大选之夜甚至还没到11点——这几乎是现任总统所属政党有史以来最惨的大选之夜——唐纳德·特朗普首次发表了看法。数周来，他奔走全国，坚称选民应当像他本人在选票上一样投票，并主张这场竞选应成为对其本人及其政策的公投。但特朗普的第一反应却是推卸所有责任。“我并不在选票上，如果我在，我们会大获全胜！”他挑衅地发帖称。
It wasn’t even 11 on Election Night—the worst Election Night for an incumbent President’s party pretty much ever—when Donald Trump weighed in for the first time. For weeks he had travelled the country, insisting that voters act as though he were on the ballot and that the campaign should be a referendum on him and his policies. But Trump’s first response was to disclaim all responsibility. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he posted defiantly.
几分钟后，他指责得克萨斯州州长格雷格·阿博特导致其本人竞选失利，声称这位国内最保守的政客之一之所以落败，是因为阿博特变成了“RINO”——仅有共和党名号的人。又过几分钟，特朗普发布了一张红色棒球帽的图片，帽檐上印着“”字样。午夜前不久，他又将矛头指向曾经最喜爱的电视网。“福克斯新闻，”他抱怨道，“应对这些失利负责，因为它持续不断地安排‘民粹党’反对派上节目，甚至更糟。”
A few minutes later, he blamed the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, for losing his own race, claiming that one of the most conservative politicians in the country had been defeated because Abbott had become “a RINO”—a Republican in name only. A few minutes after that, Trump posted an image of a red baseball cap with the word “” emblazoned on it. By just before midnight, he was saying it was all because of his formerly favorite TV network. “Fox News,” he complained, “bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse.”Yes, we get it.
是的，我们明白了。他不会悄然退场，也不会承认过错。落败时的特朗普依然是特朗普。“我不该感到内疚，”他对福克斯新闻的布雷特·贝耶说，“这只是一个时间节点。”但周二晚清算的规模之大，连他撒谎、掩饰、百般推诿的本领也无法掩盖。当全美选民都拒绝你时，要窃取大选实在太难了。这些是总统自己的选民，就在几年前，他在这些州还以巨大优势获胜。
He’s not going to go quietly. He’s not going to accept blame. Trump in defeat is still Trump. “I shouldn’t feel guilty,” he told Bret Baier, of Fox News. “It’s just a point in time.”But the scale of Tuesday night’s reckoning defies even his ability to lie, dissemble, and generally squirm his way out of it. It is really hard to steal an election when voters all across America reject you. These were the President’s own voters, in states where he won by huge margins just a couple of years ago.
到周三上午，J·D·万斯承认，问题不在于共和党选民没出来投票，而在于他们出来了。“主要问题是，许多2024年投特朗普/万斯票的人，在2026年投了民主党票，”他在社交媒体上写道。现实，哪怕只是暂时，刺破了白宫的泡沫。
By Wednesday morning, J. D. Vance admitted it wasn’t that Republicans failed to show up but that they did. “The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026,” he wrote on social media. Reality, if only temporarily, burst the White House bubble.
即使是特朗普及其亲信也清楚，爱荷华州、堪萨斯州、密歇根州、北卡罗来纳州、南卡罗来纳州和得克萨斯州不可能串通一气、共同操纵选举结果。这场正义的“蓝色浪潮”诞生于红色的美国腹地。
Even Trump and his cronies know that Iowa and Kansas and Michigan and North Carolina and South Carolina and Texas did not all conspire together to rig the outcome. This righteous blue wave was made in red America.
无论他日后如何辩解——我毫不怀疑他将花费数年时间假装刚刚发生的一切从未发生——特朗普自己也心知肚明。即便在他惨败的全貌尚在逐渐清晰之际，他仍对表示，他“完全愿意”接受那些他过去两年一直在准备要予以质疑的结果。
Whatever he may say later—and I have no doubt he will spend years pretending that what just happened somehow did not just happen—Trump knows it, too. Even as the scale of the disaster for him was still becoming clear, he told the that he was “absolutely willing” to accept the results that he’d spent the past two years preparing to contest.
