A year ago, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and US President Donald Trump openly admired one another; in recent months their relationship has sharply deteriorated. After J. D. Vance’s speech in early 2025, the US president had few allies in Europe to begin with but in the past months he has fallen out with them. This concerns not only German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, but also the right-wing politicians and parties that once saw Trump as an ideological ally. Here’s why Europeans now simply have no interest in being friends with Trump.
On June 17, Meloni and Trump met at the G7 summit in the French town of Évian-les-Bains. The smiles and jokes seemed to suggest that the recent rifts between the two leaders, born of Italy’s refusal to join the war against Iran, were behind them.
Two days later, however, Trump claimed that Meloni had supposedly “begged” him to pose for a photo together, and that he had agreed because he “felt sorry for her.” The Italian prime minister replied that this was Trump’s invention, advised him to mind his own business, and stressed that neither she nor Italy ever begs anyone.
The verbal duel continued on social media. Trump again recounted the story of the pleas for a joint photo and accused Meloni of failing to help the US in the war against Iran: “Now, after the United States defeated Iran militarily, she wants to be friends again in order to get her ‘numbers up.’ No thanks!!!”
On Instagram, Meloni responded that her popularity depends not on Trump but on her ability to defend Italy’s national interests.
How Meloni and Trump became friends
Such a barbed exchange may seem surprising given how the relationship between Giorgia Meloni and Donald Trump had developed before the war against Iran began.
Their contacts started long before Meloni became prime minister in the autumn of 2022. In September 2018, she hosted Trump adviser Steve Bannon in Rome at the annual festival of her Brothers of Italy party, then in opposition. Six months later she herself spoke at the American conservative conference CPAC, proud to be the only guest from Italy.
In January 2025, the Italian prime minister attended Trump’s inauguration, and four months later she said that for Italy, the relationship with the US was “the most important relationship we have.” Western media dubbed Meloni the Trump “whisperer,” and the US president himself described her as a “fantastic” woman who had “taken Europe by storm.”
In April last year, when relations between the US and the EU sharply worsened over Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on European imports, Meloni took on the role of transatlantic mediator. Her trip to the US and Vice President J. D. Vance’s return visit to Rome turned into a parade of mutual compliments. “Italy is the best ally of the US in Europe, but only as long as Meloni stays prime minister,” Trump declared, to which the Italian leader replied that together they could once again “make the West great.”
Trump clearly enjoyed Meloni’s company. When they met in October 2025 at the Peace Summit on Gaza in Egypt, Trump remarked: “In the United States, if you use the word ‘beautiful’ about a woman, it’s the end of your political career, but I’ll take the risk.” He then turned to Meloni: “You don’t mind being called beautiful, right? Because you are.”
What went wrong
Yet not everything between them went smoothly. In 2025, one of the US administration’s main grievances with Italy was that Rome spent too little on defense: in 2024, military spending amounted to 32 billion euros, or 1.49% of GDP, well below the 2% target NATO set back in 2006.
In 2025, defense spending rose to 2.01% of GDP. But, as the Italian research center Milex notes, this increase was achieved by reclassifying certain budget lines (for example, carabinieri pensions).
Meloni, meanwhile, took a firm stance on Ukraine. She consistently speaks in support of Kyiv, and the Italian authorities provide it with military aid whose volume exceeded 3 billion euros by the end of 2025. This contrasts with Trump’s policy: after returning to the White House, he halted free aid to Ukraine and repeatedly sought to extract concessions from Kyiv.
Washington also dislikes Rome’s resistance to US trade policy. Meloni backed the agreement reached last July between the US and the EU introducing 15% tariffs on European goods. But in January 2026, Trump promised to raise customs duties on countries that had helped Greenland strengthen its defense amid US attempts to seize the island. And in February, the US president introduced new 10% tariffs in response to the US Supreme Court ruling that the administration’s earlier tariffs were illegal. In both cases, Meloni called the US president’s actions a mistake.
Still, even while disagreeing with Trump’s policy, the Italian prime minister tried to speak as diplomatically as possible. In January, she justified the US president’s actions as “errors of understanding and communication” and stressed that she did not believe in a US use of military force in Greenland. The Italian press wrote that Meloni was behaving like a “tightrope walker,” careful not to displease Trump.
Then came the new war by the US and Israel against Iran. Meloni’s first reaction was evasive. On February 28, she contacted the leaders of the Gulf states and condemned Iran’s “unjustified strikes,” yet mentioned neither Trump nor Netanyahu. Ten days later, the Italian prime minister stressed that Rome did not intend to enter the war and stated that “the norms of international law are objectively being ignored,” but again neither condemned nor backed the US and Israeli bombings.
Gradually, however, EU countries, having recovered from the initial shock, began to oppose the actions of the US and Israel ever more firmly. Spain set the tone: on March 3 it barred US forces from using military bases on its territory and closed its airspace to combat aircraft heading to the Middle East; the next day Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez declared “no to war.”
Other European leaders followed by hardening their positions: France, Switzerland and Austria imposed bans on US aircraft overflying their territory. Moreover, EU countries did not heed Trump’s urgent demands to take part in reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
Meloni, too, began to change her tone. On March 20 she stated that Italy would not send its fleet to the Middle East, despite Trump’s insistence. A week later, when US bombers gave Italian authorities last-minute notice of plans to land at the Sigonella military base in Sicily, Defense Minister Crosetto refused. Meloni set out her cabinet’s definitive position on the Middle East on April 9, addressing the Senate: “Italy’s position in the Iranian crisis fully coincides with that of the key European countries.”
