特朗普与美国民主的命运

On Human Rights Day last month, Donald Trump’s White House issued a statement in support of those suffering under the “yolk” of authoritarianism. Cue the inevitable puns about egg on White House faces. Amid a constant stream of Trumpian typos, this ranked among the best. It captured the indolence of an understaffed presidency that is barely going through the motions. Details are revealing. But you do not need to be a copy-editor to know that Trump cares little about human rights. The error captured the span of Trump’s persona — entertaining and chilling at the same time.

在上月的人权日，唐纳德?特朗普(Donald Trump)领导下的白宫发表声明支持在威权主义“蛋黄”(yolk)下受苦的人。这让人不可避免地想到有关鸡蛋砸在白宫脸上的双关语。在特朗普频频出现拼写错误的情况下，这已经算得上最佳句子之列了。它反映出人手不足的特朗普政府的懈怠，他们只是在得过且过地混日子。细节说明问题。但你不需要成为文字编辑就可以知道特朗普并不关心人权问题。这次错误体现了特朗普性格特点的跨度——既充满娱乐性又令人不寒而栗。

The same applies to Michael Wolff’s controversial book about Trump, Fire and Fury. The furore around it has already ended Trump’s alliance with Steve Bannon, his alt-right alter-ego, who is also Wolff’s biggest source. On Tuesday Bannon quit his job as head of Breitbart News, having lost the confidence of his financial backers. He is surely now regretting having spoken so candidly to the author. Wolff may or may not deserve his reputation as a chancer — a journalist who allegedly disrespects the meaning of “off the record” and embellishes reconstructed scenes. I do not know him personally. But having conducted my own off-the-record conversations with Bannon and others, I find his book to be largely credible.

迈克尔?沃尔夫(Michael Wolff)所著关于特朗普的充满争议的《火与怒：特朗普白宫内幕》(Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House)一书也是如此。该书引发的轩然大波已经让特朗普与其盟友兼知己、另类右翼的史蒂夫?班农(Steve Bannon)决裂，后者也是沃尔夫最大的信息来源。上周二，班农辞去Breitbart News执行主席一职，因为他的金主对他失去了信心。他现在肯定很后悔对沃尔夫如此坦言。沃尔夫作为投机者的名声可能名副其实，也可能名不副实——他是一名据说无视“不得引用发表”的意思、喜欢渲染再现场景的记者。我个人不认识沃尔夫，但我自己与班农等人进行过“不得引用发表”的交谈，我觉得他的书基本上是可信的。

He paints a White House in which virtually no one has any respect left for the president and where the staff are in “a state of queasy sheepishness, if not constant incredulity”. Both Reince Priebus, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, and Steven Mnuchin, his Treasury secretary, are quoted as calling the president an “idiot”. Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic adviser, reportedly describes him as “dumb as shit”. We already knew that Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, thinks the president is a “f***ing moron”. For good measure, Rupert Murdoch, whose approval Trump craves, apparently called him a “f***ing idiot”. I doubt it needs spelling out but this is not a suitable book for family reading. Meanwhile, Ivanka Trump is “dumb as a brick”, according to Bannon, while Donald Trump Junior is “Fredo” — the low-IQ sibling in the movie The Godfather. But where is Don Corleone? In his bedroom on the phone complaining to his friends, it seems.

他刻画了一个几乎没有人尊重总统的白宫，而且那里的工作人员处于一种“令人厌烦的不安状态，甚至是持续的怀疑状态”。据说特朗普前白宫幕僚长雷恩斯?普里巴斯(Reince Priebus)及财政部长史蒂文?姆努钦(Steven Mnuchin)都称他为“白痴”。据报道，特朗普的首席经济顾问加里?科恩(Gary Cohn)形容他“蠢得像屎”。我们已经知道，国务卿雷克斯?蒂勒森(Rex Tillerson)认为总统是“他妈的蠢蛋”。另外，鲁珀特?默多克(Rupert Murdoch)显然把他称为“他妈的白痴”，而特朗普是那么希望获得默多克的认可。我不确定是不是要说得这么直白，不过它不是一本适合家庭阅读的图书。与此同时，据班农说，伊万卡?特朗普(Ivanka Trump)“蠢得像砖头”，而小唐纳德?特朗普(Donald Trump Jr)则是电影《教父》(The Godfather)中的低智商哥哥“弗雷多”(Fredo)。但唐?科莱奥内（Don Corleone，即教父——译者注）在哪儿呢？他似乎是在卧室里向朋友们打电话抱怨。

