King Charles III formally opened the new British Parliament on Wednesday. France was still operating on autopilot, with President Macron’s only recently appointed prime minister having resigned with a thud. The caretaker government may be able to steer the weary country but the task of managing the Olympic games might throw it off course. There might be riots. There is also a war in Ukraine, and it’s not going so well.

Despite all of the above and more, about the only thing anyone seems to be talking about from Faro to the Finland Station is the political drama in America and its lead protagonist, the 45th president. Surviving an assassination attempt, it appears, will do wonders for kicking the baseline European fascination for all things America into a kind of Continental overdrive. 

The drama of the fast-moving pace of events, including the attempt on the life of the former president, provide some shelter from the storm but that will likely be no more than a fleeting distraction as the weight of other developments presses. One of those is Ukraine, the subject of considerable discord.

The prospect of diminished aid to the struggling nation under a Trump-Vance ticket is already reverberating across all parts of the Continent that aren’t British. This week the Germans announced they will be cutting Ukraine aid by half next year, Der Spiegel reports.

That would bring the relevant spending down to a little more than $4 billion. Germany’s ministry of defense sought an additional $6 billion, approximately, but  the Council of Ministers prevailed. They reportedly took into account the EU’s plan to freeze Russian assets that are still located in Europe and did some number crunching before deciding on the cuts.

More significant is brewing dissent at the pan-European level. This week the European Parliament approved a non-binding resolution on support for Ukraine with a breakdown of 495 in favor, 137 against, and 47 abstentions. The Italians, notably, were divided. 

The resolution included the condemnation of the recent visit of 

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to Moscow and notably, Italy’s far right League party voted against it. Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party abstained on that point — the Italian prime minister is a supporter of President Zelensky, but on virtually every other issue besides Ukraine she is aligned with Mr. Orbán.

According to a report in Corriere della Sera, the head of the Italians’ delegation, Carlo Fidanza, stated that “as for the paragraph concerning the initiatives of the Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán, despite having already judged them critically in recent days, we voted against the first part which contained an instrumental attack on the Hungarian government that has nothing to do with the fate of Ukraine.” He added that “we supported the portions concerning the Kyiv Peace Plan and hope that Hungary itself will unblock the funding in favor of Ukraine.”

In other words, Hungary’s peace plan is anything but objective, positing as it does that it is America and the EU which are isolated on the global stage and not Moscow and Beijing. Hungary currently holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, and Mr. Orbán is using that role to the hilt as his recent trip to Moscow demonstrated. 

Yet his pro-Russia stance puts him squarely at odds with the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, who wrote to the ever-Eurosceptic Mr. Orban in a public letter  that he “cannot accept your claims that the EU has conducted a policy in favor of war.  It is the opposite. Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine is the victim exercising its legitimate right to self-defense.”

That is true, but if part of this muddle is that it seems to be too much overlapping bureaucracy at Brussels, that is because there is. All the European players with the possible exceptions of the leaders of Russia and Ukraine  find themselves bystanders while one man in particular drives the narrative: Donald Trump. 

Or, as Mr. Orbán has it, “Trump, immediately after his electoral victory, will be ready to act immediately as a mediator: he has detailed and well-founded plans.”

From now until the end of December, it seems, Europeans will be trying to fence Hungary in as President Zelensky, even while pressing for more F-16s, eyes a new summit in November. 

Could Donald Trump be the only force with the power to knock some sense into a continent where equilibrium is a rapidly diminishing commodity? Until autumn it seems as though Europeans will remain spellbound by the news from young and wild America but otherwise paralyzed — when they are not firing squirt guns at tourists, that is.