FRENEMIES

Trump Rips Female Ally He Thirsted After for Rejecting Him

After lashing out at NATO and renewing his claim that the U.S. should control Greenland, the president took aim at Italy’s right-wing prime minister.

Donald Trump has escalated his public spat with Italy’s prime minister, complaining she “just wasn’t there for us” as he sought to justify a bizarre post suggesting that she needed a restraining order.

After landing in Turkey ahead of the NATO summit in Ankara, Trump continued to test the 77-year-old alliance with members—even renewing his claim that Greenland “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark.”

He also hit out at NATO members more broadly, including Italy and its right-wing leader Giorgia Meloni.

Weeks after claiming Meloni had “begged” him for a photo at the G7 summit in France last month, Trump on Sunday reposted a meme of Meloni looking up at him, as though she was eager for his attention.

“Restraining Order Needed,” the caption said.

Asked by reporters on Tuesday to explain the post, Trump insisted Meloni was “a nice person,” but their relationship took a turn after she refused to throw her country’s weight behind his war in Iran.

“I didn’t put a heavy press on her, but she refused to get involved,” he lamented, sitting alongside Turkey president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

“So it soured my relationship with her a little bit. But I like her, I think she’s a nice person, actually. But I think she made a mistake… She just wasn’t there for us, and I wasn’t happy about that.”

The swipe marks the latest twist in an increasingly strange relationship between two leaders who were once held up as ideological allies.

Meloni, one of Europe’s most prominent right-wing leaders, has maintained cordial relations with Trump since his return to office.

She visited the White House earlier this year, has praised his efforts to end the war in Ukraine, and has largely avoided publicly criticizing his administration.

But Italy stopped well short of endorsing Trump’s decision to launch military strikes against Iran, instead pushing for diplomacy alongside other European allies rather than publicly backing the U.S. operation.

Trump’s frustration spilled over after the G7 summit when he claimed that Meloni “begged” him to pose for a photo.

Within minutes, Meloni took to her socials with a strong denial and a reminder to the president that “Italy and I do not beg.” Soon after, Italy’s foreign minister Antonio Tajani pulled out of a planned trip to Washington, raging that Trump had offended all of Italy.

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The Swamp

As revealed by The Daily Beast’s newsletter The Swamp, the diplomatic spat also left administration officials and global diplomats seething privately after a U.S.-Italy business and innovation forum scheduled for Miami collapsed in the wake of the feud.

The June 22 event was set to be held at the prestigious Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio slated to headline alongside a roster of corporate heavyweights, government officials and diplomats from both countries.

“The president couldn’t keep his mouth shut,” one exasperated source complained, summing up the mood inside parts of the administration.

The latest post about Meloni came as he also took aim at America’s broader alliance with Europe.

Discussing NATO, Trump questioned the value of allies who failed to support U.S. military action against Iran.

“We’ve invested trillions of dollars in NATO, and I say that’s fine, but you’d think that they would be very willing to do something to help us, and they really didn’t,” he said.

“We didn’t need any help at all, and in a way, I was testing people, I was testing to see whether or not they’d be there, because I’ve long said that we helped them, but I’m not sure that they’d be there for us,” he added.

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Farrah TomazinPolitical Correspondent

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