The Department of Defense has been out of the war business for over a decade; no matter what Trump says, wants, orders etc, the US military simply will not move in force into Ukraine. The Houthi bombings is the absolute maximum military action the current US military will commit to, anything requiring a major force comittment is of the table — in case anyone is wondering why Iran hasn’t been attacked, Trump’s admin was probably planning on announcing martial law due to a war with Iran, but they found out that the DoD doesn’t do wars now so that purported / leaked martial law plan which was supposed to have been announced disappeared, All the right wing media figures doing nod-winks about Trump staying past the 2nd term were probably based on that. Now everybody has to pivot to Trump being an anti-war deal maker of peace because, like the Houthi bombing, what’s important is to pretend to be in charge so that a narrative can be spun. O peak clown world.
Anyway, what all this means for Ukraine is that Trump simply CAN’T provide the leverage he needs to make the Russians agree to a ceasefire, NEITHER does he have the power to make Ukraine accept it. Trump can’t order the military into Ukraine and end the war literally overnight — if that was a card which was available it would have been played the MOMENT it became available to Biden, right from day 1. To explain: there would be no fighting, just the announcement of the US entering the war would cause Putin to immediately pack it up and move forward with a ceasefire; there’s literally nothing he could do except just eat it and think of a way to get out of the US securing Ukraine in the future. But Putin launched the war and is continuing it because he judges that the US can’t or won’t send hard power to stop him.
So CAN Trump do? Extended sanctions? Russia is already the most sanctioned country in history, and there’s nothing left to do except to cut off their legal energy exports even futther. That’s not enough to stop him because of Russia’s enormous shadow fleet and under-the-table sales with Europe, support from China and Iran, etc. Sanctioning their legal sales even more will drive the price down further and piss off the other OPEC nations even more in the process. So it’ll hurt Russia but not enough to matter. What else? Nothing.
Nothing.
At all.
Because anything past that means doing an embargo of Russian energy — which requires a major effort by the US military (to shut down Russian ports and hunt down the shadow fleet), so, as discussed above, is off the table. Basically Trump needs hard power and there’s very little of that to go around for whatever reason (budget, readiness, etc). Europe is even worse shape than the US and even the DISCUSSION of military options in the EU is immediately shut down. It’s ludicrously bad that the EU is trying to push ReArm which is giving out LOANS for members to buy military capabilities because that’s only realistic way Europe can be expected to do significant military spending (the actual reason for the European MIC stocks going up, expectation of the ReArm loans going out) not any huge orders being placed atm).
Finally, what about the US just cutting off Ukraine enitrely from aid via Republican control of the legislature? Won’t happen. Why? Because the US-Ukraine project is run by the State Department which is massively powerful with influence networks stretching deep into the Legislature and so they will mobilize “traitor” Republicans to vote the right way even if Trump / MAGA makes it a priority to kill any new aid. EVEN IF more aid is killed the fact is that Russia has a peasant military without the ability to do large-scale operations so even if Ukraine got a lot weaker in terms of air defense and intel, the Russian pesant military doesn’t have the organizational power to actually exploit that weakness decisively. Europe can step in to replace the US’s logistics efforts and keep Ukraine in enough support to keep the conflict effectively frozen. Ukraine will be hurt more and Russia won’t eat any more long-range ecenomic strikes (only possible with US-provided ELINT) but this isn’t enough for Russia to overcome the fact that it’s a peasant military that simply cannot move in force. So the war will continue.
TLDR: Trump is powerless, the US will continue sending aid and the war will continue.