Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has hit back US President Donald Trump over a supposed lie.

Trump told an Italian broadcaster that Meloni had “begged” him for a photo at the G7 summit this week.

“She begged me to take a photo with her. She wanted a photo with me so badly. I could have skipped it, but I felt sorry for her,” Trump said in the brief interview.

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“She’s probably happy I talked to her. I didn’t have to talk to her.”

But Meloni quickly clapped back at the claim on social media. She said that Trump had “completely fabricated” the story, and she was “shocked”.

“Neither I nor Italy ever beg,” she said.

Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani abruptly cancelled a planned trip to the US this weekend, calling Trump’s claims about Meloni “serious and offensive”.

The Foreign Ministry later announced that the business and scientific forum Tajani was to attend in Miami had also been called off.

While it remains unclear exactly what took place between Meloni and Trump at the G7 summit, Trump has a years-long history of telling highly dubious tales about people having supposedly begged him for things.

He is particularly fond of making such claims when he is talking about someone who was once supportive of him but went on to criticise him or his policies, as the conservative Meloni did this year.

When Trump first met Meloni in January he called her a “fantastic woman”.

But Meloni refused to support his war in Iran and stood up for Pope Leo XIV when Trump lashed out at the pontiff.

“She was a big fan but I don’t want her as a fan because she was not there, along with the NATO group, having to do with the strait,” Trump said when questioned after his begging claim.

“I don’t know why the president of the United States behaves this way with his own allies,” Meloni said. “It’s not, after all, the first time this has happened.”

Begging claims bank up

While Trump is a wealthy and powerful person who may sometimes be begged, many of his past claims of such begging have been debunked.

Denials have come with documentary evidence or rejections given in detail by people with a much better record of telling the truth than he does.

For example, in 2016, Trump claimed that Cheri Jacobus, a Republican operative who was sharply critical of him, “begged my people for a job”. Trump said he “Turned her down twice and she went hostile”.

But Jacobus had evidence that it was Trump’s campaign team that reached out to her in 2015 about working for him, not the other way around. “You lied,” she wrote on X in 2017.

Also in 2016, Trump also claimed that Brent Bozell, a conservative activist who had written an anti-Trump magazine essay, had previously come to his office “begging for money like a dog”.

But Bozell, who later became a Trump supporter and is now the Trump-appointed US ambassador to South Africa, wrote in a 2019 book that Trump’s tweet “wasn’t true”.

“I had not gone to him for money; he’d invited me for lunch to discuss his potential campaign. I hadn’t grovelled. I hadn’t even asked for money. He’d offered it,” Bozell said.

Trump’s stories about people pleading for his benevolence can be hard to debunk because Trump usually situates them in private meetings or conversations. But when independent scrutiny of the stories is possible, they tend to fall apart fast.

One prominent case is the controversial one-on-one dinner Trump had with then-FBI director James Comey in January 2017.

After firing Comey in May 2017, Trump said, “I think he asked for the dinner. And he wanted to stay on as the FBI head.”

But Comey testified to Congress that Trump had invited him to the dinner, forcing him to cancel a planned date with his wife, and that Trump had brought up Comey’s future prospects and demanded “loyalty”.

Special counsel Robert Mueller found that “substantial evidence corroborates Comey’s account of the dinner invitation and the request for loyalty” – and noted that the “President’s Daily Diary confirms that the President ‘extend[ed] a dinner invitation’ to Comey”.

Television host John Oliver also knocked back claims from Trump, after he revealed he had no interest in having the president on his show.

Trump asserted in 2015 that Oliver had actually “had his people call to ask me to be on his very boring and low rated show” but that “I said ‘NO THANKS’ Waste of time & energy!”.

The show said Trump had never been invited to come on; Trump never produced evidence to the contrary.

“It was a total lie. A meaningless lie. What kind of moron would lie about something this pathetic?” Oliver said in 2017.

– With NBC, AP