The Giorgian Rebellion

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, June 19, 2026

 

Add this to the many surprises of this era: One of the biggest stories in politics is a diplomatic spat between America and … Italy?

 

Nothing against my ancestral homeland, but Italy isn’t a top-tier partner. Plus, the curve for grading fascinating diplomatic developments is steep under the current kakistocracy. Multiple longtime allies have had to hastily prepare for war with the United States over the past 16 months, remember. Rome bickering with the White House should barely rate by comparison.

 

Especially since, until this morning, it seemed like relations between the U.S. and Italy were on the mend. The president had a falling out earlier this year with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni over her opposition to war with Iran and his criticism of Pope Leo XIV, but the two chatted at this week’s G7 summit and appeared to have smoothed things over.

 

Then he said this to an Italian news outlet (per the outlet’s translation of his remarks): “She’s probably happy I talked to her. I didn’t have to talk to her. …She begged me to take a picture with her. She wanted a picture with me so ​badly. I wouldn’t have taken it, but I felt sorry for her.”

 

That does sound like him. Casually demeaning someone because he bears them a grudge is as instinctive to Donald Trump as applying bronzer or bloviating about “strength.” There’s no exception for fellow heads of state, either—particularly heads of state from Europe, whom he’s always viewed as subjects more than friends. They’re used to it.

 

And so there was nothing very newsworthy about what he said. What was newsworthy was Italy’s response.

 

The Italian foreign minister immediately canceled a trip he was planning to the United States, citing Trump’s “serious and offensive words” about Meloni. An undersecretary to the prime minister wondered whether it was “out ⁠of intent or ineptitude” that the president had once again sabotaged relations with Europe. “With his inappropriate outbursts, he has managed no easy feat, to make the United States unpopular across the entire European continent,” he observed.

 

Then Meloni spoke up—on video, staring directly into the camera. “Donald Trump’s statements are completely made up,” she claimed, according to Reuters’ translation of her comments. “I am frankly astonished. I don’t ‌know why ⁠the president of the United States behaves like this towards his allies. It is not the first time, moreover.”

 

“I can only say it is disappointing that he does not show the same determination with the enemies of the West and of the United States, whose leaders he instead treats with far greater indulgence,” she continued. “There is one thing he should remember: Neither I nor Italy ever beg.”

 

The clip caused a sensation on social media and then in global political media, as Meloni surely knew it would. But why?

 

Indignity.

 

After 10 years of degrading bootlicking obeisance by the president’s many courtiers, it was startling to see someone who needs a relationship with Trump assert her dignity against his insults.

 

Democrats are able to do that because they don’t depend on his favor. Independent-minded conservatives like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney were able to do it because they knew they were breaking with him durably by holding him accountable for his crimes. But those who need to stay on his good side—like, say, every Republican official in the country—are doomed to follow the Ted Cruz career arc between 2016 and 2021, broadly speaking.

 

That is, if Trump insults your wife, you find a way to let it slide and salute when he asks you to help him stage a coup.

 

It’s not just right-wing politicians, though. A new book reveals that the president mocked Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg for sucking up to him after he was reelected in 2024. “Think of where these guys were in 2016,” he reportedly told Elon Musk. “They hated me. They were doing everything they could to knock me down. And look at them now.”

 

Look at them now. A simple way to understand the Trump era is as a grand renunciation of dignity by most of the American leadership class. Nearly everyone who had business with the president proved willing to be bought or bullied into accommodation. Nearly everyone turned out to value their grubby lust for power, status, or wealth over their own self-respect, not to mention the constitutional order.

 

Foreign leaders were forced to reconcile themselves to that, making them unwilling accomplices to the grand renunciation. If you’re a European head of state, desperate to hold NATO together and keep the White House no worse than neutral in Russia’s war on Ukraine, the cowardice of the American leadership class left you with few allies within the U.S. who’d be willing to support you in resisting Trump.

 

And so the prudent, if pathetic, thing to do when an imperious postliberal goblin insulted you was to bite your tongue. Not Meloni, though. She’s had enough.

 

Whether her gender played a role in today’s incident is hard to say. Being a creep toward the opposite sex isn’t out of character for the president, you may have heard, but it’s also true that he doesn’t exempt men from his attempts to belittle those who have crossed him. Ask his secretary of state.

 

Or ask Benjamin Netanyahu, whose obedience Trump has repeatedly boasted about in humiliating terms when discussing the war. The prime minister “will do whatever I want him to do,” the president declared last month. Netanyahu “won’t have any choice” but to accept a U.S. peace deal with Iran, Trump said more recently, because “I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.” You don’t need to be a woman for him to demean you gratuitously.

 

Although I’m sure it helps.

 

I can certainly believe that stereotypes around gender drove Meloni to respond more aggressively than a male counterpart would have. Because women leaders are forever under suspicion of not being “tough” enough, letting a slight go unanswered risks doing them greater political damage. A direct-to-camera rebuke, functionally addressing Trump directly, is about as forceful a display of toughness as was possible under the circumstances.

 

But I can also believe that women, for whatever reason, are more likely to feel a dignified revulsion at Trump’s domineering boorishness than men are. Voting demographics in the U.S. point that way. So does the fact that prominent Republican women were responsible for most of the trouble he faced on the right after January 6. Even within the MAGA-fied clown car we know as the House Republican conference, it was populist women who led the way in defying him on matters like the Epstein files.

 

The central absurdity of the modern right is that it’s populated by self-styled tough guys who lionize masculinity yet who spend most of their time submissively licking the feet of a fat orange clown. The fairer sex simply lacks the same compulsion to demonstrate “manliness,” perhaps.

 

If you find all of that unpersuasive, though, there’s another possible reason for Meloni’s boldness. To borrow a phrase from the president, the United States increasingly lacks the cards in world affairs.

