President Donald Trump has turned on one of his top allies in Europe after she slammed his rant against Pope Leo as “unacceptable.”
Trump, 79, has railed against Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni for daring to say that he was wrong to criticize Leo for speaking against needless wars and for promoting peace.
Just as he did on Monday to the influencer Riley Gaines, who criticized Trump for posting an AI-generated image depicting him as Jesus Christ, the president quickly turned on Meloni, a so-called “Trump whisperer.”
“Do Italians like the fact that your prime minister isn’t giving us any help to get oil?” Trump asked a Corriere della Sera reporter, referring to Meloni. “Do people like her? I can’t imagine. I’m shocked by her. I thought she was brave, but I was wrong.”
The Italian newspaper writes that Trump blurted out his attack against Meloni—a right-wing populist who was the only European leader invited to Trump’s second inauguration—before its journalist could ask a single question over the phone.
Trump later added, “She’s no longer the same person, and Italy will never be the same country again. Immigration is killing Italy and all of Europe.”
The White House did not respond to a request for additional comment.
The immigration-obsessed Trump said Meloni, 49, should run her country like the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán, who just embarrassingly lost his re-election bid despite Vice President JD Vance being dispatched to Budapest to stump for him.
“He was a friend of mine,” Trump said of Orbán. “It wasn’t my election, but he was my friend, a good man. He did a good job on immigration. He didn’t let people come and ruin his country like Italy did.”
Meloni had been one of Trump’s top allies in Europe. Unlike many of her colleagues, she has largely refrained from criticizing Trump or his administration, even positioning herself as a mediator between Europe and Washington over Trump’s crackpot desire to seize Greenland.
However, rifts between the two have emerged since Trump decided to launch strikes against Iran and effectively brought shipping traffic to a halt through the Strait of Hormuz. Italy is especially dependent on oil that passes through the strait and has barred U.S. warplanes from launching strikes on Iran after taking off from bases on Italian soil.
It was not soaring energy prices that finally got Meloni to directly criticize Trump. It was his absurd attacks on the pope, whom he called “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy.” Trump added in a rant on Sunday that the first American pontiff “should get his act together.”
Meloni, like 75 percent of Italy, is Roman Catholic.
“I find President Trump’s remarks about the Holy Father unacceptable,” she said Monday. “The pope is the head of the Catholic Church, and it is right and natural for him to call for peace and condemn all forms of war.”
Trump, who previously called Meloni a “fantastic woman” and “great prime minister” during her trips to the White House and Mar-a-Lago, had his own attack on Meloni ready to fire when he was reached by the Corriere reporter.
“She is the one who is unacceptable, because she doesn’t care if Iran has a nuclear weapon, and it would blow up Italy in two minutes if it could,” he said.