Why Meloni simply has no interest in drawing closer to Trump
Although Meloni never spoke out openly against Trump, choosing fairly vague formulations each time, her divergence from the US president had become obvious by early April. This was largely due to domestic politics.
On March 22–23, a referendum was held in Italy in which voters rejected the judicial reform proposed by the government. Meloni did not turn the vote into a popular confidence motion, but the referendum did not pass without a trace: the prime minister’s standing within the ruling coalition weakened somewhat, support for Brothers of Italy fell by the end of March from 28% to 26.7%, and approval of Meloni’s own performance from 44% to 40%.
Against this backdrop, the prime minister must respond sensitively to public sentiment — and in Italy, it is not on Trump’s side. Whereas a year ago two-thirds of Italians viewed his record negatively, by April 2026 their share had risen to 79%, according to a poll by the Italian agency YouTrend — and even among supporters of right-wing parties it stood at 76%.
Because of Trump, the Italian prime minister found herself in a difficult position. The orientation toward the White House she had emphasized from the first days of the new US administration proved incompatible with Trump’s chaotic and aggressive style, which steadily pushes away even his most loyal allies.
In April 2026, Meloni had to choose between Trump and her own voters. Here too she tried to minimize the conflict, asserting that despite the long-distance spat with the president, “[Italy’s] relations with the US remain strong.”
The June flare-up between the US president and the Italian prime minister followed the same pattern: an exchange of jabs, after which Meloni made clear that the quarrel did not affect bilateral relations. On June 23 she said she was “stunned” by Trump’s attacks and suggested they were tied to his desire to divert attention from the US–Iran negotiations. At the same time, she stressed that relations between Rome and Washington “have been developing well in recent weeks and months, on both the institutional and economic levels.”
In other words, the Italian prime minister continues to balance: on one hand taking account of Italians’ hostility — including her own voters’ — toward Trump, and on the other preserving ties with Washington. Judging by the results, she is managing rather well: according to a June poll by the Demopolis research institute, the share of Italians who trust the head of government rose over the past month from 38% to 40%.
Why the European right and Friedrich Merz are also against Trump
The split between Trump and Meloni reflects a broader trend among the European right: it is growing ever more critical of the US president.
In France, representatives of the far-right National Rally had already, back in winter, voiced skepticism about Trump’s attempts to acquire Greenland; and in April, amid the scandal over the pope, its former leader Marine Le Pen advised fellow party members to “keep their distance” from Trump. As a close associate of Le Pen noted in an interview with Politico, “we love our friends in Washington, but we don’t want them to tell us what to do.” The National Rally now sees Trump as an obstacle to its own “de-demonization” — the process that allows it to attract the votes of more moderate voters.
The Alternative for Germany underwent a similar evolution. In 2025, one of its leaders, Tino Chrupalla, who attended Trump’s inauguration in Washington, said that in the US “you feel optimism and hope in the president; the American people feel liberated.” Since then, however, the AfD too has grown disillusioned: the party condemned the war against Iran, and Chrupalla declared that Trump had gone from a “president of peace” to a “president of war.”
It is not only the far right turning away from Trump, but also more moderate politicians — for instance German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who earlier, like Meloni, had tried to build good relations with the US president. To that end, in June 2025 he had to sit through Trump musing that the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944 “was not a pleasant day for you [Germans].” It bore fruit: Trump praised the Merz cabinet’s policy on immigration and energy and called the German leader a “friend” who “does a fantastic job.”
Even after the start of the US-Israeli bombing of Iran, the German chancellor tried to maintain good relations with Trump. Visiting Washington in early March, he did not react to Trump’s threats to sever ties with Spain and spoke of the need for regime change in Tehran.
But as the conflict dragged on, Merz too began to shift his rhetoric. In mid-March he said that NATO was “a defensive alliance and should not take part in military interventions,” and he ruled out German naval participation in escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz.
In late April, Merz escalated further, asserting that the Iranians had proved stronger than expected and had “humiliated” the US. Trump’s response was not long in coming: the US president threatened to cut the US military contingent in Germany. He did not stop there: “The German chancellor would do better to devote more time to ending the Russian-Ukrainian war (at which he is utterly ineffective!) and to putting his crisis-stricken country in order […], and to get less in the way of those who are removing the Iranian nuclear threat and making the world, Germany included, safer!” the US president wrote.
Like Meloni, Merz chose not to escalate further and stressed that Germany continues to strengthen its military capability “for our common benefit and the strengthening of transatlantic ties.” But the reasons pushing Merz to distance himself from Washington have not disappeared.
First, Trump periodically continues to threaten Europe with tariffs, to which Germany is especially sensitive: the country’s economy has been in crisis for several years, and exports traditionally play an enormous role for it.
Second, the current US administration is in no hurry to fulfill the agreement, signed back in 2024 under Biden, on supplying Germany with “Tomahawk” and other medium-range missiles meant to shield the country from the threat of a hypothetical Russian missile strike.
Finally, third, according to polls, in early March 58% of Germans considered the launch of the bombing of Iran unjustified, and in April 79% had a negative view of Trump — a figure even higher in Germany than in France, Spain or the UK. Merz is surely taking this into account and will not go against voters’ mood at a time when his own disapproval rating is off the charts: in April, 76% of Germans disapproved of his performance as chancellor.
