That Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will be the first European Union leader to meet with President Donald Trump since his day of tariffs is no surprise – she's backed him long before her ascension in 2022 to her country’s highest political office.

Meloni, who will arrive in Washington on Thursday, was among the first global leaders to congratulate Trump on his 2024 reelection victory and was the first European leader to meet with him after Election Day – traveling to Mar-a-Lago in January. She was also the only European Union leader to attend Trump’s inauguration.

But this week's scheduled visit is expected to be different.

Meloni, a one-time Euro-skeptic, will attempt to convince Trump to roll back at least part of his across-the-board, 10% tariffs on the EU that earlier this month sent European stock exchanges reeling. Some major European exchanges saw their largest one-day losses and largest one-day gains in decades over the span of a few days.

It’s a delicate point in U.S.-Europe relations, after Trump started his tariff campaign by announcing 25% tariffs on all steel, aluminum, and automobiles entering the U.S., then a 20% import tax on almost all other European Union exports to the U.S. 

Trump has since postponed the 20% levies at least 90 days, and the European Union backed off its threatened counter-measures. But the 10-percent tariff rate on EU products entering the U.S. remains in place, and the clock is ticking toward the end of the 90-day pause for the higher rate.

Meloni will arrive in Washington days after Trump bragged that countries were embarrassing themselves trying to convince him to reverse his tariff policies.

“Countries are calling us up, kissing my ass, they are dying to make a deal,” Trump said at the latest National Republican Congressional Committee dinner. “Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir.”

It’s not clear how far Meloni will go to secure better terms for Italy and the rest of the European Union. But the consensus is, the challenge she faces to build a bridge spanning the widening gulf between the U.S. and Europe is enormous.

The consensus is that Meloni’s game plan involves offering a “zero-zero” deal, in which tariffs are completely removed for both sides’ industrial products going both ways across the Atlantic. It’s an idea that has the support of billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk, who said earlier this month he would like to see a kind of free trade zone between North America and Europe.

“At the end of the day, I hope it's agreed that both Europe and the United States should move ideally, in my view, to a zero-tariff situation, effectively creating a free trade zone between Europe and North America,” Musk said earlier this month.

It’s not clear how Trump would react to the concept, but according to Maros Šefčovič, the European Union’s top trade official, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick rejected the “zero-zero” idea when it was offered to him back in February, less than a month after Trump took office.

According to Javier Noriega, chief economist with investment bank Hildebrandt and Ferrar, Meloni’s visit to the White House will probably not yield concrete results, but that it could be a first step in talks that could yield results before Trump’s 90-day pause expires.

“The best-case scenario is that no serious option is taken off the table and that both sides agree to keep talking,” Noriega told Just the News. “I think hopes are high for some kind of enduring agreement to come in the next few weeks.”

If that is indeed the case, the second step could follow closely on the heels of the first: the day after meeting Trump in Washington, Meloni will welcome Vice-President JD Vance to Rome, where his three-day trip will coincide with the Easter weekend.