Axios, the email-based newsletter, revealed last week that Trump is cutting his office hours ever shorter. He now only emerges for appointments at around 11am — two hours later than when he started the job. He often concludes his lightly scheduled routine before 6pm then retires to the presidential apartment upstairs. There he is surrounded by three giant flatscreen televisions and likes to order a cheeseburger, make “self-pitying calls to friends” and send tweets, says Wolff. John Kelly, the retired general and White House chief of staff, whom Wolff claims can barely conceal his distaste for the president, has professionalised Trump’s Oval Office day. People can no longer wander in and out at will. Trump’s response has been to curtail the hours that Kelly controls.

基于电子邮件的新闻通讯网站Axios近期透露，特朗普正在日益缩短办公时间。他现在在上午11点左右才现身办公——比他刚上台的时候晚了两个小时。沃尔夫说，他经常在下午6点之前结束一天的轻松日程，然后到楼上的总统套房休息。他在楼上被三台巨大的平板电视环绕，喜欢点上一个芝士汉堡，“自怨自艾地给朋友打上一通电话”，并发送推文。退休将军、白宫幕僚长约翰?凯利(John Kelly)规范了特朗普椭圆形办公室的工作流程——据沃尔夫说，凯利几乎不能掩饰自己对总统的厌恶。人们不再能随意进出。特朗普的回应是缩短凯利控制的时间。

The journalist Joe Scarborough asked Trump whom he most trusted, according to Wolff: “The answer is me,” said Trump. “I talk to myself.” For those around him, it is a losing battle. Trump will always win. It is “like trying to figure out what a child wants,” says Katie Walsh, a former White House official who left last year (though she has disputed some of Wolff’s quotes).

据沃尔夫称，记者乔?斯卡伯勒(Joe Scarborough)曾问特朗普最信任谁？特朗普说：“答案是我。我和自己说话。”对他身边的人来说，这是一场必输的战斗。特朗普总是会赢。去年离职的白宫官员凯蒂?沃尔什(Katie Walsh)表示，“这就像试图弄清楚一个孩子想要什么一样”（尽管她对沃尔夫的一些引述有所质疑）。

Doubtless some of Wolff’s examples are cherry-picked. There must be occasions where Trump uses a grammatically correct sentence, or reads a briefing sheet to the end. There are surely some officials who retain loyalty to their president. But the spirit of Wolff’s narrative rings true amid suspicion over some of the details. In one quoted email purporting to represent the views of Gary Cohn, Trump’s White House is cruelly depicted as “an idiot surrounded by clowns”. The truth is that the Trump administration has no Don Corleone. Yet in spite of lacking a respected authority figure, the show is likely to go on. To work out why, readers should turn to David Frum’s Trumpocracy and How Democracies Die, a slim volume by two Harvard academics, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

毫无疑问，沃尔夫举的一些例子是精心挑选的。特朗普肯定有使用语法正确的句子或者一直读完简报的时候。肯定有一些官员仍然忠于他们的总统。虽然一些细节令人怀疑，但沃尔夫叙事的基调听来真实可靠。在一封据称代表盖瑞?柯恩(Gary Cohn)观点的引用电子邮件中，特朗普领导的白宫被无情地描绘成“一个白痴被一群小丑包围”。真相是，特朗普政府没有“教父”。然而，尽管缺乏受人尊敬的权威人物，表演很可能仍会继续。要想弄清原因，读者应该去看看戴维?弗拉姆(David Frum)的《特朗普统治：美国共和国的腐败》(Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic)，以及哈佛学者史蒂文?列维茨基(Steven Levitsky)和丹尼尔?齐布拉特(Daniel Ziblatt)合著的小篇幅著作《民主制度如何死亡》(How Democracies Die)。

Frum, a former speech writer to George W Bush and one of the most articulate “Never Trumpers”, asks how a man like Trump could have reached high office in the first place. One answer is that Trump does possess real skills. Among these is an almost diabolical knack for divining other people’s resentments — perhaps because he is riddled with so many of his own. Trump often tries out different applause lines at rallies and sticks with the ones that resonate. Such market testing appears to work. He has an ability to identify with people who feel slighted. Wolff describes how on a tour of Atlantic City with foreign investors many years ago, Trump was asked to define “white trash”. He replied: “They’re people just like me, only they’re poor.” Trump converted their frustrations into electoral gold.

