The American president did not appreciate the mess that Stefano Rolli, in his second and very successful cartoon in a few days about Trump, had dumped on the front page of Secolo XIX onto his hair by the Italian premier Giorgia Meloni, after the “unacceptable” attack on the Pope. Perhaps even more unacceptable than the wars that the ally, so to speak, fails to extinguish or even opens in the world with the “bullying” implicitly reproached to him by the fellow countryman who rose to the head of the Church last year.
“Shocked” by Meloni’s protests, which were not the first after the skirmishes over Greenland and the conduct of Italian soldiers in the past Iraq war, Trump withdrew the “courage” he had repeatedly recognized in her, even receiving her in the White House like a half queen. And he practically insulted her, earning her solidarity expressed in Parliament by the secretary of the main opposition party, Elly Schlein. A double solidarity, both gender and political. A miracle, I would say, considering what Trump attributed to himself disguised as Jesus at the bedside of a sick person more over there than over here.
On what happened between Trump and Meloni, or vice versa, journalistic headlines and images have been wasted: break, rupture, divorce, dumping, collapsed bridge and more. But without detracting from all this on the international level, with all the effects that may result in the continuation of Trump’s term at the White House, the rupture and whatever else took place domestically, on the left, between Schlein supportive of Meloni and her competitor for the leadership of the so-called alternative, Giuseppe Conte, also seems remarkable to me. Conte renewed the accusation against the premier of at least ambiguous relations, if not outright subservience, to the American president. With whose personal ambassador in Rome, different from the official one, the former premier has just had a convivial meeting, not at all covered by confidentiality, which is usually sought, organized, and held not to exchange insults. Conte remains after all “Giuseppi,” plural like his policies and majorities, appreciated by Trump in his first term at the White House.
