publicly rebuked Trump over his criticism of Pope Leo XIV, who had spoken out against the war in the Middle East. Trump then accused Meloni of not doing enough to help in the conflict: “I’m shocked at her. I thought she had courage, but I was wrong,” he told Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
After that episode, “Meloni sought to patch things up, but it didn’t work,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a professor of political science at Luiss University in Rome. “Now, she has been skillful to seize the opportunity and distance herself from Trump, perhaps definitively.”
While Meloni reportedly urged her ministers in recent days to avoid escalating tensions with Washington, it is difficult to imagine relations returning to normal anytime soon. Party officials at every level have hardly minced words about the spat. Trump’s attack was “shameful, absurd, and made him look ridiculous,” said Alessia Ambrosi a member of Parliament from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party. Meloni “answered the way she had to” when faced with Trump’s “gibberish,” said Giuseppe Manganiello, a Brothers of Italy city councilor in Pinerolo, a town of 35,000 in the country’s northwest.
In recent years, a budding international alliance of far-right movements has seen prominent figures from the United States and Europe gather at political events on both sides of the Atlantic. In early 2025, nationalist leaders from all over Europe hailed Trump’s reelection at a “Make Europe Great Again” rally in Madrid. This March, Trump kicked off an ultraconservative conference in Budapest with a video endorsing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban ahead of the country’s elections, which he ended up losing.
But that front appears to be increasingly fragile, with Trump infuriating nationalists far beyond Italy. In recent months, leaders from far-right parties including France’s National Rally, Germany’s Alternative for Germany, and Britain’s Reform UK have all slammed the White House over its Greenland ambitions and the Iran war.
According to Javier Carbonell, an analyst at the European Policy Centre think tank in Brussels, Trump alienated European right-wingers with his bullying approach to trade and the Greenland issue, and with what Europeans largely perceive as his ongoing assault on their pride. “This is the problem with Trump: Putting America First means that you are second,” Carbonell said.
The latest spat may push Meloni closer to Brussels. After spending much of her political career lashing out at the EU, since becoming prime minister, Meloni has sought to strike a delicate balance in her dealings with the bloc. She has pursued a restrained fiscal approach and cultivated a good relationship with the European Commission, but also clashed with the EU over its green transition policies, which she largely rejects, and most recently over tight budget rules, which make it hard for the Italian government to tackle the energy crisis sparked by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
“Meloni has already taken Brothers of Italy closer to Europe,” D’Alimonte said, “and this falling out with Trump will only reinforce her ‘Europeanization.’”
According to Carbonell, however, this shift is unlikely to significantly reinforce the EU’s hand when dealing with Trump, as Meloni, for all her much-touted affinity with the U.S president, was already prioritizing national and European interests before their recent falling out. On Greenland, for example, even if her government refrained from the more hawkish tone struck by other countries, she did sign a strongly worded statement alongside some other European leaders in January vowing to defend the principle of territorial integrity.
Meloni’s approach has not gone unnoticed in Trump’s MAGA movement. In an interview with Italian daily Repubblica shortly after the latest row broke out, former White House strategist Steve Bannon lambasted her for becoming a “total globalist” who “played the European Union’s game.”
But while the Trump-Meloni clash could be the last nail in the coffin of an already faltering trans-Atlantic partnership, it may also be a boon for Meloni at home. The past few months have been hard for the Italian leader. She lost a key referendum on judicial reform in March, her first major defeat since taking office; her budget-tightening efforts have been jeopardized by the inflationary flare-up caused by the war in the Middle East, with her government forced to spend generously to curtail the rise of prices at the pump; and a newly founded ultraconservative party, National Future, is trying to siphon away her most radical supporters. Against this backdrop, her closeness to Trump—whom barely 15 percent of Italians approve of—became a liability.
“This incident may have positive domestic consequences for Meloni: She can play the usual, easy card of national pride, of defending the national interest against anyone, even somebody who was always said to be her friend,” said Vittonetto, of Griffith University.
The Meloni-Trump alignment revolved around standard far-right talking points, such as limiting immigration and fighting so-called woke ideology, according to Vittonetto. “But Meloni failed to translate that into a functioning strategic alliance,” he said.
