U.S. President Donald Trump’s relationships with foreign leaders are notoriously fraught. In the middle of the turmoil, he met Monday at the White House with the new Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. After the two met, a perhaps embarrassing video montage went up on Trump’s personal Twitter account.
The video chronicles Conte’s time at the White House in an over the top flattering light. Its design glosses right over the fact that, at present, the United States is at odds with the European Union as a whole and some of its key members, like Germany. In Trump’s world, everything is getting along just fine and if it’s not, it can be fixed up with a Twitter post.
Check out the video below.
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— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 30, 2018
While at the White House, Trump praised Conte for the tough stance he’s taken on immigration in his home country.
Speaking first to the Italian PM, Trump said:
‘I agree very much with what you are doing with respect to migration, and illegal immigration, and even legal immigration… He has taken a very firm stance on the border, a stance that few countries have taken. And frankly he is doing the right thing in my opinion.’
In the face of hundreds of thousands of migrants reaching Italy’s shores in the Mediterranean Sea in recent years, Conte has severely curtailed his nation’s acceptance of any more asylum seekers. Italy has even “shut its ports to humanitarian rescue ships,” Reuters notes.
That strategy is certainly in line with Trump’s own, as he noted.
He came into office promising to build a wall along the entire border between the United States and Mexico. Although that wall hasn’t yet materialized, during a joint Monday press conference with Conte, Trump reaffirmed his commitment to the proposal.
He explained:
‘As far as the border is concerned and personally, if we don’t get border security after many, many years of talk, I would have no problem doing a shutdown. It’s time we had proper border security. We’re the laughingstock of the world.’
He has threatened to refuse to sign necessary spending legislation if he doesn’t get the funding he wants for “border security” time and time again.
Despite his apocalyptic proclamations, undocumented border crossings continue their general downward historical trend, and those who are coming over the border, including thousands and thousands of children, don’t pose some kind of documented criminal threat to the United States.
That hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from putting immigrant children including a one-year-old in court in front of a judge anyway.
In Trump’s quest to impose his draconian immigration policy on the United States and world, Conte is one of his few allies. Germany, another member of the European Union alongside Italy, is one of the many nations to find itself at odds with the U.S. under Trump, declaring themselves no longer able to rely on the U.S. as an ally like in the past.
While Trump and Conte mill around in their world of nice public statements and glossy Twitter videos, those of us in the real world continue to deal with the consequences of their actions.
Featured Image via Screenshot from the Video
