This past January, Giorgia Meloni reached the height of her praise for Donald Trump by saying she hoped he would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She was his greatest champion in Europe despite his attacks on the EU, the imposition of severe trade tariffs, his threats to invade Greenland and violations of international law in Venezuela and Iran. None of this produced any real benefit for Italy, but Meloni presented herself as the privileged interlocutor with the White House, the bridge between the U.S. and the European Union.
However, beginning in April the romance began to sour, and it has now just been broken off. It marks the collapse of the entire foreign-policy approach of the Italian prime minister over the past two years. After the fall of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, it also means the loss of the White House’s last ally in the EU. Meloni now awaits with some anxiety the next face-to-face meeting, on July 7 and 8 at the NATO summit in Ankara.
It was in April when Trump attacked her for the first time, saying she lacked courage and that he was “disappointed” in her after her refusal to take part in an attack on Iran. The break culminated abruptly this week with another volley of aggressive remarks against Meloni, and a forceful response from the latter. The far-right leader and Italy have already been placed, in Trump’s eyes, in the pack of traitorous and “terrible” countries, like Spain.
This time the U.S. president mocked Meloni for having “begged” to take a photo with him at the G-7 summit and said he agreed out of pity. The prime minister replied with a social media video in which she said Italy “does not beg” and that Trump had made the whole story up.
Italian diplomacy and Meloni herself have tried in recent days to tone down the severity of the clash, but nothing will be the same again. “Foreign policy is not Temptation Island,” she summed up on Tuesday, referring to memes that depicted her and Trump as a troubled reality-show couple. In reality, this crisis reveals a change in Meloni’s game that Trump, who demands unconditional obedience, has not accepted.
Beyond Trump’s unpleasant manners, his outburst is not entirely incomprehensible. The U.S. president has grown tired of the ambiguity of a leader who for two years has tried to keep a balancing act with one foot in the U.S. and the other in the EU. Until the moment of truth arrived. In reality, Italy is putting the brakes on defense spending and has followed the European line against collaborating militarily to keep the Strait of Hormuz open.
The issue of defense spending is revealing, because a year ago, at the NATO summit, Spain was the only country that openly refused to raise that allocation to 5% by 2035. Italy backed the increase, even though it has the highest public debt levels in Europe at 138%, and cannot perform miracles: in reality it is dragging its feet on defense spending. After reaching the 2% target in 2025, like Spain, the projection for this year is to reach 2.8%, but that remains to be seen, as budgetary calculations leave it in the air depending on how the economy performs. The increase is, moreover, largely due to an accounting shuffle that assigns to Defense items already planned for other functions, such as law enforcement. Italy had counted on this year exiting a EU infringement procedure for violation of the Stability Pact (which requires member states to bring their deficit-to-GDP ratio below the 3% threshold), but its calculations went wrong and it still has a deficit above 3%.
There’s more. Italy, unlike Spain (which contributed €100 million), has not joined the PURL plan to buy U.S. weapons destined for Ukraine, and has also stayed out of the EU’s SAFE loan program to invest in armament. At the end of 2025 it requested €14.9 billion, but has since pulled back. It may ultimately request only €5 billion, and the EU, also annoyed by Italy’s ambiguity, has just given it a one-month ultimatum to clarify its position.
The reasons, beyond economics, are political. In the right-wing coalition of the Italian government there are tensions over defense spending, and Meloni knows it is unpopular when people can’t make ends meet. And there are general elections in 2027. The energy crisis caused by the war in Iran has sharpened the dilemma.
In May, the Italian prime minister wrote to the European Commission asking for an exception to the Stability Pact to cover measures against rising fuel, electricity and gas costs. “In the absence of this necessary political coherence, it would be very difficult for the government to explain to the public a possible recourse to the SAFE program,” she explained.
But above all, Meloni has understood that her submissive relationship with Trump was already costing her votes. That is why in her reply video to the real estate tycoon she played the patriotic card, casting herself as a leader defending national pride. The whole episode did her good: her number of social media followers then shot up by a million.
The Italian government had already made subtle moves to disconnect with the White House: the newspaper Corriere della Sera published on March 31, via a leak, that Italy had denied the use of its Sigonella base in Sicily to U.S. bombers flying to Iran. The Italian government already wanted to appear uncompromising with its ally.
The blow of the referendum
The reason is what had happened a week earlier: Meloni had suffered a defeat in a crucial referendum to change the organization of the judicial system, a measure the government had sold as one of its major reforms and believed it had won. She took it as a warning from a public tired of always saying yes to Trump and opposed to her support for Israel and the offensive in Gaza.
Last week the Italian government experienced what it saw as a low blow, and perceived all kinds of conspiracies: the remarks by Mark Rutte, NATO secretary general, in which he defended European support for the U.S. on Iran and held Italy up as an example. He said Italy had allowed its bases to be used 500 times by U.S. planes. Officials in Rome do not believe it was an innocent comment, but rather a way for Rutte to create problems for Meloni at home in order to win over Trump, precisely by pointing out her contradictions. The opposition immediately demanded explanations and the government clarified that there had been only about 200 permissions and always of a logistical nature, not for direct involvement in the attacks. NATO later corroborated this.
However, the true trigger that began the rupture was Trump’s attack on Pope Leo XIV, who had criticized the bombings in Iran. For any Italian prime minister the Vatican is a very delicate red line. On April 14, Meloni took several hours to react; she knew it was a decisive step. She tried to manage in the morning with a vague note of solidarity with the Pope, but after criticism from the opposition she finally had to speak more forcefully at 6.00 pm. She called Trump’s words “unacceptable.” And on that same day the Italian government announced it would not renew its military cooperation agreement with Israel on defense, in force since 2005. The Republican leader’s attack on Meloni came shortly later.
Two months of silence followed, until last week the two leaders finally met at the G-7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France. There was a certain stage tension in the Italian delegation: the media were told everything had gone wonderfully, but then a video emerged showing a strained atmosphere. “You abandoned me,” Trump reproached Meloni. The storm then passed, but three days later he went back at it with the same formula as before: an Italian journalist called his cell phone and, without warning, attacked Meloni.
The Italian government acted surprised. According to U.S. media, the cause of this latest outburst is a video that went viral in the U.S. showing Meloni gesturing angrily in front of Trump. It gave the impression she was scolding him. She has not since clarified what she was saying: “I have read several reconstructions of the alleged viral videos in which my attitude may have seemed a bit assertive. (…) I cannot say whether they might be true, but I do not want to continue fueling this confrontation.”
For the MAGA movement she is already a traitor. One of its main ideologues, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, has been very harsh with her: “She used to be fantastic but now she has become a complete globalist. She played the EU game because she needed the money, and the NATO game as well,” he told the newspaper La Repubblica. “Frankly, I don’t think anything she says is relevant, because she has no economic or military resources to back it up. I no longer take her seriously, and no one in the U.S. does.”
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