只有希拉里才能阻擋特朗普 Trump has the White House in his sights
Better late than never. It took eight months for Republicans to wake up to the fact that Donald Trump could make off with the party’s crown. After Marco Rubio’s clinical attacks on Mr Trump last week, the airwaves are suddenly awash with anti-Trump attack ads. But they are almost certainly too late to stop him. That task will fall to Hillary Clinton. It promises to be a spectacle unlike anything we have seen. America should brace for the strangest contest in its presidential history.
遲做總比不做好。共和黨人用了8個月時間才幡然醒悟：唐納德礠朗普(Donald Trump)可能最終贏得共和黨總統候選人資格。在上週馬可脠比奧(Marco Rubio)有理有據地抨擊特朗普後，媒體突然開始充斥攻擊特朗普的競選廣告。但幾乎可以肯定的是，阻止特朗普爲時已晚。這項任務將落在希拉裏克林頓(Hillary Clinton)身上。這必將是一場我們從未見過的奇觀。美國人應爲本國總統制歷史上最奇特的一場競選做好準備。
All things being equal, the outcome should not be in doubt — Mrs Clinton’s victory. Yet there is nothing remotely equal about America in 2016. All that is solid is melting into air. It was not just the Republicans who misread the Trump threat. Just three months ago, Nate Silver, the guru of election forecasters, stuck to his earlier prediction that Mr Trump had only a 2 per cent chance of taking the Republican nomination. He now puts that at 45 to 50 per cent. That still seems too low.
不出意外的話，結果將毋庸置疑——希拉里獲得勝選。然而，在2016年的美國，一切都在變。不只是共和黨未能識破特朗普的威脅。就在3個月前，選舉預測大師納特纏爾弗(Nate Silver)還堅持自己早些時候的預測——特朗普贏得共和黨總統候選人提名的機率只有2%。如今，他將這一機率提升至45%至50%。這看起來仍然過低。
The bookies, meanwhile, give Mr Trump a one in four chance of becoming the next US president. That may also be too low.
與此同時，博彩公司認爲特朗普成爲下屆美國總統的機率爲25%。或許同樣過低。
How could he pull it off? The demography is stacked against him. As a rule of thumb, Democrats are assured of victory if they take 80 per cent of the non-white vote and 40 per cent of the white vote. The first part ought to be easy. Hispanics, African-Americans, Muslims and others will come out in droves to vote against Mr Trump.
他是怎樣做到的呢？人口結構因素對他並不利。根據經驗判斷，如果民主黨能獲得非白種人80%的選票以及白人40%的選票，就確定能夠獲勝。獲得第一部分選票應該不難。拉美裔、非洲裔美國人、穆斯林及其他族羣將成羣結隊地投票反對特朗普。
It is the white vote — and particularly white males — that ought to worry Mrs Clinton. Blue collar whites are America’s angriest people. They feel belittled, trod upon and discarded. The future belongs neither to them nor their children. Mrs Clinton personifies an establishment that has taken everything for itself while talking down to those it has left behind. Mr Trump is their revenge.
應該讓希拉里擔憂的是白人的選票——尤其是白人男性。藍領白人是美國最憤怒的羣體。他們感覺自己被輕視、被踐踏、被拋棄。未來既不屬於他們，也不屬於他們的後代。希拉里代表着自私自利、不把被拋在後面的人放在眼裏的當權派。選擇特朗普可以讓他們雪恥。
His greatest weakness is that he has no policies. As Mr Rubio exposed in last week’s debate, the New York property developer has little clue what healthcare system he would substitute for Obamacare, which he promises to abolish. Nor does he have an idea how his tax plan would work.
特朗普最大的弱點在於他拿不出任何政策。正如魯比奧在上週的辯論中所言，這名紐約房地產大亨根本不知道將用怎樣的醫保體系來取代他承諾要廢除的“奧巴馬醫改”(Obamacare)。他也不知道自己的稅收計劃要如何開展。
Much like estimates of his personal wealth, Mr Trump’s tax cut would be huge — at $10tn it is far larger than anyone else’s. That is about it. The same applies to his plans to bring peace to the Middle East. He merely asserts that he would be the best deal maker the region has ever seen. The only subject on which Mr Trump speaks with any detail or fluency is his poll numbers, which he rattles off like a caffeinated auctioneer.
