Meloni pushes back at Trump as G7 feud strains ties with Italy

Giorgia Meloni has stopped absorbing Donald Trump’s barbs and started answering them in public, turning a dispute over a G7 lunch in Evian-les-Bains into a broader test of Italy’s place in Washington’s orbit. What began as a claim about a photo has widened into a diplomatic rift touching NATO, U.S. military access in Italy, and the politics of a nationalist alliance that once looked unusually sturdy.

After the June 16 Group of Seven summit in France, Trump said on television that Meloni had “begged” him for a photo. Meloni denied it, then on June 19 posted a video calling his account “completely fabricated.” The next day she escalated further, telling Trump to “focus on your own popularity” after he accused her of trying to raise her domestic standing by repairing ties with Washington. For a leader who had previously let his jabs pass without a direct public answer, the shift was striking: Meloni was no longer treating the insults as background noise, but as a challenge to her authority at home and abroad.

The exchange quickly spilled into official business. Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani canceled a planned trip to the United States, and the Miami business and scientific forum he was due to attend was also scrapped. Tajani called Trump’s remarks “serious and offensive” toward Meloni and toward Italy, a sign that Rome is now willing to turn a social-media clash into a diplomatic cost. The quarrel is also bound up with a larger dispute over Italy’s refusal to join the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. Rome has insisted that any use of its bases is governed by long-standing agreements and that Italy remains a sovereign nation.

The politics behind the pushback matter. Meloni won the September 2022 election and became prime minister in October 2022 at the head of a right-wing coalition that took about 44% of the vote, making her Italy’s first female prime minister and placing her in the country’s most right-wing government since World War II. Her Brothers of Italy party was still polling around 28% in recent Italian averages in June 2026, a cushion that gives her room to answer Trump without appearing weak. But the confrontation also exposes how much the nationalist-populist affinity between Rome and Washington has thinned. For NATO, the risk is less a single insult than a deeper erosion of trust between a U.S. president and a government that hosts American military interests. For Europe, it is another reminder that the relationship with Washington now runs through domestic political pressures as much as through alliance discipline.