What’s behind Trump’s jabs at Italian PM Giorgia Meloni

President Donald Trump is contending with quite a lot on the world stage right now. Europe and NATO are increasingly self-reliant, there’s 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. 

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The latest recipient  of Trump’s sexist ire is Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a conservative leader he once praised as a “beautiful young woman” and who was the only European leader to attend Trump’s 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 “restraining order needed” ahead of the NATO conference in Turkey.

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’t. Armchair psychology aside, though, the pattern of his contempt for women leaders is long-standing.  

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 “this woman” or “this person” as an epithet.

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel was selected as Time magazine’s person of the year in 2015, Trump tweeted about being ignored as “the favorite” for “the person who is ruining Germany.” During a 2016 rally in Iowa, when Germany had agreed to accept Syrian refugees seeking asylum, Trump blamed the woman in charge: “The German people are going to riot … end up overthrowing this woman.” 

Trump used a campaign rally in Minnesota to claim that during the Covid-19 epidemic, “there was a big surge in New Zealand” under Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary: that New Zealand under her leadership had one of the lowest case rates in the world.

According to the reporting of veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, Trump will often “fawn over authoritarian strongmen” like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but can be “near-sadistic” in his secure phone calls with women foreign leaders — alarming his national security advisers that relations with allies would be disrupted as a result. Trump’s “most vicious attacks … were aimed at women heads of state,” Bernstein wrote in a 2020 report that cited classified documents and records detailing the president’s official interactions while in his first presidential term.