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