Why Meloni Backstabbed Trump

By Roger L Simon

Remember the cute, clever young Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni?

She was the European head-of-state we liked, the one who steered the lost and wandering Joe Biden back to the G-7 group photo (June 13, 2024) and whatever reality was for our then-president.

After President Trump’s election, she had positive things to say about 47 and seemed to approve at least most of his policies, unlike the stodgy bureaucrats helming the rest of the NATO states, not to mention the EU.

She was also a strong supporter of Israel, which she described as a “vital” democracy and a “friend of Italy.”

It went so far that the Italian PM was being characterized in the European press as their version of MAGA. France’s Le Monde huffed: “Giorgia Meloni: Neo-fascist or far right? Why Italian PM’s tenure raises questions among political experts”.

But now, in case you missed it—in close imitation of Spain’s execrable Pedro Sanchez—Ms. Meloni has done a volte-face, a complete turn-around from her Trumpianism, and, in a fiery speech, has vilified the Iran War and denied the US landing rights for its planes on Italian airfields, as several other European countries have.

She further roundly condemned Israel and began to sound weirdly like a latter-day Benito Mussolini, who also shifted his position on Jews, initiating anti-Jewish racial laws in 1938. Well, to be fair, not quite that bad.

Nevertheless, our former heroine has joined the rest of Western Europe in the same equivocation and passivity in the face of Iranian terror that has led President Trump, with support from his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, to threaten, quite seriously, to leave NATO.

What’s going on?

Giovanni Giacalone—a senior analyst in Islamist extremism and terrorism at the Italian Team for Security, Terroristic Issues and Managing Emergencies-Catholic University of Milan—channels our own Tip O’Neill with an explanation. As with our former Speaker of the House, Giacalone tells us that for Meloni, as with too many politicians, high and low, “All Politics Is Local.”

He writes in “Is Meloni turning her back on the US and Israel over election fear?”:

“Why is the Meloni government suddenly moving towards harsher positions against the United States and Israel regarding the Iran war? Could it be because of the referendum defeat on the separation of judicial careers?

“Although the vote was ostensibly a technical matter, it was heavily exploited by the far-left, the pro-Palestinians and the Islamists, turning it into a referendum against her government. The result was a turnout of 59% and a 54% voting against the reform.

“Meloni said that the vote was not a political one but exclusively technical, and she may be right about that. However, her recent moves suggest that Meloni is far more concerned than she lets on about the far-left, pro-Palestinian positions, to the point of undermining positions that, more than ever, need to be held firm. Added to this are the government’s rather ambiguous positions toward the Iranian regime, with which the Italian government appears unwilling to engage.”

More “in the weeds” material on Italian government jockeying is at the link, but Giacalone’s “unwilling to engage” comment is the key, not only for Italy but for all of Western Europe.

You would think with Iran’s missiles hitting Diego Garcia 2500 miles off—enough to reach London, let alone Rome—they would be a bit more concerned for the safety of their people than their own electability. But national leaders react differently to stress. Emmanuel Macron is already leading his country in its traditional direction—backward.

Tip O’Neill’s old idea that “all politics is local,” witty as it was, has its limitations in our post-nuclear world of ICBMs with countless satellites revolving overhead, outer space already part of the battlefield. Meloni and the other European leaders undoubtedly understand this, but they’ve probably lived too long under a U.S. umbrella to really know what to do about it by themselves All the way back to the Marshall Plan, Daddy America has been taking care of them, first against the Soviet Union and more recently against an imperialistic Islam that has invaded their shores with immigrants to the extent that their countries have become barely recognizable. And now they have the growing possibility of Iranian missiles to contend with. With or without nuclear warheads, they are lethal.

No wonder they hate Donald Trump. He calls them out about this and has thrown the solution of Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in their laps.

They are finally meeting, along with the Gulf States, but without the US, ostensibly to open the Strait, but one wonders. France and Japan have basically opted out. One wonders too if, secretly or, in some cases, not so secretly, they hope the US and Israel will take care of these monsters anyway. Even many US Democrats probably feel the same way. But all are loath to admit it. That would mean they acquiesced to Big Bad Donald and his rather competent sidekicks in Eretz Israel.

And then they could lose an election. Not good. All politics is local after all.

First published in American Refugees