曾在小布什(George W Bush)政府担任发言稿作者的弗拉姆是最旗帜鲜明地表达“永远不要特朗普”(Never Trump)的人之一。弗拉姆发问，特朗普这样的人到底是如何当上总统的？一个答案是，特朗普确实有两把刷子。比如，特朗普几乎可以像魔鬼一样感知他人的愤怒——可能是因为他本人也充满了这种情绪。特朗普经常在集会上试用不同的“金句”来博得掌声，然后一直使用那些能够奏效的语句。这种市场测试法看起来是有效的。特朗普还擅长与那些觉得自己被轻视的人群建立联系。据沃尔夫描述，多年前特朗普陪同外国投资者参观大西洋城时，有人问他“白种垃圾”是什么意思。当时特朗普回答：“他们就像我一样，只不过他们很穷。”特朗普把这些人的挫败感转变成了自己的选举资本。

Much of their plight is real. Between the late 1990s and 2015, according to Frum, non-college-educated white Americans went from 30 per cent less likely to 30 per cent more likely to die in their fifties than non-college-educated African-Americans. White males account for just under a third of America’s population but over two-thirds of its suicides. Yet white working-class America’s collapsing morale has been downplayed by mainstream society. In the year leading up to Trump’s election victory, the word “transgender” appeared in The New York Times 1,169 times. The word “opioid” appeared just 284 times.

这些人的困窘是实实在在的。根据弗拉姆提供的数字，在上世纪90年代末，与未接受过大学教育的非裔美国人相比，未接受过大学教育的美国白人在五十多岁死亡的风险要低30%；然而到了2015年，他们的风险要高30%。男性白人占美国人口总数的比例略低于三分之一，却占美国自杀人口的逾三分之二。然而美国白人工薪阶级颓丧的精神状态却被主流社会轻描淡写地带过。在特朗普赢得大选的那年，“变性人”一词在《纽约时报》(New York Times)出现了1169次。而“鸦片类物质”一词才出现了284次。

Now picture Trump in his tweet on December 25 2016, standing in front of a Christmas tree with his fist clenched in defiance; “We’ll all be saying Merry Christmas again!” had been the refrain. That image captured the rage against political correctness that fuelled his campaign. It also expressed the mythology. No American was banned from saying “Merry Christmas”. But people started to repeat Trump’s line. They are still doing so. As the writer Dale Beran, quoted by Frum, puts it: “Trump supporters voted for the con-man, the labyrinth with no centre, because the labyrinth with no centre is how they feel.”

想一想特朗普在2016年12月25日发的推文中的形象：他站在圣诞树前攥紧拳头，摆出一副反抗的姿态；再弹起“我们大家又能说圣诞快乐了！”这样的老调。这样的形象表达出对政治正确的怒火，而这怒火正是他竞选的“东风”。这个形象也传达了一种谬误。实际上没有哪个美国人被禁止说“圣诞快乐”，但人们却开始重复特朗普的口号。到今天依旧如此。就像弗拉姆引用作家戴尔?贝兰(Dale Beran)的话：“特朗普的支持者把票投给了骗子，投给了没有中心的迷宫，因为没有中心的迷宫就是他们的感受。”

Trumpocracy is a far more rewarding book than Fire and Fury. The significance of Trump’s administration goes so much deeper than Wolff’s “idiot and clown” account. Trump’s fate will shape the future of liberal democracy. That is what makes it so alarming. As Frum points out: “Democracy is a work in progress. So is democracy’s undoing.” All it takes is for good men, and women, to do nothing. Just over a third of Republican senators called on Trump to quit the race after the Access Hollywood tapes were released in October 2016. He ignored them. Thirty-two minutes after the “pussy-grabbing” transcript came out, WikiLeaks dumped its largest cache of Hillary Clinton emails to date, including those of John Podesta, her campaign manager. Most of those Republican senators are now firmly behind Trump. Roughly half of the conservative intellectuals who signed the famous “Never Trump” letter published by the National Review during the campaign have now fallen into line behind Trump.

