{"id":272,"date":"2026-07-08T20:11:33","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T20:11:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=272"},"modified":"2026-07-08T20:11:33","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T20:11:33","slug":"trump-picked-a-fight-with-italys-giorgia-meloni-its-part-of-a-larger-pattern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=272","title":{"rendered":"Trump picked a fight with Italy\u2019s Giorgia Meloni. It\u2019s part of a larger pattern."},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

President Donald Trump is contending with quite a lot on the world stage right now. Europe and NATO are increasingly self-reliant, there\u2019s a quagmire in the Strait of Hormuz as the Middle East realigns without the United States, and the African continent is turning to China for economic development. Yet as the U.S. increasingly goes it alone and loses credibility, its commander in chief insists on projecting his feelings onto a timeworn target of his: women.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more Trump administration dangles counterterrorism funding in exchange for voter suppression<\/a><\/p>\n

The latest recipient\u00a0 of Trump\u2019s sexist ire is Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a conservative leader he once praised as a \u201cbeautiful young woman\u201d and who was the only European leader to attend Trump\u2019s second inauguration. She fell from his good graces quickly when she defended Pope Leo XIV from his attacks, something any leader in Italy would need to do to ensure their political survival. The spat has continued, with Trump at one point recently posting a photo of himself and Meloni with the caption \u201crestraining order needed\u201d ahead of the NATO conference in Turkey.<\/p>\n

Given his track record, the sexism itself should not come as a surprise, but Trump appears to reserve a special type of denigration for women who are leaders of foreign countries. Perhaps it is because protocol requires female heads of state to be treated as peers and equals; perhaps it is because the women leaders he has targeted are, in many cases, popular with their people in a way Trump isn\u2019t. Armchair psychology aside, though, the pattern of his contempt for women leaders is long-standing.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

In many instances it seems Trump cannot even be bothered to refer to women leaders he takes aim at by their titles or names, frequently using \u201cthis woman\u201d or \u201cthis person\u201d as an epithet.<\/p>\n

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel was selected as Time magazine\u2019s person of the year in 2015, Trump tweeted about being ignored as \u201cthe favorite\u201d for \u201cthe person who is ruining Germany.\u201d During a 2016 rally in Iowa, when Germany had agreed to accept Syrian refugees seeking asylum, Trump blamed the woman in charge: \u201cThe German people are going to riot \u2026 end up overthrowing this woman.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Trump used a campaign rally in Minnesota to claim that during the Covid-19 epidemic, \u201cthere was a big surge in New Zealand\u201d under Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern,\u00a0despite all evidence pointing to the contrary: that New Zealand under her leadership had one of the lowest case rates in the world.<\/p>\n

According to the reporting of veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, Trump will often\u00a0\u201cfawn over authoritarian strongmen\u201d like Russia\u2019s Vladimir Putin and Turkey\u2019s Recep Tayyip Erdogan,\u00a0but can be \u201cnear-sadistic\u201d in his secure phone calls with women foreign leaders \u2014 alarming his national security advisers that relations with allies would be disrupted as a result. Trump\u2019s \u201cmost vicious attacks \u2026 were aimed at women heads of state,\u201d Bernstein wrote in a 2020 report that cited classified documents and records detailing the president\u2019s official interactions while in his first presidential term.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more A horrific NFL story shows brain damage\u2019s terrible toll<\/a><\/p>\n

In classic Trump rhetoric,\u00a0the president\u00a0also often defaults to the male pronoun in press remarks. When asked to respond to comments made by the leaders of Venezuela and Ireland, he consistently responded using male pronouns, making comments like \u201cthe Irish president, he is lucky I exist\u201d and, regarding Venezuela, \u201cthe relationship with the president is great, we get along with him really well.\u201d (The respective presidents of Ireland and Venezuela, Catherine Connolly and Delcy Rodr\u00edguez, are both women.)<\/p>\n

For women in power, as with any role in society, there\u2019s no way to win this fight. While Hillary Clinton gamely avoided Trump following her around on the debate stage in 2015, she later regretted not turning around and telling him to back off. Merkel took Trump\u2019s berating her \u201clike water off a duck\u2019s back,\u201d even when he called her \u201cstupid\u201d to her face. Theresa May, as prime minister of the United Kingdom, is said to have become \u201cflustered and nervous\u201d when Trump called her \u201ca fool\u201d for her handling of Brexit and immigration. In each of these instances, Trump thrived in his comfortable role as bully, while women bore the consequences of being targets of his criticism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As it is to all women working in national security and in leadership, Trump\u2019s sexism is familiar to me. Regardless of the executive titles I\u2019ve earned in places ranging from the White House to academia, or my years of experience as a diplomat, I continually have to prove my credibility to male peers. At one point, a television producer told me point-blank: \u201cYou just don\u2019t look like a national security expert.\u201d It gets easier over time to deflect and ignore such microaggressions, like Clinton and Merkel have done.<\/p>\n

But perhaps the quips of a younger generation of leaders \u2014 women who were not taught to suck it up and carry on when men behaved badly \u2014 will be more effective in managing Trump. The record is clear that, whether for a man or woman, being in Trump\u2019s good graces only lasts until he finds something or someone else who will benefit him more.\u00a0<\/p>\n

New Zealand\u2019s Ardern had some success in brushing Trump off and retorting back to him publicly; Meloni started doing the same, and Trump took a milder tone this week. Of course he didn\u2019t use her name or title, but he did call her \u00a0\u201ca nice person.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more MaddowBlog<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The president reserves a special type of denigration for women who are leaders of foreign countries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":271,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump picked a fight with Italy\u2019s Giorgia Meloni. It\u2019s part of a larger pattern. - Long Distance Movers USA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=272\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump picked a fight with Italy\u2019s Giorgia Meloni. 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