就现在乃至永远而言，2026年的中期选举将被视为自1974年理查德·尼克松登上那架直升机以来，对一位美国总统最具决定性的拒绝之一。共和党同时失去众议院三十五个或更多席位以及参议院多达八个席位——这现在看起来是一种非常现实的可能性——自第二次世界大战以来仅发生过一次：1958年。而那场竞选与2026年这场针对白宫主人危险言论、破坏性行动和古怪个人偏好的全民公投，根本不在一个量级。
For now and for forever, the midterm election of 2026 will be known as one of the most decisive rejections of an American President since long before Richard Nixon got on that helicopter in 1974. Republicans losing both the House by thirty-five or more seats and the Senate by as many as eight seats—which now seems like a very real possibility—has happened only once since the Second World War: in 1958. And that campaign wasn’t anything close to the 2026 referendum on the dangerous words, disruptive actions, and bizarre personal preferences of the man in the White House.
特朗普坚持让这场选举如此独一无二地围绕他本人展开，这并不令人意外，但这是一个恰如希腊悲剧式的错误——国家广场的那喀索斯上演的一场史诗级自我毁灭，只能被解读为对总统的直接否定。过去两年，华盛顿的共和党人在保卫国家免受本党领袖蹂躏方面彻底失败了，但全国各地的共和党选民——至少足够多的人——承认了自己的错误，并采取重大行动加以纠正。
Trump’s insistence on making the election so singularly about himself was not a surprise, but it was an error right out of a Greek tragedy—an epic self-own by the Narcissus of the National Mall that could be read only as a direct disavowal of the President. Republicans in Washington these past two years failed spectacularly when it came to defending the nation from the depredations of their party’s leader, but Republican voters around the country—enough of them, at least—admitted their mistake and did something big to rectify it.
当福克斯新闻的评论员们艰难地寻找措辞，来解释这场他们本不愿承认即将到来的灾难时，在投票站接受采访的普通共和党选民的病毒式传播视频片段中却能找到许多清晰之处，那种清晰以及最分明的道德厌恶感：他们不再想要特朗普、他的政策或他的政党了。
As the pundits on Fox News struggled for words to explain the calamity that they had not wanted to admit was coming, there was much clarity to be found in the viral clips of regular Republican voters interviewed at the polls, clarity and the clearest possible sense of moral revulsion: they did not want Trump, his policies, or his party anymore.
是因为伊朗战争吗，正如华盛顿这里的许多人已经开始主张的那样？（“我们失败的原因是战争，”万斯在X上写道。“总统本人昨晚也这么说。”）也许吧，但我认为不止于此。这样的结果不会仅仅因为加油站柴油价格逼近每加仑七美元就发生。这件事的规模如此之大，是因为特朗普的罪行之规模如此之巨。关税和贸易战、抨击加拿大、抨击欧洲、背叛乌克兰并拥抱弗拉基米尔·普京、他本人及其圈子令人作呕的自我敛财、在我们的街道上放出武装暴徒民兵。
Was it because of the Iran war, as many here in Washington are already starting to argue? (“The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote on X. “The president himself said so last night.”) Maybe, but I think not only that. Results like this don’t happen just because diesel is pushing seven dollars a gallon at the pump. The scale of this is so large because the scale of Trump’s offenses has been so vast. Tariffs and trade wars, Canada-bashing, Europe-bashing, the betrayal of Ukraine and embrace of Vladimir Putin, the grotesque self-enrichment of himself and his circle, the unleashing of an armed militia of goons on our streets.
人们投票支持亚历克斯·普雷蒂和洛伦佐·萨尔加多·阿劳霍。他们投票反对数据中心，反对埃隆·马斯克收买选举。他们投票反对一切东西都贵得要命。他们投票，是因为特朗普治下的美国正在发生的太多事情看起来如此不像美国。
People voted for Alex Pretti and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. They voted against data centers and Elon Musk buying elections. They voted against the cost of everything being too damn high. They voted because so much of what is happening in Trump’s America seems so very un-American.
