Giorgia Meloni has pitched herself as a broker between Washington and Brussels. Next week, at the Oval Office, the Italian prime minister will get a chance to show them what she’s got.
Meloni will visit the White House on April 17 “for an official working visit,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed during a briefing Tuesday.
The right-wing premier will be the first European leader to meet United States President Donald Trump since he announced 20 percent tariffs on EU goods last week. Given her amicable relationship with the president and several figures his administration, Europe could hardly have picked a better emissary.
But Meloni faces a fine balancing act.
Sweet-talking Trump should be the easy bit: All she has to do is make the right noises about trading with America on Trump’s terms, groundwork that her ministers have been busy laying.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, for instance, said Tuesday evening that the best export strategy for Italy “is to buy more from the United States, I am thinking above all of gas, and to invest more in the United States.” Trump had earlier called for the EU to buy more U.S. gas.
But Meloni’s sights will surely be set higher than merely emerging from the meeting unscathed, which was the aim of Ireland’s leader Michael Martin a month ago.
Her positive relationship with the Trump administration will count for little domestically if she can’t soften his stance on tariffs she has already conceded will damage the Italian economy. Polling shows some 63 percent of Italians view Trump unfavorably.
With Trump, it seems, even warm ties don’t guarantee results. During an in-person visit at the White House on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — another right-wing leader with whom Trump gets along well — was unable to nudge the president to reduce freshly announced tariffs on Israel.
Instead, Netanyahu emerged from the meeting having promised to erase his country’s trade deficit with the U.S. Trump offered nothing in return.
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