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.

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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.

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“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.

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“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.

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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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