Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni could have denied Trump’s claim that she begged him to take a photo together, and left it at that.

Instead, she went much further. She posted a video on X Friday that made a show of standing up to Trump and linked the episode to his ill treatment of allies.

“I can only say that it’s a shame he doesn’t have the same determination with the enemies of the West, with the enemies of the United States, with leaderships with which he instead appears much more accommodating,” Meloni said.

It was a broadside — and not just from any leader. This is a right-wing leader that some have compared to Trump.

This isn’t even the first time Meloni has gone down this road. Back in April, she called Trump’s criticisms of Pope Leo XIV “unacceptable.” (Just a month earlier, Trump had called Meloni an “excellent leader” and a “friend.”)

Somewhat similar to Meloni, French President Emmanuel Macron — who just hosted a lavish dinner for Trump in Versailles at the end of the G7 summit — has previously responded strongly to a pretty personal remark from the US president.

Earlier this spring, Trump alluded to 2025 video showing Brigitte Macron appearing to shove her husband in the face. He said Macron’s “wife treats him extremely badly” and that he was “still recovering from the right to the jaw.”

Macron in April responded that Trump’s comments “weren’t elegant, and they weren’t up to par.”

Around the same time, Macron made veiled remarks aimed at Trump’s handling of the Iran war. He said the war was “not a show” and urged his American counterpart to be more careful about his comments.

“When you want to be serious, you don’t say every day the opposite of what you said the day before,” Macron said.

Unhappiness with the Iran war undergirds a number of the most recent rebukes of Trump. German Prime Minister Friedrich Merz in his own veiled comments suggested in April that the Iranians were stringing Trump along.

“And then letting the Americans travel to Islamabad, only to send them back without any results,” Merz said in late April after failed peace talks. “An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, especially by these so-called Revolutionary Guards.”

In the early days of the conflict, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called it “reckless and illegal” and said Spain would “not be complicit in something that is bad for the world … simply out of fear of reprisals from someone.”

He declined to celebrate too much when a ceasefire began in April.

“The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket,” Sánchez said.

But this trend dates back to early this year.

A number of leaders spoke out in January, for instance, about the unacceptability of Trump’s flirtation with taking over Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory that’s part of NATO ally Denmark.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose country Trump has also suggested he could commandeer, followed that up with a speech in Davos, Switzerland, that laid out a path forward for a decoupling from the United States.

Referring to Trump’s trade wars, Carney decried using “economic integration as weapons,” “tariffs as leverage,” and “supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” He said the “middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

A couple days later, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called Trump’s comments claiming NATO troops in Afghanistan had avoided fighting on the frontlines “insulting and frankly appalling.” (In fact, more than 1,000 NATO troops were killed in the war.) Trump the next day cleaned up his comments by praising British troops and their sacrifices.

By April, Starmer complained that the British people’s energy bills were swinging wildly “because of the actions of Putin or Trump across the world.” He also rebuked Trump’s threat to destroy a “whole civilization” in Iran.

“I’m fed up,” he added.

That seems to be a trend with prominent allies.

Trump has been able to throw his weight around with them because of how powerful the US government is. And as is the case with Republicans in Washington trying to navigate Trump, the easy play is to just go along to get along — to not rock the boat and hope everything turns out okay.

But at some point, that risks emboldening the president to do yet more things that are going to make their lives hell.

Trump’s trade war didn’t seem to be a red line for many of these leaders, but he’s clearly touched some nerves with the Greenland talk and now the Iran war, which has negatively impacted all of the world’s economy.

And Meloni’s rebuke Friday is a punctuation mark.

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