Trump Offers Lower Tariffs As He Pushes Trade Partners To Buy US Energy

President Donald Trump is offering lower tariff rates to trade partners, pushing them to buy more U.S. energy as he looks to narrow the country’s fiscal deficit.

Trump has already asked the European Union to commit to purchasing $350 billion in U.S. energy for the bloc to get tariff relief.

This is 49% higher than the fiscal deficit that the U.S. runs with the EU—according to the U.S. Trade Representative, the country had a goods trade deficit of $235.6 billion with the EU in 2024.

“One of the ways that that can disappear easily and quickly is they're gonna have to buy our energy from us ... they can buy it, we can knock off $350 billion in one week,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday, according to a report by Politico.

Trump was responding to a reporter's question about whether European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s “zero-for-zero” tariff offer on industrial goods was enough.

This would also fit with Trump’s “drill baby drill” agenda, where he sought to increase energy production in the U.S.

“America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have — the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth — and we are going to use it,” he said in his inaugural address.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also sought to use the U.S.’s energy goals as a dealmaker with countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Bessent told CNBC that a potential investment in an Alaska LNG project could be the basis of tariff deals with these three trading partners.

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY), which tracks the S&P 500 index, gained 1.8% on Friday, even as the CBOE volatility index (VIX) rose 1.8% at the time of writing.

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