Trump-Meloni Relationship Deteriorates After Fresh Public Clash| National Catholic Register
The political relationship between President Donald Trump and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni suffered another blow last week, the latest in ongoing tensions spurred in part by Trump’s criticism of Pope Leo XIV earlier this year.
On June 18, Trump told the U.S. correspondent for Italian broadcaster LA7 that Meloni had “begged” for a picture with him, and that he “felt sorry” for her. The Italian establishment and media reacted with almost unanimous indignation. Minister of Foreign Affairs Antonio Tajani canceled his imminent mission to the U.S.; a source very close to the prime minister even dismissed Trump’s remark as a “delirium.”
Meloni herself released a short video where she explained, barely containing her outrage, that the American president’s narrative was false — and that neither she nor the country would ever beg anyone. A similar reaction was repeated the following day: Meloni invited Trump to focus on his own loss of popularity after he accused her of trying to shore up her dwindling support with a picture in his company.
Meloni has been highly regarded by Republicans in the U.S., her views appearing to be in alignment with the political party that elected Trump on issues like immigration, gender politics and traditional family values. The tensions between Meloni and Trump are therefore seemingly at odds with her reputation among U.S. conservatives, calling into question whether she might face the same fate as the newly ousted Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s former prime minister known for his conservative values.
This wasn’t the first time Trump and Meloni fought publicly. As recently as May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had gone on an official visit to Rome to smooth things over with both the Italian government and the Vatican, after Trump had criticized the Pope and then, in turn, Meloni, who had rallied to Leo’s defense. On that occasion, the president had stated that Meloni’s support of the Pope had left him “shocked” and that he had been wrong in believing she was a brave leader.
It is not entirely clear what might have weakened a relationship that used to be thriving. Trump, however, has a point in saying that Meloni is going through a crisis of public support. In fact, the tensions with the U.S. are just one notable episode in a wider series of setbacks for the Italian prime minister.
Her rough patch started in March, when she suffered a resounding defeat at a referendum. In late 2025, the Italian Parliament had passed a constitutional amendment reforming career paths for magistrates and some mechanisms of judicial overview. However, the right-wing coalition supporting Meloni’s government failed to attract support from opposition parties, which triggered the referendum Meloni lost. This defeat was particularly damning for her record, since constitutional matters had been a core element in her 2022 electoral manifesto.
That incident speaks to a broader narrative, shared on both sides of the political spectrum, whereby Meloni’s four-year term in office might have been extraordinarily long by Italian standards, but hasn’t been particularly fruitful. Recently, high-ranking members of Fratelli d’Italia have defended the government’s dubious record on immigration by spinning an audacious narrative: the number of resident aliens has indeed increased, but legally so, which means Meloni’s cabinet has successfully brought the phenomenon within the perimeter of legality. Moderate critics observe this is no different to what happened in Spain, where the hard-left government fast tracked the legal naturalization of about 500,000 people. Radical critics, such as MEP Roberto Vannacci, point out that even racial laws were legal within the relevant juridical system — which didn’t make them one bit less monstrous.
Vannacci’s attacks speak to Meloni’s struggle to control her turbulent allies. Earlier this year, the former special-forces general defected from Salvini’s League, which had granted him a platform for election to the European Parliament in 2024, and formed a party of his own named Futuro Nazionale (“National Future”). Vannacci is now promoting a hardcore nationalist agenda that in many ways resembles Meloni’s own political outlook before she took office. His rapid surge in the polls has emboldened him to the point that he is threatening Meloni to run on his own at the next general election, unless she resumes a radically conservative course. Such a scenario could prove fatal to the Italian right, especially if opposition parties struck a comprehensive electoral pact.
At the same time, the Berlusconi family, who still controls Forza Italia, Meloni’s more moderate partner, is veering leftward and pushing for an assisted dying bill which Parliament will soon start debating. Some argue Marina Berlusconi’s maneuvers are reminiscent of her late father’s entrance into the political arena, in the early 1990s, and could lay the groundwork for a wide centrist coalition — without Meloni — after the next election.
Rather than confronting this threat to life-friendly legislation head-on, the prime minister’s party is trying to placate Forza Italia. They have introduced a bill proposal to the Italian Senate that welcomes some pro-choice requests on the removal of life support for the terminally ill. This might tarnish Meloni’s otherwise positive record in matters of family policy, including legislation against surrogacy and LGBT-friendly modules in state education.
International matters have hardly been a consolation for Meloni. The defeat of former Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán in mid-April deprived her of a historical ally — someone with whom she had run the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group at the European Parliament. Orbán’s successor Péter Magyar has shown some openness toward his Italian colleague and even visited her last month, just before Rubio. Concurrently, her complex interactions with the U.S. leadership have left Meloni in a lose-lose position with Italian public opinion. Both Italian citizens and the mainstream media have been highly critical of the American intervention in Iran and of its impact on energy costs and international trade; having been attacked by someone she once paraded as a close ally has made her look both weak and misguided in her choice of friends.
Equally, the rewards of this recent turbulence might be of little consequence for Meloni. Yes, she did enjoy widespread solidarity from across the political spectrum after Trump’s attacks. Yes, her meeting with Rubio in May probably helped, since the Secretary of State is perceived as more of a moderate than Trump or Vance. Both forms of respite, however, have proved short-lived — partly because the cross-party solidarity was mostly tactical, and partly because Trump’s offence undermined medium-term hopes to stabilize relations with the U.S.
Giulio Andreotti — a committed U.S. ally, and something of an Italian Henry Kissinger and a predecessor of Meloni — famously stated that successful politics is contingent on a bearable ratio between friends and foes. Meloni needs to restore that ratio in the “friends” direction, including and beyond President Trump, if she doesn’t want to become the next Orbán. In fact, if she fails to secure a strong end to her term in office, the civilizational alignment Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Rubio advocated at the last two Munich Security Conferences will be jeopardized. Any viable political alternatives to her would end up aligning Italy even more strongly with the secular, globalist agenda the European Union promotes — something she allowed sporadically and only out of political calculus.
If, on the contrary, she deploys all her cunning and channels her quiet fury into policy, rather than into Instagram — and if she capitalizes on the European Parliament’s recent approval of remigration for illegal aliens and positions herself once again as an unapologetic defender of life and human dignity — she can hope to win a second mandate at next year’s general election, and shake off the risk of a return to that deadly stagnation Italy is so used to.
European civilization would greatly benefit from that, and Italy, for good or bad, would look less like a country one needs to feel sorry for.
