Marco Rubio’s shoes revealed how Donald Trump’s team works behind the scenes many months ago. The White House owner personally presented them to his secretary of state (as well as to Vice President Vance). Whether he “guessed” correctly or honestly asked for their size — to which the men decided to significantly exaggerate it — is unclear. After all (I’ll skip the completely sensational details here), Trump, they say, associates size with character. And then they had to wear the shoes, and here the fear of looking ridiculous on camera turned out to be less than the fear that someone might tell Trump that his gift wasn’t being worn — or wasn’t being worn often enough — or with insufficient respect.

Primitive tribal psychology — anger, fear, arrogance, and the desire to belong to the chief’s inner circle — makes it impossible for the chief to receive accurate information. In primitive times, the leader himself could see all the factors necessary for making future decisions that prolonged or even improved the tribe’s existence, and when the leader began to make mistakes too often, he was replaced by one of his fierce successors. However, even the president of a country the size and with the budget of Ukraine — not to mention the president of the world’s largest economy, equipped with the most advanced military technology — can no longer rely solely on his own instincts, because he cannot see beyond his own office. The better his administration functions, the more up-to-date, appropriately structured, and refined for better comprehension the information reaches the person at the top.

But that's not our case.

There are no longer any “suicidal” people around Trump who are willing to risk both their reputation — by working for him — and their career — by opposing him, his family members, or his current favorites. Such people were still around in the administration during his previous term, but since then, everyone has learned their lesson. And Trump has genuinely decided that since he was re-elected after the storming of the Capitol, anything really goes now. Say anything, publish anything, do whatever he wants. It’s scary to say, but for a while, he was absolutely right — until he decided to wage a little war to celebrate his victory.

In 2020, Joe Biden pulled ahead not because he was the only strong candidate against Trump. COVID-19 and the White House’s inadequate response to the pandemic helped Biden win. In just a few months, masks had practically become part of the party’s symbolism. If you rode the metro without a mask in the U.S. capital, it was as if you were declaring out loud: “I’m voting for President Trump.” That’s why DC residents became so obsessed that they wouldn’t even take off their masks in the middle of the woods — I’m not joking, and I’m not exaggerating. Six years later, the Republicans’ crushing defeat — which can easily be compared to the elections of the 1970s following Watergate — is once again no cause for pride among Democrats. It’s simply that gas prices have risen by 50 percent because Trump decided to get involved in the very things he had accused his predecessor of, particularly a foreign policy that was unpopular with voters. At the same time, he (and Republican donors, see Elon Musk) poured an incredible amount of resources into the election. Even to me, someone half Trump’s age, his schedule for the last month seems incredibly hectic. He gave a speech somewhere every day. Every day he campaigned for someone. Every day, through these very efforts, he brought the Republican defeat closer, because he increasingly united against himself even those Americans who had voted for him two years ago — not to mention the frustration of the rest. This defeat turned out to be so crushing that Trump didn’t even resort to the tried-and-true method of refusing to acknowledge the election results — a move many analysts had feared — even after the storming of the Capitol. 

The blame game has begun, and — would you believe it or not — Ukraine isn’t being blamed for a single thing, just like during the election campaign. It’s a tiresome topic; it didn’t work, so they tossed it in the trash. After staying silent for a few hours and waiting for Trump to say it all himself, Vice President Vance posted a bombastic, column-length message on social media platform X, in which he directly blamed the war for the defeat. And who’s responsible for the war? The Secretary of War — that’s what he was named for. However, this may not help: some Republicans — such as current Texas Senator Cornyn, who will be replaced by a Democrat next January — are no longer shy about blaming Trump for their defeat and the party’s disaster. 

We’ve already seen how this played out after the crowd was incited to storm the Capitol: within a matter of hours, literally everyone had turned their backs on the still-sitting President of the United States — including the Vice President.

Given the tone J.D. Vance struck in his address to the public via Elon Musk’s social media platform (which poured billions into the election — money that could just as easily have been scattered from satellites to let them float around in space), one gets the impression that he decided to do the same thing, just two years earlier. Trump has become toxic again, but now on a much deeper level. Because there’s nothing deeper to an American from a one-story backwater town than the cost of a tank of gas for his car — without which he’s as good as legless. To be honest, Vance is far more dangerous than Trump. He’s just as unprincipled, but in some ways more relentless — and much younger. And he personally can’t stand Ukraine, which, back in the day, didn’t give him a “beautiful deal” and, on top of that, acted too arrogantly. This past April, for example, Vance called the suspension of aid to Ukraine one of the greatest achievements of his and Trump’s administration. 

However, we shouldn’t expect that, having won both chambers of Congress (at least seven new seats in the Senate — which is still hard to believe), the Democrats will start flooding Ukraine with their taxpayers’ money as early as February. 

First of all, even if they do start, Trump could easily avoid even vetoing the bill and simply choose not to spend the funds. That’s just how the executive branch works. Foreign policy is the prerogative of the President of the United States; he can even start a war without formal approval from Congress (not to mention consultations with allies) — a power that American presidents before Trump have exercised. 

Second, the Democrats will be focused solely on the presidential election, and the preparations for this race were kicked off by Vance’s policy post, along with a series of test statements from winners in battleground states. If the Democratic campaign decides that impeachment is more advantageous, there will be a third impeachment attempt. Or they’ll try to make a mockery of Trump in other ways, based on how much of a lame duck he now is — as they call presidents serving out their term after losing their supermajority… sorry, just the majority of votes in their own legislature. 

However, if you’ve lost a war somewhere and were even forced to admit it, you have to win at least something somewhere. You could, of course, escalate tensions in Iran — but even your own second-in-command is slowly chipping away at your power. 

That’s why there won’t be a more advantageous interlocutor for Xi and Putin in Shenzhen than Trump — if he does end up going there in mid-November. We may yet feel the consequences of this conversation — which, like his previous ones, will likely be documented only for show, if at all. They surely have plenty more good ideas in store for him.