TOI correspondent from Washington: In the high-stakes theater of global diplomacy, world leaders are accustomed to dealing with classified cables, complicated negotiations, and delicate treaties. What they are generally unprepared for is a US President who treats international summits like an episode of The Apprentice.The latest geopolitical casualty of Donald Trump’s bare-knuckle approach to bilateral ties is Italian PM Giorgia Meloni, once a staunch European ally and the only major EU leader to attend his 2025 inauguration. Turns out that bellesima is fuming after the MAGA boss claimed in an interview to Italian media that she had begged him to take a selfie with her at the recent G7 summit and he had obliged because he felt sorry for her.Meloni’s response was blunt and brutal. In a video she released on social media, she called Trump’s claim fabricated and said, “There is one thing he should remember: neither I nor Italy ever beg.” The Italian government closed ranks, with Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani canceling his scheduled trip to Miami, calling the President’s boast “serious and offensive.”“Donald Trump’s statements are completely made up, I’m frankly appalled. I don’t know why the President of the US behaves this way with his own allies; after all, it’s not the first time it’s happened. I can only say it’s a shame that he doesn’t show the same determination with the enemies of the West, with the enemies of the US, with leaderships toward which he instead proves much more accommodating,” Meloni said in the video.Indeed, diplomatic chroniclers say fabricating quotes and anecdotes about foreign counterparts has become something of a signature presidential hobby. Meloni is just merely the latest entry in an illustrative ledger of global leaders who have found themselves caught in Trump’s narrative spin-cycle.France’s Emmanuel Macron has been at the receiving end of US presidential embellishment, including jibes on Macrons’ purported marital discord; Germany’s Friedrich Merz has been told to focus on “fixing his broken country” before criticizing Washington’s middle east policy; and Spain’s Pedro Sanchez was told U. S could simply use the country’s bases without informing Madrid.Trump also embarrassed Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi by invoking Pearl Harbor to illustrate his idea of surprise attacks. Even Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman once became part of a memorable Trump rally performance in which the President claimed foreign leaders were effectively “kissing my ass” in pursuit of favorable treatment.But perhaps Trump’s most legendary creative exercise involves India and Pakistan, where he claims his personal intervention by threatening both nations with a 200% tariff averted a catastrophic nuclear war in which a gazillion people would have died. The real comedy, however, lay in his arithmetic, where his memory of the aerial dogfight between the two sides underwent a massive inflationary spike over months, going up in July 2025 from five jets shot down to seven in August, eight in November, to 11 by February 2026.While India’s PM Modi chose a strategy of stone-faced silence regarding this fictional air war and imminent nuclear conflagration, government spokespersons timidly contested the timeline, gently reminding reporters that the math did not match any known radar data on Earth. Trump has since dialled down the claim although he periodically revisits the fantasy that brought peace to eight (or nine or ten) battlefronts which some of the countries involved are themselves unaware of.Over the years, Trump has developed a unique diplomatic style in which allies, rivals, generals, journalists, economists, central bankers, waiters, and occasionally inanimate objects are said to approach him with tears in their eyes, and to address him as “sir” while seeking favors. Once you have been inserted into a Trump anecdote involving tears, admiration, begging, pleading, applause, or a selfie request that may or may not have occurred, diplomatic recovery becomes considerably more difficult. As Meloni is now discovering, escaping a Trump story is much harder than appearing in one.
