The Trump–Meloni Dust-Up Was Pure ‘Euroslopulism’

Trump has left an unusually large amount of drama in his wake after last week’s G7 conference in Europe. The festivities seem to have culminated in a dust-up between the president and Italy’s prime minister—and one-time Trump fangirl—Giorgia Meloni. The origins of the spat are still a bit mysterious, but it appears Meloni was trying to play the “outraged girlboss” with Trump in the hope that he would recommit to Europe’s failing war in Ukraine. Trump responded by going to the Italian media and saying that Meloni was “begging” him to take a photo with him and that he “felt bad” for her. Meloni then had a very public and very histrionic meltdown in a video she appears to have self-recorded for her X account.

While Americans might be inclined toward a hot-tempered Italian woman, they would be mistaken. In fact, there has been a very longstanding attempt to astroturf a pro-Ukraine, right-wing movement in Europe in the hope that it could be used to get the Trump administration to reengage with the war that so obsesses Brussels. Meloni is at the heart of this attempt. Prior to becoming prime minister, Meloni held genuinely contrarian views that were very much in keeping with many of the attitudes of the American populist right. But since she was elected, Meloni has become another Brussels clone—albeit with the occasional nod to the idea that there might be too many immigrants in Europe. 

Why this Damascene conversion? It is likely that the Italian elite sat Meloni down, explained to her that Italy is bankrupt and is only held together because the European Central Bank prints money to suppress Italian bond yields, and warned that if she made any moves that the Brussels elite did not like she would trigger a Liz Truss-style bond market meltdown and be chased from office. The deal that Meloni appears to have struck with the Brussels elite and their agents in Rome is that she is not allowed to take any genuinely heterodox positions on matters of substance, but that she can deploy populist-conservative aesthetics in her government. This is probably the origin of Euroslopulism.

Since then, Euroslopulism seems to have evolved. Several accounts on X have appeared out of nowhere that seek to convince their followers that both hardcore European federalism and the Ukraine war are, in fact, “edgy” and “based” positions for young conservatives to take. These accounts appear to have been boosted after the Hungarian election in April. Viktor Orbán’s government was a genuine threat to Euroslopulism because it insisted on governing on matters of substance, rather than wearing a populist skinsuit while pushing the Brussels party line. Needless to say, before he was ejected from office Orbán and Meloni did not like one another. It looks like there was a plan in place to give Euroslopulism a hard push after Orbán was taken out of the picture.