Giorgia Meloni was in Mar-a-Lago for barely five hours and every moment had to count. With so many leaders vying for Donald Trump’s attention, hers was a win. But after dinner with the president elect, she was sat down to a screening of a controversial documentary on John Eastman, a Trump ally who formed a plan to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The episode illustrates the perils of conducting business in the era of Trump, where access comes at a price and is loaded with risk.
This is a world Meloni — a savvy political operator who leapfrogged rivals to become Italy’s first female prime minister — must learn to navigate.
Trump has a track record of souring on people who don’t bow to his will. Same goes for Elon Musk, Meloni’s initial conduit to Trump. She developed a close friendship with the world’s richest man and photographs of the pair have made headlines around the world. After the Trump visit, Italy confirmed it was in advanced talks with Musk’s SpaceX to provide secure telecommunications, inevitably raising the question of a quid pro quo.
The rewards are clear — a role not dissimilar to the one Angela Merkel enjoyed back in the day as “the Queen of Europe” and the continent’s point person to the US, especially with France and Germany in political and economic disarray. She could punch above her weight, and just as easily get burned if she doesn’t get the balancing act right.
Canada’s Justin Trudeau, for example, was among the first to peg it to Palm Beach to try and ingratiate himself with Trump, but he quickly became a punch line and saw his fortunes made worse by Trump’s tariff threats. He announced on Monday that he’s resigning after more than nine years leading the country.
Meloni already showed a certain deftness of touch in managing some complicated dynamics, European officials noted. With so many angling for an invitation to the Trump inauguration, she already had one but was live to the risk that it could upset the apple cart when the likes of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, has had limited lines of communication with the incoming president. Also, there was the issue of Joe Biden.
Meloni formed a genuinely close relationship with the outgoing president — both staunch Catholics — and he’s going to be visiting Rome and the pope at the end of the week. By going to see Trump early she was able to avoid upset on many fronts, the officials said on condition of anonymity.
If Trump can be mercurial, Musk is arguably even more volatile. He’s sunk millions to get Trump elected and firmly ensconced in his inner circle. There he is popping up in calls with world leaders, and again in photos shaking hands with Viktor Orban when the Hungarian prime minister made his own surprise visit to Trump’s winter White House.
He’s now also throwing his weight aggressively in European politics and backing ever more extreme views. Nigel Farage, loved by Trump and until this weekend also by Musk, is now being berated by Musk because he won’t welcome far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, into his Reform UK party.
Farage, after saying he didn’t “agree with everything” Musk stands for, learned the extent of the X owner’s ire. This poses a problem for Meloni who holds many opposing views from the president-elect, from proposed tariffs that could hurt Italian firms to support for Ukraine. Meloni has been among Kyiv’s staunchest backers both publicly and privately, diplomats say.
Meloni has worked hard to shed the fascist label that she wore through her election campaign, keeping a foot in the European Union and also cultivating ties with like-minded conservatives. Musk, though close to her, has also defended her deputy Matteo Salvini, who leads the anti-immigration League that holds more extreme views than her own party and is a rival she outwitted to become premier.
For her cohort in the EU, and indeed in Brussels, Meloni is one of the few who has good links with the Trump-Musk duo and isn’t Orban. Many of them are struggling to establish communication channels with Trump’s team.
Meloni’s trip was shrouded in secrecy, with even parts of her closest circles in government kept in the dark about her movements — such is her fear of leaks. The two spoke about a range of matters, including the threat of tariffs and the imprisonment in Iran of Italian journalist Cecilia Sala.
There was an early clue, though that spoke to the invisible hand of Musk at a play. The billionaire’s envoy in Italy, Andrea Stroppa, tweeted an AI-generated picture of the three in Roman imperial garb on Saturday afternoon. But Meloni and her government kept quiet.
For now, it’s all going to plan. Trump praised her for “taking Europe by storm.” At 11 p.m. local time, the government-owned Airbus 319 carried her back to Rome overnight.
Though fleeting, just having had that face time gives Meloni an edge as other European leaders are still getting their bearings in a MAGA-ified Washington. Her Italian ambassador to the US, Mariangela Zappia, played a key role in orchestrating the visit with the help of Musk’s team, people familiar with the matter said. Meloni and Musk are in touch on a near-constant basis, according to officials.
Already, it appears to have borne fruit. Musk gleefully posting on his X platform about the Starlink deal.
The danger for Meloni — who made a point of abandoning China’s Belt and Road Initiative and managed to do so without irking Xi Jinping too much — is that Italy creates a different kind of dependency.
The imprisonment of Sala – the Italian journalist – in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison puts her in a tricky situation with the Americans.
The arrest came days after Italian law enforcement, at the request of the US, apprehended a Swiss-Iranian national at Milan’s Malpensa airport on charges of lethal drone warfare. Now Meloni has a domestic headache.
What Meloni has shown — so far — is a certain mindfulness to the optics of appearing next to populist figures such as Argentina’s Javier Milei and Hungary’s Orban — also favorites of Trump. She is seeking to carve a path somewhere between the two as a more serious and institutional whisperer, officials say.
She is also riling up political adversaries who accuse her of siding with populists.
“What do you mean ‘You side with Milei,’” she recently told former premier Matteo Renzi in the Senate. “You were friends with Barack Obama and wore a coat like him. I am friends with Milei but that doesn’t mean I’m growing sideburns.”
Meloni also knows her closeness to Musk — he presented her with an award at a New York gala event and was a guest of honor at her Lord of the Rings-inspired political festival — risks angering some of her own colleagues.
“She has been far-sighted to cultivate a relationship with him,” said Beniamino Irdi, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former Italian government official. “To consolidate this advantage, Meloni will need to solve very intertwined problems.”
Meloni will face a “dilemma concerning her party’s political identity, caught between her far-right ideological roots and the burden of governance and international commitments,” especially in Europe, he added. “Even if she returns to her conservative roots, ideological alignment alone isn’t going to cut it.”
Trump capped his Mar-a-Lago meeting short with Meloni, telling a crowd at the movie screening that the two leaders had skipped dessert to watch the documentary in the grand ballroom that evening.
