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As Trump scraps with Meloni, his envoy to Italy is at sea 49%
By Motoko Rich0% New York Times Company0%
7/20/2026, 2:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 23 faulty reasoning types, including Ambiguity (Equivocation), Halo Effect, and Hasty Generalization, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 17.7% saturation with 227 hits. Analysis detected 1,358 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,286 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 50.4% and a BS Rank of 49% (9,646 of 18,900 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 51.00% of the article peer group.
ABOARD A SUPERYACHT — In recent weeks, while President Donald Trump was locked in an unusually testy standoff with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, the United States ambassador to Rome was on a monthslong tour of Italy’s coastline aboard his $450 million superyacht.
As the leaders’ spat escalated over the Independence Day weekend, the ambassador, Tilman J.
Fertitta, moored the 384-foot, seven-deck yacht off Palermo in Sicily to host a phalanx of Sicilian dignitaries.
The visitors could gawk at the boat’s pools, hot tubs, spa that offers facials and pedicures, movie screening room, putting green, multiple bars and two helicopters.
They sipped wine, nibbled antipasti and posed for the ambassador’s Instagram feed — shoeless, as footwear is forbidden on the yacht — in rooms decorated with fluorescent artwork, varnished wood, crystal sculptures and chandeliers.
Trump was about to roast Meloni, posting on social media that he needed to take out a “restraining order” against her, two weeks after he claimed she had “begged” him for a photo at a gathering of world leaders.
Fertitta, 69, seemed unconcerned by the political fracas, telling me that weekend on the yacht that he had talked to Trump and Meloni “in the last couple of weeks.”
“I listened to ’em both,” he said, speaking in his heavy Texas twang.
“And they both make sense to me.”
The president is “upset with Giorgia Meloni,” Fertitta conceded in the 90-minute interview as he spread his arms across the back of a large couch and rested his white-socked feet on a coffee table.
“And so he lets the world know it.”
“It doesn’t affect my relationship or the American-Italian relationship,” he added.
There are those who feel Fertitta is not practicing much diplomacy during the worst public feud between American and Italian leaders in living memory.
Trump is furious at Italy’s decision not to support the war in Iran, and Meloni has lashed out at Trump, saying he picked a fight with the pope.
“It sounds like something that comes from a movie, from an Italian comedy, like the guy who wants to cruise around the coast,” said Michele Masneri, a novelist and columnist at Il Foglio, an independent newspaper.
“The job of an American ambassador, I’d say, is like 60% being a high-scale tourist,” Masneri added.
His sailing has also attracted criticism for its cost to the Italian state.
An opposition lawmaker has called for a government inquiry into how much Italy is spending on providing a police escort to secure the yacht.
The Italian government declined to comment.
Fertitta is a Houston-based billionaire best known as the chairman, CEO and sole owner of Landry’s Inc., one of the largest restaurant and hospitality conglomerates in the United States — and the owner of both the Golden Nugget casinos and Houston Rockets.
“How many people ever get to come on a boat like this?”
Fertitta said of Boardwalk, the sixth yacht that he has given that name.
“People love successful people.
Everybody wants to be successful.
And anybody who says they don’t is just lying to you.”
Mariangela Zappia, Italy’s former ambassador to the United States, said she saw value in Fertitta’s approach because the yacht tour relegated the personal agita between the two leaders to “the background.”
Fertitta, she said, can “demonstrate village by village, port by port, that this relationship is in fact very lively and thriving.”
Fertitta was not specific about how often he spoke to Italian officials, but Antonio Tajani, Italy’s foreign minister, said in a statement that the ambassador had helped “when we need to understand something.”
A bipartisan political donor
Even among politically appointed ambassadors, who are often selected in part as a reward for campaign donations, Fertitta stands out.
Based on Forbes’ billionaire rankings, which estimate his worth at $11.1 billion, he is by far the richest envoy appointed by the Trump administration.
When he first arrived in Rome last summer, Fertitta said, he spent about $3 million of his own money renovating the private living spaces at Villa Taverna, the official residence of the U.S. ambassador.
Although he identifies as conservative, he is a political chameleon who has donated to both major parties, sometimes during the same electoral cycle.
Recently, he has generally given more to Republicans, but he hosted fundraisers at his Houston home in the 1990s for President Bill Clinton and calls Sen.
Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., a friend.
In the run-up to the 2024 race, he donated $13,200 to President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign and gave roughly $500,000 to Trump’s political action committees, according to public filings.
He explained that rather than hewing to strict partisan affiliations, he is “a loyal American.”
In a nod to the flexibility of his politics, Fertitta said that Italian officials were “smart enough to know” that they would not necessarily have to deal with Trump forever.
“Just because one president and one administration wants to do things one way, that doesn’t mean that 2 1/2 years from now another president isn’t going to do things different,” he said.
Indeed, Fertitta first started to muse about the ambassadorship to Italy while raising money for Clinton, he said.
At the time, though, Fertitta was too busy trying to expand his business, he said.
Several of his associates in Houston said that even this time around, they did not expect him to actually want the job.
John Whitmire, the Democratic mayor of Houston, called Fertitta “as big a name as we’ve got in Houston in terms of networking” and said he was surprised Fertitta wanted to leave his business empire for the job in Rome.
Now, though, “I think he’s enjoying the importance of the job of the ambassador,” Whitmire said.
The sailor-ambassador
Fertitta’s maritime itinerary is sometimes determined as much by whim as by diplomacy, scrambling the Italian police escorts that accompany him.
While sailing toward Sicily, he and his wife, Lauren Fertitta, spotted the village of Acciaroli in Campania.
“I said, Look at this cute little town,” Fertitta recalled.
“Let’s stop there.”
The mayor of Acciaroli, Stefano Pisani, said the consulate in Naples gave him about 15 minutes to prepare for the ambassador’s impromptu visit.
Despite the short notice, the mayor was delighted to help, taking the ambassador on a three-hour tour and hosting him for a meal.
Such visits can feel like the arrival of a small expeditionary force.
On July 4, with more notice, Boardwalk anchored outside the storied port of Cefalù, Sicily.
Fertitta’s entourage motored in on two skiffs, including his wife, his youngest daughter, two of his adult sons and a group of friends, Italian security agents and yacht staff members.
Curious bystanders, standing knee-deep in the water to snap photos, did not seem to know who Fertitta was, although one man raised his fist in the air and said, “Viva Trump!”
Dressed in a linen shirt and formal sneakers, Fertitta joined the Cefalù mayor for a walk through the city, where his great-grandfather lived before setting sail in 1887 for the United States.
Back on the yacht, I asked him if he was having fun in his job.
He looked puzzled.
“I don’t really look at anything as fun,” he said.
Still, he added, “It’s a very enjoyable job.”
In fact, he said, he would consider returning to Italy as ambassador for a second term, even under a different administration.
“It wouldn’t matter to me who the president was,” he said.
Still, he said, he had “no desire” to run for elected office himself.
“Because there’s no job that I could hold and I could be on this boat,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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