特朗普本人在这其中所扮演的角色不容忽视。我知道，政治学者往往认为结构性因素才是最重要的。他们会做回归分析，研究经济数据，然后得出结论：结果可能几个月前就已注定。但尽管如此，我希望他们也研究一下总统最后一个月竞选活动——那是一场愚蠢与恶意谎言的狂欢，包括在二十一天内举行二十一场集会。
Trump’s own role in this cannot be discounted. I know that structural factors are often considered the most important ones by political scientists. They will perform their regression analyses and examine the economic data and conclude that the results were probably baked in months ago. But, still, I hope they study the President’s last month of campaigning, too, an orgy of foolishness and mean-spirited lies that included twenty-one rallies in twenty-one days, where he talked about Jon Husted’s ass, the glories of his golden ballroom, and the algae in the Reflecting Pool while dismissing and demeaning voters’ concerns about practically everything.
他在集会上谈论乔恩·赫斯特德的屁股、他金色舞厅的辉煌，以及倒影池里的藻类，同时几乎对所有选民的关切都予以轻蔑和贬低。他说“负担能力”是民主党的骗局，说他发动却未能打赢的那场战争根本算不上战争，还说对手糟糕透顶，会允许男人参加女子体育比赛。总统身边的人竟允许他继续讲这些话，这足以说明他们的彻底堕落——而特朗普竟认为这些是能赢的论调，也说明他灵魂中可怕的空洞。
He said that affordability was a Democratic hoax and that the war he started and has failed to win wasn’t really a war at all and that the other guys were so awful that they would allow men to play in women’s sports. It speaks to the utter debasement of those around the President that they allowed him to keep saying these things—and to the terrifying emptiness of Trump’s soul that he thought these were winning sentiments at all.
周二，当这场选举的规模开始显现时，我开始记录用来描述它的各种不同说法：蓝色浪潮、蓝色海啸、蓝啸、血洗、灭绝级事件、洪流、 landslide（压倒性胜利）、抹除、一代一遇、一生一遇、斥责、拒绝、否定。早在9点58分，约翰·金就在CNN上明确无误地宣布：“这是总统所属政党的崩溃，就在电视直播中。”他说得对。这比特朗普2018年中期选举的失败更明显，甚至比他在2020年于特朗普制造的混乱中被赶下台更明显——正因如此，你怎么称呼它都无关紧要。
As the magnitude of the election began to hit on Tuesday, I started to keep track of all the different words being used to describe it: blue wave, blue tsunami, blue-nami, bloodbath, extinction-level event, flood, landslide, obliteration, once in a generation, once in a lifetime, rebuke, rejection, repudiation. As early as 9:58 , John King announced on CNN, clearly, unequivocally, “This is the collapse of the President’s party, on live television.”He was right. This was more clear than Trump’s 2018 midterm defeat, more clear even than his ouster in 2020, amid and Trump-created chaos—which is why it doesn’t matter what you call it.
到周三上午，白宫只能发布他们那位坐在“决心桌”后的照片，配文是：“公共服务公告：特朗普仍是你的总统。”照片里他瞪着眼睛。如果这看起来像是一种威胁，我敢肯定这正是其意图。但那又怎样？那是明天的事。正如佐治亚州参议员乔恩·奥索夫在胜利演讲中所说——那演讲听起来像是2028年总统竞选的开场白——“黎明的第一缕曙光已在天边升起。”
By Wednesday morning, the White House was reduced to sending out pictures of their guy behind the Resolute desk, under the caption, “PSA: TRUMP IS STILL YOUR PRESIDENT.”He was glaring. If it seemed like a threat, I’m sure that was the intent. But so what? That’s a tomorrow problem. As Senator Jon Ossoff, of Georgia, said in a victory speech that might have been the opening lines of the 2028 Presidential campaign, “The first light of dawn is on the horizon.”
无论接下来发生什么，美国人民最终且明确地告诉唐纳德·特朗普：够了，到此为止。
Whatever happens next, the American people have finally and definitively told Donald Trump that enough is enough.