《特朗普统治》比《火与怒》更值得一读。特朗普政府的影响要远比沃尔夫所说的“白痴与小丑”深刻。特朗普的命运也将决定自由民主制度的未来。这正是可怕的地方。就像弗拉姆指出的那样：“民主是一项正在进行的工作。民主的失败也是如此。”要使民主失败，只需要好人的不作为。2016年10月，《走进好莱坞》(Access Hollywood)的一段录音曝出后，仅有略多于三分之一的共和党参议员呼吁特朗普退出竞选。特朗普无视了他们。“抓私处”那段录音的文字稿曝光后32分钟，维基解密(WikiLeak)就对希拉里?克林顿(Hillary Clinton)的邮件进行了到那时为止最大的一次披露，其中包括希拉里竞选团队主席约翰?波德斯塔(John Podesta)的邮件。现在，那些之前呼吁特朗普退选的共和党参议员中，大部分人坚定地站在了特朗普的身后。在大选期间，曾在《国家评论》(National Review)发表的著名的“永远不要特朗普”公开信上签名的保守派知识分子，有大约一半人加入了特朗普的行列。

Trump’s inauguration committee raised $107m — twice the previous record — with donations from financiers who had previously shunned Trump. Paul Singer, the “Never Trump” hedge fund billionaire, donated $1m. In the first four months of 2017, the Trump International Hotel in Washington took in $4.1m more in revenues than projected at a time when other hotels’ occupancy rates were flat or declining. Meanwhile, senior Republican figures such as Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House of Representatives, now routinely sing Trump’s praises. The party’s gatekeepers have decided to swallow their doubts. “It is their public actions, despite their private qualms, that sustain Trumpocracy,” writes Frum.

特朗普的就职委员会从之前回避特朗普的金融家手中筹集了1.07亿美元的捐款，这是之前纪录的两倍。曾支持“永远不要特朗普”运动的对冲基金亿万富翁保罗?辛格(Paul Singer)捐了100万美元。2017年前四个月，位于华盛顿的特朗普国际酒店(Trump International Hotel)的收入比预期高410万美元，而同期其他酒店入住率持平或下降。与此同时，像众议院议长保罗?瑞恩(Paul Ryan)这样的共和党资深人物也开始例行公事地对特朗普大唱赞歌。党内的看门人也决定把质疑咽回肚子里。“尽管他们私下里有顾虑，但正是他们的公开行动，维系了特朗普统治。”弗拉姆写道。

Where does it go from here? The great strength of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die is that it rejects the exceptionalist account of US democracy. Their lens is comparative. The authors say America is not immune to the trends that have led to democracy’s collapse in other parts of the world. “Even though we know democracies are always fragile, the one in which we live has somehow managed to defy gravity,” they write. “Our constitutional system, while older and more robust than any in history, is vulnerable to the same pathologies that have killed democracy elsewhere.”

“特朗普统治”何去何从？列维茨基和齐布拉特所著的《民主制度如何死亡》的出色之处在于，该书摈弃了认为美国民主制例外的说法。他们采用了对比的方法。两位作者认为，美国无法避开导致世界其他地区民主制度崩溃的趋势。“尽管我们知道民主制度总是很脆弱，但我们所生活的这个民主国家过去却一直以某种方式成功避免崩溃，”他们写道，“我们的宪法体系虽然比历史上任何其他宪法体系都古老和强大，但它也会患上杀死其他地方民主制度的疾病。”

Since the turn of this century, according to the Stanford scholar Larry Diamond, no fewer than 25 countries have ceased to be democratic. In almost all cases this happened by stealth within an existing system that retained outwardly democratic trappings. Think of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey or Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Gone are the days of military coups. During the cold war, coups d’état accounted for three-quarters of democratic breakdowns. Today they barely feature. “The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy — gradually, subtly, and even legally — to kill it,” they write.

