Trump and Meloni voice optimism on US-EU trade deal during White House meetings

The president has threatened to resume the higher tariff rates for all trade partners should they fail to present favorable deals to the White House by the time the pause expires this summer. European Union trade commissioner Marcos Sefcovic, following a meeting in Washington this week with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, said that negotiating a favorable deal would require a “significant joint effort” from both the EU and the U.S.

While fielding questions from reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump lavished praise on his Italian counterpart but denied that his pause on tariff implementation marked a shift in his overall trade strategy.

“Everybody wants to make a deal, and if they don’t want to make a deal, we’ll make the deal for them, because that’s what’s going to happen,” the president claimed. “We’re building a base. We’re building a country like no other.”

Despite the current tension between the White House and virtually all U.S.-trade partners, both Trump and Meloni expressed confidence during their working lunch that a new trade deal would be renegotiated between the U.S. and the EU.

“There’ll be a trade deal, 100%,” Trump said while in the Cabinet Room. “Why? You think there won’t be? Of course, there will be a trade deal, very much. They want to make one very much. And we are going to make a trade deal. I fully expect it, but it’ll be a fair deal.” 

Trump added, “We’re gonna have very little problem making a deal with Europe or anybody else, because we have something that everybody wants.”

Senior White House officials told reporters Thursday morning ahead of Meloni’s visit that the president views Italy as a “valuable interlocutor” in bridging that divide.

“President Trump won’t simply focus on how Italy’s marketplace can be opened up, but also how they can help us with the rest of Europe,” one senior aide said.

“This visit is not just based on the strong bilateral relationship between United States and Italy with our shared allied interests, but also on Meloni’s role as a key force in Europe and a voice that largely sees eye to eye with the president on a lot of issues,” a second senior administration official said, noting that the Meloni visit was scheduled ahead of the president’s tariff announcements. “She’s increasingly playing that role in the European Union. I think a lot of other states are grateful for her leadership in that venue.”

Italy, buoyed by cheese, wine, and other food sectors, has emerged as the third-largest European exporter to the U.S., behind just Germany and Ireland. However, the country enjoyed a substantial trade imbalance with the U.S. last year, with exports totaling $76 billion and imports of American goods and services clocking in at just $32 billion.

As the leader of the right-leaning Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia) party, Meloni shares Trump’s interest in curbing immigration. She was notably the only major European leader to attend his inauguration in January. 

Trump called Meloni “a wonderful woman” in late February and claimed that “Italy has got very strong leadership.” 

When European leaders upbraided Trump after his testy Oval Office exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Meloni refrained. 

Meloni also counts tech billionaire and key Trump ally Elon Musk as a friend. It’s unclear to what extent Musk will be involved in trade negotiations between the U.S. and Italy. 

However, her visit to the U.S., the first from a European leader since Trump announced and suspended tariffs, has fueled rumors that Meloni could take an Italy-first agenda at the expense of a unified EU, although some experts have pushed back against these claims. 

Douglas Besharov, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland and director of UMD’s European Center, told the Washington Examiner that, given Meloni’s ideological alignment with Trump, the prime minister is Europe’s “best bet” to bridge the trade divide between the commission and Washington.

Besharov went so far as to suggest that D.C. and European negotiators have already “cooked” a deal, and that Meloni’s visit was “high theater” to help sell the forthcoming accord.

“It sure looks like this deal is already set. It’s highly unlikely that they’re going through all this just to fail. So I think they’ve got something going on. The distance between the U.S. and Europe isn’t nearly as great as other places,” he explained. “There are a lot of separate tariffs and other administrative obstacles between our two continents, but I don’t think anyone thinks that they’re insurmountable. There’s a deal sitting there. The bigger issue is, do people trust Trump to stick to the deal?”

The EU hopes that Meloni can convince Trump to agree to a “zero-for-zero” tariffs deal. “The challenge to explore, one that Italy supports, and President von der Leyen proposed yesterday, is the potential for removing mutual tariffs on industrial products under the ‘zero for zero’ formula,” Meloni previously said, referring to the EU Commission president. 

Still, Italy remains one of the worst offenders in a pet focus of Trump’s foreign policy: NATO defense commitments.

Dating back to his first term in office, Trump has pressured NATO members to meet the 2% GDP defense spending benchmark and even increased his demands to a 5% commitment in his second term. According to the White House, Italy spent just 1.49% of its GDP on defense in 2024, an increase of a tenth of a percentage point but still far below the Trump administration’s stated goal.

The president also brushed aside concerns that U.S. allies were growing closer to China in response to the suspended tariffs. 

“Nobody can compete with us,” Trump said in the Cabinet Room. “I think we’re going to make a very good deal with China.” 

Vice President JD Vance, who attended Thursday’s bilateral meeting alongside the president, will again meet with Meloni in Rome in the coming days. He’s set to depart Friday for a weeklong trip with stops in both Italy and India.

Though Trump has deployed Vance on multiple foreign tours through their first 100 days in office, where the vice president has served as a messaging cudgel touting Trump’s isolationist foreign policy, the president himself is yet to take a trip overseas.

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Trump is slated to travel to Saudi Arabia in May, the first foreign visit of his second term in office.