Trump Wants to Be Begged, Italy Does Not Beg

Donald Trump claimed on Italian television that Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni begged him for a photograph at the G7 summit and that he agreed only out of pity. Rome reacted sharply, the foreign minister canceled his trip to Washington, and Meloni replied that neither she nor Italy begs.

On Friday morning, in an interview with the Italian broadcaster La7, Trump was supposed to speak about Ukraine. Instead, he turned to Giorgia Meloni and offered his version of their encounter at the G7 summit. She was probably happy that he spoke with her, he said, and he did not even have to speak with her. She had begged him so much for a photograph that he normally would not have done it, but he felt sorry for her. In his version of events, Italy’s prime minister stood before him like a petitioner, and he, the generous one, granted her the favor out of pity.

The meeting was recorded. The two were seen speaking several times in Evian and at one point sitting together alone on a small sofa. La7, which drew the remarks from him, later aired them in an Italian voiceover rather than in the original English. So the begging exists in the retelling, not in the footage.

Rome did not let it pass. Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani abruptly canceled his trip to the United States scheduled for June 21 and 22 and called Trump’s remarks serious and insulting, both for Meloni and for all of Italy.

Meloni responded in a video, saying that some things deserve an immediate reply. Trump’s statements were completely fabricated, she said, and she was sincerely stunned. She did not know why the president of the United States behaved this way toward his own allies, and she added that it was not the first time. The only shame, she continued, was that he did not show the same determination toward the enemies of the West and the United States, whose leaders he instead treated with far greater leniency. But there was one thing he should remember: neither she nor Italy ever begs.

The dispute had a history. In April, Trump told Corriere della Sera that he resented Meloni for refusing to support the American Israeli war against Iran, which she considers unlawful, and at the time she remained silent. Earlier, she had already criticized him for attacking Pope Leo over his remarks on the Iran war, after which Trump accused her of lacking courage. By Friday, she had had enough of his boasting.

Italy’s Defense Minister Guido Crosetto also pushed back against Trump. He said he did not believe Meloni would ever beg anyone for a photograph, not even under pressure. But he could imagine how much it had cost her to set aside what Trump had said weeks earlier, in the interest of Italy and Europe, and of the West as a whole. Jokes of this kind help no one, he wrote, not the United States, not Italy, and not the alliance. State Secretary Giovanbattista Fazzolari, a close ally of Meloni within the Italian government, went further and said that whether through intention or inability, Trump was destroying the historic relationship between the United States and Europe. Journalist Antonello Guerrera put it more directly: between the two, all hell had broken loose.

The rupture undoes what only days earlier had looked like a thaw, two politicians from the right in close conversation on that shared sofa. Meloni was once among Trump’s most visible friends in Europe. She was the only European Union leader present at his 2025 inauguration, and she had understood herself as a bridge between Washington and Brussels. Over the Iran war, which she considers unlawful, and over his position on Ukraine, which Italy strongly supports, that bridge had become fragile, along with disputes over tariffs and his unwavering support for Israel in the war in Gaza. Now the bridge seems to have had enough of being walked across.

And so it shows what vanity drives people to do. It cannot tolerate an equal, it must turn every encounter into a court, with itself on the throne and the other person on their knees. And so a man invents begging that no camera captured and grants, in his own telling, a favor nobody requested out of a pity nobody needed. He wanted to be begged, and in order to be begged, he had to imagine it. It may have cost him one of his last close, sometimes closer and sometimes more distant, political allies in Europe. And she answered him with a single sentence: she does not beg.