斯坦福大学(Stanford University)的学者拉里?戴蒙德(Larry Diamond)认为，自从进入本世纪以来，至少25个国家不再实行民主制度。几乎所有案例都是在仍然保留民主外壳的现有体制中悄然发生的。想一想雷杰普?塔伊普?埃尔多安(Recep Tayyip Erdogan)领导的土耳其或者欧尔班?维克托(Viktor Orban)领导的匈牙利。军事政变的时代已经一去不复返。在冷战时期，政变导致了四分之三的民主垮台事件。如今政变几乎毫无踪影。他们写道：“从选举走向威权主义的可悲悖论在于，刺杀民主的刺客正是利用民主制度——循序渐进、隐秘、甚至合法地——杀死它。”

They set out four tests for whether a democracy is in danger. Trump fulfils them all. The first is when an elected leader rejects the democratic rules of the game. Trump more than meets this test. Campaigning against Hillary Clinton in 2016, he threatened to “lock her up” and said the poll would be “rigged”. Since then he has alleged electoral fraud and repeatedly vowed to use the vast law enforcement powers at his disposal to investigate the defeated Democratic candidate. The second test is whether the leader rejects the legitimacy of his opponents. Ditto. The third is whether he tolerates or encourages violence. During the campaign he encouraged supporters to beat up protesters and even defray their legal costs. Since becoming president, he has goaded law enforcement officers to beat up immigrants and other arrestees. The final one is whether the leader is willing to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including the media. Trump almost daily accuses the media of bias and threatens them with libel action. It took Trump’s lawyers less than 48 hours to issue a “cease and desist” threat to Wolff’s publishers.

他们进行了4项测试，来检验民主制度目前是否处于危险之中。特朗普全都符合。第一项是，民选领导人是否拒绝遵守竞选的民主规则。特朗普符合得不能再符合了。2016年与希拉里竞争时，特朗普威胁要“把她关起来”并称民调结果将被“操纵”。从那之后，他一直宣称选举舞弊并再三发誓要利用他手中强大的执法权来调查那位被打败的民主党候选人。第二项测试是，这位领导人是否拒绝承认其对手的合法性。同上。第三项是，他是否容忍或鼓励暴力行为。在竞选期间，他鼓励支持者殴打抗议者，甚至为他们支付法律费用。自从就任总统后，他鼓励执法人员殴打移民和其他被捕者。最后一项是，领导人是否愿意剥夺反对者（包括媒体在内）的公民自由。特朗普几乎每天都指责媒体对其有偏见并以诽谤诉讼来威胁他们。特朗普的律师用了不到48小时就对沃尔夫的出版方提出“停止并终止”威胁。

As these authors diligently show, and Frum eloquently argues, democracy is based on norms rather than rules. The system is only as good as the people who uphold it. Plenty of Latin American democracies adopted the US constitution almost word for word. It offered them little protection against the depredations of strongmen. According to Wolff, Trump does not even understand the basics of the US Constitution. An aide who was asked to explain it to him stopped after the Fourth Amendment — Trump’s mind had wandered elsewhere. The only people who hold real sway in his White House are his “shamelessly grasping extended family,” says Frum.

正如这些作者极力表明、以及弗拉姆以雄辩说明的那样，民主制度的基础是规范、而不是规则。民主制度的好坏只会和拥护者的水平一致。很多拉美民主国家几乎一字不差地照搬了美国宪法。但面对政治强人的蹂躏，这根本没有为他们提供多少保护。沃尔夫认为，特朗普甚至不理解美国宪法的基本内容。被请来向他解释美国宪法的助手在说完《第四修正案》(Fourth Amendment)后就停下来了——特朗普早已神游到别的地方。弗拉姆表示，在白宫内唯一真正有支配力的人是他“贪婪无耻的大家庭”。

That may be true. But American democracy’s ultimate arbiters are those on Capitol Hill, in the federal bureaucracy, in the media and elsewhere who have the power to block or enable him. Whether Trump’s White House heralds a new phase in American politics — or a grotesque aberration — is in the hands of those whose names we may not know. Above all else, the secret sauce of democracy is the integrity of people.

这可能是事实。但是美国民主制度的最终裁决者是国会议员、联邦机构官员、媒体以及其他有能力阻止或支持他的人。特朗普执掌的白宫是否宣告美国政治进入新阶段——或是进入荒诞的偏差——答案掌握在那些我们可能从未听过的人的手中。最重要的是，民主的秘诀是人民团结。