ANKARA: US President Donald Trump appeared to have turned the page on a diplomatic dispute with Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Tuesday as he landed in Ankara for a key NATO summit.
The couple fell out late last month after Trump claimed in statements to an Italian television channel that Meloni had “begged” him to take a photo together at the G7 summit and that he only agreed because he “felt sorry for her.”
Meloni angrily denied the claim, calling it “made up”, prompting Trump to double down, and his comments opened a rare personal rift with one of Europe’s most prominent right-wing leaders.
The dispute sparked an undiplomatic back-and-forth that lasted until Sunday, when he posted a doctored image on his Truth Social platform showing Meloni looking at him as if she adored him in a post accompanied by the words, “Restraining order needed.”
But on Tuesday he appeared to take a more conciliatory tone.
“Actually, I think he is a good person,” he said at a joint news conference with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“We had a bad relationship, friends. It got a little bad because she refused to help us… She refused to get involved in the Strait of Hormuz,” he said, reiterating his disappointment at Europe’s reluctance to play a role in the US-Israel war against Iran.
“I like him, I think he’s actually a good person, but I think he made a mistake…he just wasn’t there for us and that didn’t make me happy,” she said.
Trump has been highly critical of European NATO countries ahead of the Ankara meeting, and his allies have tried to showcase rising defense spending in hopes of placating him.
