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Trump and Italy’s Conte: Brothers in Nativism

President Trump and Giuseppe Conte, the new Italian prime minister, play to their publics by demonizing immigrants.

President Trump with Giuseppe Conte, prime minister of Italy, following a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House on Monday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

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President Trump likes to claim that his meetings with foreign leaders are one huge victory after another in promoting his worldview. The reality is usually far different, but measured by this yardstick, his meeting with Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy was a smashing success. Standing alongside the president in the White House East Room, Mr. Conte sang praises to Mr. Trump for “positions and stances which are expressed with clarity,” and offered to be his “privileged interlocutor” in Europe.

Mr. Trump was equally effusive, congratulating Mr. Conte on his “tremendous victory in Italy” and finding parallels between the Italian’s rise and his own: “We’re both outsiders to politics — can you believe it?” In fact, Mr. Conte, a law professor, never won any election and is prime minister solely as the malleable compromise choice of two anti-establishment parties that formed a coalition of convenience after elections in March.

Such nettlesome facts aside, the love-fest between Mr. Trump and the new Italian government marks another step in the evolving network of right-wing, populist governments in Europe and the United States, with demonization of immigrants as their major bond, followed by admiration for President Vladimir Putin of Russia, an aversion to the European Union and disdain for political elites.

To Mr. Trump, Mr. Conte’s accession to power was further evidence of the consequences of a tide of illegal immigrants. “Like the United States, Italy is currently under enormous strain as a result of illegal immigration,” Mr. Trump declared. “And the prime minister, frankly, is with us today because of illegal immigration. Italy got tired of it.”

Italy, of course, has a far more tangible problem than the United States as one of the first destinations of migrants from Africa and the Middle East trying to reach Europe by perilous crossings of the Mediterranean. About 600,000 migrants are believed to have reached Italy over the past four years, a challenge compounded by the failure of the European Union to form a cohesive joint policy on migration. If there is a similar “enormous strain” in the United States, it is largely a result of Mr. Trump’s incessant demagogy on the subject and his obsession with building a wall along the Mexican border. It was at his news conference with Mr. Conte that he declared his readiness to shut down the government if he didn’t get funding for the wall.

However disparate the problems, Mr. Trump’s embrace of Mr. Conte bolsters the hard-line views on immigration of the right-wing, xenophobic League, the smaller but so far more assertive partner to the politically amorphous Five-Star Movement in Italy’s ruling coalition. Matteo Salvini, the head of the League, is also the interior minister who started his tenure turning away a ship with 630 refugees, forcing it to reroute to Spain. And that, in turn, reinforces the nativist directions of other populist governments and parties.

Unchecked, illegal immigration is a serious problem. But the solution must be a coherent, humane and (in Europe) collective policy that shares the burden of immigrants and gives people fleeing intolerable conditions a fair chance to find safe refuge. Hate speech and punitive policies are not the answer.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Mr. Trump Finds a Brother in Nativism. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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