I have a rule: never stand between a dog and a fire hydrant. With these words, 73-year-old Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy refuses to comment on Donald Trump's spat with Elon Musk. The scandal erupts on the same day that Trump compares Ukrainians and Russians to children fighting in a park and calls the opening of the second front against Nazi Germany a failure for Chancellor Merz. But in a few hours, all of this is forgotten: the main event of the American political day is the Musk-Trump duel.

Musk accuses Trump of having ties to Jeffrey Epstein, a trafficker in underage girls who committed suicide in a prison cell in August 2019 (during Trump's first term, by the way) without waiting for a trial. Trump threatens to cut off government subsidies to Musk. Musk observes a steep drop in Tesla shares and reposts someone else's words about the president's impeachment, and announces the immediate suspension of the SpaceX Dragon program (which in turn jeopardizes all NASA missions). It is noteworthy that on the same day, a few hours before the scandal gained momentum, Axios, citing sources in the White House, published details of the reaction of Trump's entourage to the Ukrainian Operation Web. “From an international perspective,” an unnamed Trump adviser commented on the Web, ”it's like a Chihuahua that has torn up a much bigger dog.

I don't know how much experience this unnamed adviser has with dogs, but I can tell you one thing for certain: you'd be hard-pressed to find a fiercer dog than a Chihuahua. These tiny descendants of the ancient Toltec dogs would have long ago torn apart anyone who smiled at them arrogantly (literally anyone), and no other small breed tries to attack my four-year-old German Shepherd so often without any hesitation. 

For the tiny head of a Chihuahua, size is of no consequence, but the same cannot be said for Donald Trump, from whom even his Republican senators cannot squeeze agreement to the already prepared package of anti-Russian sanctions. The last trip to the United States left the Ukrainian delegation with a strange feeling: Secretary of State Rubio refused to talk to OP Chairman Yermak, senators were preparing the document with one hand and holding it with the other, waiting for the president to take at least some decisive action. And Trump himself began by taking Putin's spokesman's job away from him, speaking for the Kremlin leader: after the strike on strategic aviation, “he has no choice but to attack, and it probably won't be very pleasant.” Someone then thought of deleting the post (causing a wave of excitement in the ranks of domestic Americanists), but a few minutes later it reappeared in the same form, down to the last letter.

For Trump, looking like a person whom Putin respects is fundamental. To do this, it is not a sin to treat the Russian dictator with understanding. No publication would write that Putin's actions in recent months indicate the exact opposite, but the American president only receives the characteristics that he is pleased to hear. Because this time, his entourage has been chosen much more carefully than in his previous White House cadence, and he has learned from the mistakes of his predecessors. That's why Trump's fierce surprise when journalists suddenly voiced the acronym TACO, which had been circulating in professional circles for a month, seems quite sincere.

“Taco” as a word means a Mexican dish, which is already well known to many Ukrainians. TACO, an acronym first coined by a Financial Times journalist, stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. The term was born out of observing the American stock markets, which have become much calmer in their reaction to new tariff announcements: no matter how hard the American president slams his fist on the table, a draconian duty has never been introduced. Something always happened at the last minute, and Trump postponed it, leaving everything as it was. The same thing is happening with Putin: since winter, we have been hearing that everything will be clear in “two or three weeks,” and everything seems to be clear, but Russia does not receive any sanctions for its unwillingness to follow Trump's peace initiative, so it continues the war with impunity, and the cameras hear another deadline - “in a week,” “next month,” “in a few days” - which is eventually replaced by threats (which have now also become commonplace) to give up everything and withdraw from the peace process. 

The German chancellor, whom the American president received yesterday at the White House, brought Trump a gift - his grandfather Friedrich Trump's birth certificate, which was issued in the German village of Kalstadt in 1869. It was only later, when he moved to the United States in search of a better life, that Friedrich changed his name to Frederick and began to pronounce his surname differently. Perhaps it was this transparent hint that the great warrior with migrants himself came from a migrant family that made Trump first insult Merz by linking him to the Nazis, and then declare that Russia and Ukraine should be given time to fight a little more.

“It happens in hockey. It happens in sports. The referee gives them a little more time, a couple of seconds. Let them run a little bit more, and then you have to stretch them out.” A penalty shot in hockey, like a penalty kick in football (I should mention here for those who are even less interested in sports than in dogs), is still called a “bullitt” in many places in the post-Soviet territories, and it has a lush ideological history. There is no sport more ideologized than the sport of authoritarian states. It is not surprising that Putin is hooking Trump with a proposal to organize a friendly hockey match between Russians and Americans (despite the fact that Russia and Belarus have been suspended by the International Ice Hockey Federation since the beginning of the full-scale invasion). But even if we ignore the inappropriate choice of words and look at the fact that these words describe, it is clear that Trump, no matter what the remaining hawks of the Republican Party do to him, is submissive to the tactics imposed by the Kremlin. And the Kremlin was not going to agree to any large-scale truce until the very end. That's why the next thing Trump says at the same meeting with Chancellor Merz is that if there is no peace, sanctions will have to be imposed. On both states.

In less than three weeks the NATO summit in The Hague will take place, where European partners will make every effort to prevent Trump from breaking up the alliance. Ukraine was invited (at the last minute), but it is still not clear in what status. The final declaration of the summit will be unusually brief to avoid attempts to downplay the promises made to Ukraine in Vilnius and Washington, D.C. That is, if Vilnius was perceived by many as an offensively weak summit, because they were waiting for an invitation to the alliance until the very last moment, this year we should be thankful for the absence of a mention of Ukraine in the document, because any mention risks significantly reducing our Euro-Atlantic expectations. And there is no reason to do so: Europe is still dependent on Russian gas, just as it has been until recently, and it is still dependent on the American military-industrial complex. And if Trump, for example, forbids sharing with Ukraine all technologies with traces of American development, real problems will begin. And we should not rely on the American system of so-called “checks and balances”: the Republicans have a monolithic majority in Congress, and this will not change until the fall of 2026, and it is not yet known whether it will change then. 

Let's face it: just like Republican Senator Kennedy, Trump is afraid to stand between a dog and... a smaller dog that behaves as if size doesn't matter. He does not understand Ukraine and will never understand Ukraine. In his world, we should have been afraid long ago and accepted the Russian ultimatum. And cease to exist in the information field, irritating the best negotiator on the planet.

But it's not scary. Every time I hear the new American acronym TACO, I am reminded of the pithy American name that was given to a speech by another Republican president, George W. Bush: Chicken Kyiv. What sounds to us like “cutlet in Kyiv” is perceived by English-speaking listeners as naturally as “coward in Kyiv.” This is how the then New York Times columnist William Safire christened Bush's speech to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. Arriving in Kyiv from Moscow, he sincerely (and against all local expectations) urged Ukrainians not to separate from the Soviet Union with the following words: “The Americans will not support those who seek independence to replace distant tyranny with local despotism. They will not help those who promote suicidal nationalism based on ethnic hatred.” The Communists gave Bush a standing ovation. 

23 days later, Ukraine declared independence.