 

Fewer cards.

 

It can’t be a coincidence that she chose to confront him days after the White House signed a peace deal with Iran that everyone without a Fox News contract regards as a national humiliation.

 

And it’s probably not an accident that Meloni is less worried about causing a permanent rupture between Europe and the United States at a moment when Ukraine has gained the initiative against Russia.

 

America wouldn’t subdue the Iranians with military force, couldn’t subdue the Ukrainians by ending military aid, and plainly can’t be trusted to faithfully honor its foreign commitments under this administration. We don’t have the cards, or at least not as many as we used to.

 

So what do U.S. allies realistically stand to lose at this point by being a bit more assertive about their dignity?

 

Will the president punish them by dragging them into a new trade war? That’s unlikely, at least in the near term. Even if his tariff authority hadn’t been weakened by the Supreme Court, he can’t afford another drag on the economy before the midterms. He all but admitted on Wednesday that he surrendered to the Iranians in the name of bringing down gas prices and averting a global recession. He’s not going to turn around now and slap a new tax on American voters by escalating with the EU over trade.

 

Might Trump punish Meloni and Europe for their insolence by siding with Russia against Ukraine? Also unlikely. As much as he’d like to see Vladimir Putin prove to Americans that authoritarianism at home means dominance abroad, the tide of war is running in the opposite direction. There’s nothing the president hates more than associating himself with losers, and it ain’t the Ukrainians who look like losers lately.

 

Ukraine’s success after losing American aid has surely convinced Europeans that the continent is more capable of defending itself without U.S. help than it assumed—especially after watching Iranian drones confound the White House in the Strait of Hormuz. For all its firepower, the U.S. military suddenly seems dangerously behind the curve in modern warfare. Meloni must know it.

 

Then there’s NATO.

 

Trump could retaliate against “disloyal” allies like her by trying to withdraw from the alliance or declaring that he won’t honor Article 5 if Europe is attacked. But let’s be real: Everyone assumes he’s going to do that anyway. The lesson of the Iran conflict is that the president will fight a war if and only if he’s convinced that victory can be achieved quickly and easily, with next to no American casualties. Once he concludes that it can’t, he wants out at practically any cost.

 

That means he’s not going to risk war with Russia—or China, for that matter, in case things get froggy in Taiwan. Whether Giorgia Meloni is disrespectful to him doesn’t matter a bit to that, so why shouldn’t she answer his own disrespect accordingly?

 

Europeans need only look at Israel’s predicament to grasp the peril of relying too heavily on Trump’s America.

 

The Jewish state began the conflict with Iran believing that the president shared its commitment to regime change. It discovered that that commitment depended entirely on the Iranians not inflicting meaningful political costs on him, something they did when they closed the strait. Israelis now find themselves as a captive party to a deal that will send many billions of dollars to their archenemy, will do nothing to constrain Iran’s missile capabilities and terror proxies, and will incentivize Trump and J.D. Vance to resent Israel’s attempts to defend itself from provocations.

 

The Jewish state has learned the same hard lesson that officials in the president’s party have learned and re-learned since 2016. When your survival depends on Trump, he owns you. And when your interests conflict with his, his take priority.

 

Maybe Meloni reflected on that and concluded that Europe is better off having a Ukraine-style relationship with Trumpist America than an Israel-style one. Allies, sure—but no longer so dependent on the U.S. that displeasing the president might create an existential threat to one’s national security. An arm’s-length ally doesn’t pick needless fights with the White House, but neither does Meloni feel obliged to bite her tongue when the White House picks a needless fight with her.

 

You can have your dignity or you can enjoy Trump’s favor, but it’s one or the other. As he turns 80, with his job approval less than half that number and his pretensions to “strength” in ashes after Iran, his favor just isn’t worth what it used to be. Woe to a bully who’s lost his ability to intimidate, who no longer has “the cards,” as there’s no one more likely to get popped in the nose. This morning Meloni popped him.

 

Giving the right a bad name.

 

I wonder if her politics are contributing to her annoyance at him.

 

She isn’t some pomo leftist of the sort Americans typically imagine European leaders to be. She’s a right-wing nationalist, like the president himself. She promotes Christian values and the traditional family model, and presumably she’d like to see that vision make inroads across the continent.

 

Trump is killing her chances. The more right-wing politics becomes associated with fat orange clownery, the less European voters will want any part of it.

 

Far-right European leaders have been running away from the president for months, in fact. Anger at the Iran war’s impact on energy costs left them little choice, but Trump’s behavior is also partly to blame for scaring the proverbial horses. “Not only erratic but also extremely unsteady and constantly shifting” is how Jordan Bardella, the head of France’s leading nationalist party and a potential candidate for president next year, described the president’s antics recently.

 

We need to “allow powers that are a bit bewildered by the United States—and who no longer understand the comings and goings of the American president, particularly on defense—to be able to find in the French defense industry a backup option,” Bardella added. To be clear, he said that before Trump turned on a dime from insisting that Iran’s missile arsenal must be destroyed to insisting that Iran must be allowed to have missiles.

 

The incident with Meloni is simply another bewildering episode involving the American president that can only hurt the United States and make the global right he unofficially leads look petty, tactless, impetuous, and stupid. Maybe Meloni’s irritation is less a product of her pride being wounded than her resentment at being saddled with a prominent ideological ally who’s discrediting their mutual cause. She’s doing what she can to re-dignify it.

 

I’m tempted to say that Republicans in Congress should meditate on that and draw a lesson, but we’re waaaaaaay past the point of salvaging the respectability of right-wing politics in the U.S. So enjoy the Giorgian rebellion abroad. It’s the closest to dignity from a conservative official that you and I will witness in 2026.