Trump always chickens out: Putin doesn't

Three reasons to fear for Ukraine

A grim Kyiv Independent dismisses Trump’s empty promise to get tough with Putin

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The best way to understand Trump is to read fantasy fiction not news sites. He has a dark magical power. He can lie and make his lies come true. He can lie and – unlike ordinary politicians – never suffer the consequences.

Walk in his shoes an imagine what it must be like being Trump. You can behave with impunity. Deny the results of free elections and attempt an insurrection and still your supporters will put you back in the White House.

We used to say that a good liar needs a good memory. He needs to worry all the time that his audience might catch him out. But Trump has learned that his audience on the American right will believe his lies as he tells them.

Trump’s power to make his own reality is of urgent concern to Europeans and to besieged Ukrainians most of all.

On Tuesday Trump appeared to finally break with the man who had helped rig the 2016 US presidential election on his behalf. Since returning to the White House, he had given every appearance of being a bought-and-paid-for Russian agent. Trump called Vladimir Putin a “genius,” while blaming Ukraine for the war and humiliating its president with the help of his gruesome sidekick J.D. Vance.

He now plans to send Patriot missile systems to Ukraine, saying they are “desperately” needed to shield the country from intensifying Russian air strikes. He threatened "severe tariffs" of "about 100%" if there isn't a deal to end the war in Ukraine within 50 days.

Apparently, Putin had committed the worst crime imaginable. He had failed to show Trump respect, and must pay the price

This appears to be progress. But is it real? In the world of Trumpian fantasy fiction can he U-turn back again and pretend that he had never promised to help Ukraine in the first place.

I hope I am wrong. I genuinely do. But as it’s always best to prepare for the worst while hoping for the best, here are three reasons to fear for the future.

1/ Trump has made few real commitments

On Tuesday, when Trump began his supposed U-turn, reliable sources told the Financial Times and Washington Post that Trump had asked Zelensky whether Ukraine could strike Moscow if he gave it long-range U.S. weapons.

Trump believed that the only way that Ukraine could force Putin to back down was if it made Russia “feel the pain.”

This is a decent military strategy, you might think. But it barely lasted 24 hours. The White House said that Trump was "merely asking a question, not encouraging further killing" and had no intention of helping Ukraine strike the Russian capital.

Unlike the citizens of Kyiv and Odessa, the residents of Moscow and St Petersburg could sleep safely in their beds.

And what about the sanctions? Russia is running the same terror tactics it always runs whether it is fighting in Ukraine, Syria or Chechnya. Its summer campaign is at its height right now. The secondary tariffs Trump threatened on China, India and others doing business with Russia should be coming today, not in 50 days at the beginning of September.

As a grim Kyiv Independent put it when it spelt out the consequences of Trump’s delays: “Ukrainians brace for 50 more days of Russian terror”.

Phillips O’Brien of St Andrews University says that if you want to view Trump cynically – and I would suggest there is no other way to view him – the delaying of sanctions is a tactic to stop effective action against Putin.

“[Trump’s threat of sanctions] was portrayed as a ‘threat,” but that is getting it ass backwards. Its delaying a threat and giving Putin time to plan. Right now there is a massive majority in the Senate (and we think the House) to support heavy secondary tariffs on Russia through the Graham-Blumenthal bill. These tariffs could be ready in days, and Trump could be able to impose them if he wanted by the end of the month.

However, Trump has just wrong-footed Graham-Blumenthal and put off any decision on these sanctions, even if the bill passes, until September at the earliest. And even in September Trump is under no obligation to impose the tariffs—he could do what he almost always does in such cases, back down and delay.”

I hate to say it but Dimitri Medvedev, former Russian “moderate” turned imperialist fanatic and drunk, got it right on Twitter (X) when he mocked Trump.

Russian military bloggers were as contemptuous.

"The biggest chatterbox of the planet talked a lot and was engaged in self-promotion," wrote a blogger known as "Two Majors" to his more than a million and a quarter subscribers.

"Well, in 50 days he will be so angry he might even write a post on social media."

Which takes us to our second point

2/ Putin is tougher than Trump

For Putin the Ukrainian war is existential. It was his decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022. He dragged his country into a needless war that has claimed a million Russian casualties (and counting).

The militarist strand of Russian public opinion – which is to say the only strand of public opinion that can speak freely – will turn on him if he compromises. Trump in his ignorance genuinely thought that Putin would agree to a ceasefire, and was shocked when he carried on as usual,

“Putin really surprised a lot of people,” Trump said.

No he didn’t. He surprised Trump and a handful of ignorant American isolationists. Christian Caryl, the former Moscow bureau chief for Newsweek, puts it well in Foreign Policy

“Really? Putin “surprised a lot of people”? How could anyone, at this point, be ‘surprised’ by Putin’s unwillingness to come to the negotiating table? The war in Ukraine, after all, is the very definition of a war of choice: Russia invaded Ukraine, not the other way around. By most accounts, Putin believes that he is winning and that time is on his side—which is why he continues to saturate the skies over Ukraine with missiles and drones. Why on earth would he want to bring the war that he started to a halt?”

Putin is focused on his objectives to a monomaniacal degree. Trump, by contrast, has no grasp of the fundamental argument that Russia has no right to launch wars of imperial aggrandisement. Or if he does, he does not care.

Our leaders here in Europe know the moral arguments backwards. Unfortunately for us, and for Ukraine, Europe still depends on an unreliable US.

3/ Europe’s pathetic dependence continues

If you listened to European broadcasters or read the news sites you would have noticed that they displayed pathetic gratitude as they related the news that Trump may finally be doing the right thing for Ukraine.

As you listened to the grovelling tone, you might have thought that nothing really changes.

Supposedly free and modern European citizens are not so different from medieval peasants. We gaze at our masters and hope that they will be kind kings or good tsars, even though our gormless optimism is based on precious little evidence.

Or in the case of Donald Trump our gormless optimism is based on no evidence whatsoever.

Europe is overdependent on the US for our defence, and so we flatter the king on the Potomac. Keir Starmer suppresses his every decent principle to keep Trump on side. With a bizarre psycho-sexual flourish Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, calls him “daddy.” After Trump intervened in the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, Rutte wrote:

“Dear Donald, Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, it was truly extraordinary … you will achieve something NO president in decades could get done.”

Rutte, who is saving the West by debasing himself, greeted the president’s apparent U-turn on Ukraine with an oleaginous cry of:

“Mr. President, dear Donald, this is big. This is really big,”

Honestly, serfs doffing a cap before the monarch’s carriage had more self-respect.

But what is the alternative?

Macron is trying to build up European defence capabilities. And this surely must be the way forward.

We can no longer rely for our defence on a US president who lies so often and so successfully he no longer knows truth from falsehood – assuming, that is, that he ever did.

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