就像對他個人財富的估值一樣，特朗普的減稅幅度將是巨大的——10萬億美元，遠遠大於任何其他參選人的方案。除此之外就什麼也沒說了。他爲中東帶來和平的計劃也是如此。他只是斷言自己將成爲該地區有史以來最佳的調停者。特朗普唯一能夠詳細或流暢談論的主題就是自己的民意支持率——他可以像一位打了雞血的拍賣師一樣滔滔不絕。
But not having policies is also Mr Trump’s greatest strength. It makes him nimble. He can discard whatever Republican orthodoxy he felt obliged to adopt and pivot to Mrs Clinton’s left in a general election. If you want to take on Wall Street — something the country is itching to do — vote for the man who has continually outwitted the banks in his bankruptcy-ridden career. While Mrs Clinton was giving $225,000 speeches to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — transcripts that she still refuses to release, by the way — Mr Trump was imposing haircuts on his creditors. Mr Trump may be a “con artist”, as Mr Rubio is belatedly pointing out. But he knows how to make a deal. He also knows what America’s middle classes want to hear. Mr Trump will protect their entitlements, scale down costly overseas military bases and revamp trade deals with China, Mexico and others.
但是，沒有具體政策也是特朗普最大的優勢。這讓他表現得靈活。他可以拋棄自己認爲根據共和黨傳統立場必須接受的任何觀點，並在大選中偏向希拉里的左派觀點。如果你想拿華爾街開刀——全美國都渴望這麼做——那麼就把票投給這個在從事破產業務的職業生涯中智勝銀行的人吧。儘管希拉里曾收取22.5萬美元在高盛(Goldman Sachs)和摩根士丹利(Morgan Stanley)發表演講——順便說一下，她仍拒對外界公開演講稿——而特朗普則迫使他的債權人進行資產減記。正如魯比奧（說得太晚了）指出的那樣，特朗普或許是一個“行騙高手”。但他知道如何做成交易。他也知道美國的中產階層想聽什麼。特朗普將保護他們的權利，減少代價高昂的海外軍事基地，並修改與中國和墨西哥等國的貿易協議。
The chances are that Mr Trump would still lose in a landslide to Mrs Clinton. Over the coming days and weeks, Republican-affiliated funding groups will air advertisements that feature the victims of Trump Inc. These will include people who paid $35,000 to study real estate management at Trump University only to discover it was not what it was cracked up to be. They will feature Americans who tried to find work at Mr Trump’s luxury Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida only to discover the jobs had been taken by imported Romanians. They will also include victims of Mr Trump’s ruthless use of eminent domain — the power of the state to compel people to sell land needed for public projects — to evict people unlucky enough to be living near one of his casinos.
特朗普可能慘敗給希拉里。在未來的幾天和幾周裏，支持共和黨的募資團體將發佈以“特朗普公司”(Trump Inc)受害者爲主題的廣告。其中包括那些支付3.5萬美元在“特朗普大學”(Trump University)學習不動產管理的人——他們最終發現教學水平根本達不到該校自吹自擂的水平。廣告中還將出現那些嘗試在特朗普在佛羅里達州的馬阿拉歌俱樂部(Mar-a-Lago)度假勝地找份工作的人——他們最終發現工作崗位都給了外來的俄羅斯人。也將出現特朗普魯莽使用徵地權的受害者——不幸的是，他們居住的地方距離特朗普所經營的俱樂部太近了。徵地權是指州政府爲建設公共工程而強迫民衆賣地的權力。
You can bet that white victims will feature prominently. Look at how Mr Trump treats the little guy, they will say. His campaign is a fraud.
你可以斷定，白人受害者將是這些廣告中的重要角色。他們將說，看看特朗普是如何對待這個“小傢伙”的。他的競選充滿欺騙。
All of which may be true. But they are almost certainly too late to stop Mr Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican party. Mrs Clinton, on the other hand, has plenty of time to acquaint voters with Mr Trump’s biography before the general election. Do not expect her to hold back. She will mercilessly expose his thin grasp of policy. He does not even know what a “nuclear triad” is for goodness sake. He believes global warming is a hoax dreamt up by China to con America into shutting down its manufacturing. He thinks that Mexico will pay for a wall to keep Mexicans out.
所有這一切或許是真的。但是，他們要阻止特朗普“敵意收購”共和黨，幾乎註定是太遲了。另一方面，在大選之前，希拉里有足夠的時間讓選民瞭解特朗普的生平。不要指望她會有所保留。她將無情地暴露特朗普不懂政策的形象。天啊，他竟然連“三位一體核力量”都不知道。他認爲，全球變暖是中國捏造的一個騙局，意在哄騙美國關閉自己的工廠。他覺得，墨西哥應該出錢造一面牆，把墨西哥人擋在美國外面。
When it boils down to it, most Americans would not want such a person in the White House — or so believe the best and the brightest. A Trump presidency is too preposterous to imagine, they say. They may be right on that. But so far in this cycle they have been wrong about everything else. Should we put faith in their judgment now?
總之，大多數美國人不會希望這樣的人入主白宮——或者說，最優秀、最聰明的美國人是這麼認爲的。他們說，讓特朗普當總統太荒謬了。他們在這一點上或許是對的。但在這個競選週期中，迄今爲止，他們在其他方面的看法都是錯誤的。那麼，我們現在應該相信他們的判斷嗎？
