Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 0.8% (9 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 1.4% (16 hits)
• Availability Heuristic - 7.4% (82 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 9% (100 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 0%
• Overconfidence Bias - 7.1% (79 hits)
• Framing Effect - 1.4% (15 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0%
• Status Quo Bias - 0%
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 0%
• Pessimism Bias - 12.4% (138 hits)

Article text

Trump’s Spat With Meloni Shows He Can’t Even Keep Far Right Leaders on His Side

In mid-June, Donald Trump announced, apropos of nothing beyond stroking his own ego, that he had only agreed to be photographed with the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at the G7 summit because she “begged me” to do it, and that he had agreed because he “felt sorry” for her.

This may have been Trump’s usual misogynistic, self-aggrandizing patter.

Or it may have been an expression of pent-up frustration with a European leader shaped in Trump’s same nationalistic, anti-immigrant mold who has increasingly aligned herself with EU positions in a series of growing spats with the Trump administration.

Meloni was the only EU leader invited to Trump’s 2025 inauguration.

But, since then, the relationship between the two leaders has very publicly soured.

Trump initially gravitated to Meloni due to their shared right-wing politics: Her Brothers of Italy party is in some ways an heir to Mussolini’s Fascist Party, and it generally allies itself with hard-right populist parties and movements in Europe, including France’s National Rally party led by Marine Le Pen.

But when Trump announced, early in 2026, that he wanted to take over Greenland, and then threatened to slap tariffs on countries that rushed forces to the ice-bound island to deter a potential U.S. landing, Meloni called his actions a “mistake.”

And while she has opposed European Union approaches to the climate crisis, she has also made it clear in her speeches that — unlike the U.S. leader — she doesn’t reject the basic science of global warming.

When Trump went to war with Iran — without consulting his European allies and inexplicably without planning for what would happen if Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz — Meloni joined other European countries in denying the U.S. access to jointly controlled military assets for the purpose of launching bombing raids.

Polls in Italy showed this was in line with public opinion — nearly 80 percent of Italians surveyed in April disapproved of the Trump administration’s handling of the situation.

More recently, after NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte announced that hundreds of U.S. flights had, in fact, taken off from Italian bases during the fighting, Meloni’s administration quickly contradicted him, stating that these flights were only for “technical and logistical” purposes and were not used to directly drop bombs.

Meanwhile, when Trump and his henchmen inexplicably picked a fight with Pope Leo XIV and lambasted him for his opposition to Trump’s policies on immigration, war, and other issues, Meloni announced that the attacks on the papacy were “unacceptable.”

Trump responded by publicly insulting Meloni, saying she was the one who was unacceptable, and then accusing her of being weak and lacking courage because she didn’t support the U.S.’s war on Iran.

Meloni hasn’t taken Trump’s insults lying down.

In fact, while many European leaders initially stayed silent in the face of the U.S. president’s tirades and personal affronts, Meloni has repeatedly pushed back.

Her actions appear to have paved the way for European leaders to feel comfortable criticizing Trump, including outgoing U.K.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

Each of these leaders has responded more forcefully to Trump’s juvenile insults and personal mockery in the past couple of months.

The events at the G7 summit seem to have been the last straw for Meloni, who apparently decided that it was no longer worth the humiliation required to preserve a decent relationship with the U.S. president.

When Trump announced that she had “begged” him to be in photographs with her, the Italian prime minister immediately took to X to post a video saying that he had fabricated this entire scenario, that she was stunned by his words, and that she could not understand why he repeatedly ridiculed America’s allies while cozying up to hostile countries and leaders.

“Italy and I do not beg,” she concluded, and then promptly cancelled her foreign minister’s upcoming visit to D.C.

What has happened to the relationship between Trump and Meloni speaks to a much larger issue.

Trump is toxic across the ideological spectrum in Europe, as populations reel from the MAGA leader’s continued assault on their economies via tariffs, on their political project via repeated attacks on the EU, and on their security via repeated efforts to undermine NATO and to signal to Russia that the U.S. might not respond militarily to an attack on Eastern Europe.

A recent survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations found that only 11 percent of those polled in 15 European countries view the U.S. under Trump as a steady ally.

Beyond Europe, Trump’s United States is almost equally unpopular.

Last week, the Pew Research Center released a poll conducted across 36 countries around the globe.

It found that on average only 23 percent of each country’s respondents trusted Trump’s global leadership.

The declines in trust that the poll detailed toward the U.S. were extraordinary.

In 2022, 83 percent of Swedish respondents saw the U.S. as a reliable partner.

In 2026, that number had declined to 31 percent.

In Italy it went from 73 percent to 34 percent.

In the U.K., which has, since World War II, historically seen itself as having a “special relationship” with the U.S., it declined from 82 percent to 49 percent.

In South Korea, it went from 83 percent to 57 percent.

And in Japan from 76 percent to 59 percent.

The recent Pew poll also detailed collapsing confidence in the U.S.’s respect for personal freedoms and in the U.S. taking other countries’ interests into consideration when shaping its own policies and military posture.

In short, since Trump’s second inauguration 18 months ago, a vast amount of global goodwill and trust toward the United States, built up over decades of carefully stitched-together alliances, has been squandered.

In the short term, the U.S., viewed increasingly by much of the rest of the world as a rogue superpower, may be able to muddle through by falling back on all of the excess power it has accumulated during those decades; in the long run, however, U.S. actions that alienate allies and undermine global confidence in the country will leave it increasingly friendless.

Trump’s recent spat with Meloni over the G7 photo op is indicative of this wider issue.

It turns out that when a superpower is led by a nasty, petty figure who thinks only of his own aggrandizement — and when U.S. policy goals are subjugated to the whims of this soulless man and his opportunistic inner circle — much of the world ends up seeking friends elsewhere.