Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša cracked a joke about First Lady Melania Trump at a NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, in June 2025, deploying humor in a bid to ease mounting tensions between President Donald Trump and alliance members who feared the United States might abandon NATO altogether, according to a new report.
Janša used the moment to congratulate Trump on persuading Slovenia to raise its defense spending, telling the room that “if anybody knew how stubborn Slovenians could be, it was the husband of Melania Trump.” Trump smiled at the quip. Bulgaria’s then-prime minister, Rosen Zhelyazkov, who was present, offered a more sober assessment of what the laughter concealed, telling The Wall Street Journal that “there was laughter in the room, but it masked deep anxiety.”
Leaders Scrambled to Keep Trump in NATO
The joke was one small piece of a much larger, behind-the-scenes effort by allied governments to keep the 80-year-old president from withdrawing the United States from NATO. Alliance members had grown deeply alarmed by Trump’s repeated threats to leave, which intensified alongside his sweeping retaliatory tariffs and his stated desire to acquire Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO member Denmark. The anxiety ran so deep that NATO members held private meetings specifically to examine whether the alliance could survive without American participation.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte emerged as perhaps the most dedicated flatterer in the group. Rutte reportedly flooded Trump with public praise and even adapted his own writing style in private messages to mirror Trump’s — short, punchy sentences with unconventional capitalization. Fellow leaders grew so struck by Rutte’s commitment to the performance that some described him as an “actor who never broke character.”
According to reports, Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre collaborated on message drafts and discussed which words to capitalize to match Trump’s distinctive communication style.
Defense Spending and the Iran Dispute
At the heart of the tension was Trump’s long-running demand that NATO members dramatically increase military spending. The June 2025 Hague summit produced a significant concession: every NATO member nation except Spain pledged to reach defense and security expenditures of 5 percent of GDP by 2035, a threshold Trump had demanded for years, up from the previous 2 percent target he had long criticized as inadequate.
Trump also complicated matters by complaining that nearly all NATO countries declined to support the United States in its war with Iran, a conflict widely unpopular among allied governments. That grievance added fresh urgency to the flattery campaign, as leaders calculated they needed to keep Trump personally satisfied to preserve the alliance’s core commitments.
Those tensions are set to resurface when NATO leaders convene in Ankara, Turkey, for a summit on Tuesday and Wednesday. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said Trump “looks forward to traveling to Ankara for the NATO Summit, where he will have constructive and frank conversations with many world leaders.” Kelly said Trump has accomplished more for NATO than any previous leader, noting his strong working relationships with Rutte and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, though she acknowledged Trump’s view that certain member states have not met their commitments.
Janša’s Return to Power in Slovenia
Janša’s role in the NATO diplomacy drama takes on added significance given his recent political comeback. On May 22, he became Slovenia’s prime minister for the fourth time, cementing his status as one of the nation’s most enduring political figures. Although his right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party placed second behind the center-left Freedom Movement in the March parliamentary election, Janša managed to forge a governing coalition while former prime minister Robert Golob could not.
According to Ali Zerdin, who edits the weekend supplement of Delo, Slovenia’s most widely circulated newspaper, “On the other side, we have the veteran of Slovenian politics, Janez Jansa,” Zerdin said. “He knows all the tricks to build a coalition necessary to run Slovenia.” Golob, Zerdin noted, had the numbers to form a government but lacked the deal-making ability to pull it together.
Janša’s coalition includes the center-right Democrats under former foreign minister Anže Logar’s leadership, the Christian democratic New Slovenia party, and the far-right Resnica party, whose leader Zoran Stevanovic had previously signed a public commitment not to support a Janša-led government. Stevanovic ultimately accepted SDS support to become parliamentary speaker and subsequently directed his members of parliament to vote for Janša as prime minister. Janša appointed Tone Kajzer as foreign minister — a career diplomat and SDS member who was dismissed as Slovenia’s ambassador to the United States in 2022 after breaching the confidentiality of the diplomatic dispatch system.
Slovenia’s Place in a Fracturing Alliance
Questions about Slovenia’s direction within the European Union have accompanied Janša’s return. The Resnica party holds fringe positions that include skepticism toward NATO membership itself, and Janša’s historical alliance with longtime former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has prompted comparisons to Hungary’s contentious relationship with Brussels. Kajzer sought to tamp down those concerns, insisting that Slovenia would not be a disruptive presence in EU affairs and that his first diplomatic visits would be to European partners.
The more immediate question is how Janša — freshly returned to power and already proven willing to deploy personal charm in the service of alliance cohesion — will navigate the coming NATO summit in Ankara, where Trump’s relationship with the alliance remains the defining issue.
