脾气暴躁能持续整整两年吗？在红色美国的选民给唐纳德·特朗普及其共和党来了一记残酷打击的九天里，这位总统在《60分钟》节目中宣称，他宁愿继续仇恨敌人也不愿上天堂；指示助手威胁要起诉调查他的国会议员；在大选之夜承诺接受结果后，又公开质疑结果的公正性；并提拔斯蒂芬·米勒为新任白幕僚长。特朗普或许已是跛脚鸭，但他绝不会悄无声息地离场。
Can a temper tantrum last for two full years? In the nine days since the voters of red America administered a brutal takedown of Donald Trump and his Republican Party, the President has announced on “60 Minutes” that he’d rather keep hating his enemies than go to heaven, instructed his aides to threaten prosecution of members of Congress who investigate him, publicly questioned the integrity of the results after promising on Election Night that he would accept them, and promoted Stephen Miller as his new White House chief of staff. Trump may be a lame duck, but he is not going anywhere quietly.
周四，特朗普清晨便开始发作，凌晨5点50分在Truth Social发帖抱怨，民主党“恶毒地”指控他及其政府腐败，而民主党才是“腐败且邪恶”的一方。38分钟后，他指责民主党“非法威胁共和党人，炮制明知虚假的指控和罪名”。上午7点04分，他重拾首个任期最爱的套路之一，警告称“巨大的非法移民大篷车”正从南部涌向美国入侵，若不加阻止，他将立即对墨西哥加征双倍关税。
On Thursday, Trump began his morning meltdown with a 5:50 Truth Social post complaining about how “viciously” he and his Administration were being accused of corruption by Democrats when they were the ones who were “CORRUPT AND EVIL.”Thirty-eight minutes later, he accused them of “illegally threatening Republicans with knowingly false accusations and charges.”By 7:04 , he had reverted to one of his favored tropes from his first term, warning that “Huge CARAVANS” of illegal immigrants were on their way to invade the U.S. from the south and that, if they weren’t stopped, he would immediately double tariffs on Mexico.
上午10点59分，尽管日程上没有公开活动，他仍在继续，用那种经典的“谁帮我除掉这个多管闲事的神甫”口吻，询问何时才会有人终于起诉那“煽动叛乱的六人组”民主党籍国会议员——一年前，他们发布视频提醒美军人员，无需服从非法命令。
At 10:59 , with no public events on his schedule, he was still at it, wondering, in his best who-will-rid-me-of-this-meddlesome-priest mode, when someone would finally get around to prosecuting the “Seditious Six” Democratic members of Congress, who, a year ago, posted a video reminding U.S. military personnel that they were not required to follow illegal orders.
历史学家请记录在案：这是美国总统首次在经历历史性中期选举惨败之痛时，通过社交媒体发布低质量、情绪化帖文（shit-posting）来宣泄。然而，无论他在社交媒体上如何自我安抚，似乎都无法平息总统对中期选举的愤怒，我想这倒也合乎情理——他的暴怒程度与这场选举惨败的规模相称，而这场惨败确实堪称史诗级。
Historians take note: It’s our first-ever case of an American President shit-posting through the pain of a historic midterm defeat. No amount of self-soothing on social media, however, seems to have quelled the President’s rage over the midterms, and I suppose it’s only fitting that his fury should be equal to the scale of the electoral drubbing, which was truly epic.
随着选票仍在统计中，民主党在全国众议院普选票中的领先优势已逼近十四个百分点，这是该党五十多年来最大的领先幅度。就我有生之年而言，共和党在中期选举中从未取得过如此巨大的普选票优势。特朗普在其第二任期迄今的表现，完成了一项此前难以想象的政治壮举：让俄亥俄州、堪萨斯州、北卡罗来纳州、南卡罗来纳州、得克萨斯州，甚至密西西比州都团结起来，反对他及其提名的候选人。
With ballots still being counted, Democrats are pushing close to a fourteen-point lead in the national House popular vote, the widest margin for the Party in more than fifty years. In my lifetime, Republicans have never come close to that big of a popular-vote win in a midterm. Trump’s record thus far in his second term has accomplished the previously unthinkable political feat of uniting Ohio, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and even Mississippi against him and his candidates.
周四上午的帖文中，或许最引人注目的是特朗普在上午8点07分宣布，他即刻解除J·D·万斯负责与伊朗谈判和平协议的职务。“我们不需要与伊朗达成协议，”特朗普说——他希望副总统将“全部心力”投入到揭露全美由民主党执政的城市和州发生的“大规模腐败和犯罪”中。换句话说，这位无能的副总统已被解除职务，不再负责结束那场万斯声称是导致共和党上周大败原因的战争。
Perhaps most notable among Thursday morning’s posts was Trump’s announcement, at 8:07 , that he was immediately relieving J. D. Vance of responsibility for negotiating a peace deal with Iran. “We don’t need a deal with Iran,” Trump said—he wanted the Vice-President to dedicate his “complete and total attention” to uncovering the “Massive Corruption and Crime” taking place in Democratic-run cities and states across the land. In other words, the feckless Veep has been fired from his effort to bring an end to the war that Vance claims was the reason Republicans lost so bigly in last week’s election.
万斯被剥夺伊朗事务职权，距离有关报道仅数小时：副总统愿意与伊朗最高国家安全委员会秘书、强硬派穆赫辛·礼萨伊进行面对面会晤。这恐非巧合。特朗普是否担心万斯会出卖利益？万斯急于结束一场似乎正在毁掉他当总统仅存希望的冲突，这种绝望显而易见，特朗普很难指望他能在谈判中强硬立场。又或许只是特朗普一早醒来心情不好。无论总统做出这一决定的直接原因是什么，都以特朗普喜欢的全大写方式凸显了一个事实：在中东冲突问题上，他的副总统不再代表他发声。
It is likely not a coincidence that Vance’s ouster from the Iran portfolio came within hours of the reporting that the Vice-President was open to an in-person meeting with Mohsen Rezaei, the hard-liner who is now secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. Did Trump fear a sellout? He can hardly have expected Vance, with his obvious desperation to end a conflict that seems to be destroying what remaining hope he has of becoming President, to drive a hard bargain. Or maybe it was just that Trump woke up in a bad mood. Whatever the proximate cause of the President’s decision, it has underscored—in the all-caps way that Trump likes his decisions to be underscored—that on the matter of the conflict in the Middle East, his Vice-President no longer speaks for him.
这里面有很多信息需要拆解。最重要的是，特朗普到底打算如何退出一场拖累其总统任期的战争。大选日前，特朗普曾暗示正在考虑通过新一轮军事升级来打破与伊朗的僵局；大选后，他突然转向，告诉《60分钟》节目，他看不出有“任何理由”这么做。在过去几天里，特朗普既拒绝新一轮战斗，也拒绝新一轮谈判，似乎在发出信号：他将寻求某种形式的现状，一个非战非和的灰色地带——美国试图通过海上封锁和惩罚性经济制裁压垮伊朗，同时避免在伊朗条件下达成协议的屈辱，也避免整个地区再遭一波军事打击的冲击。
There’s a lot to unpack in this one. Most important, there’s the question of just what Trump is planning to do to exit a war that has dragged down his Presidency. Before Election Day, Trump had suggested that he was considering a new military escalation to end the stalemate with Iran; since then, he has abruptly pivoted in the other direction, telling “60 Minutes” that he did not see “any reason” to do so. By rejecting a new round of fighting a new round of negotiating in the past few days, Trump appears to be signalling that he’s going for some version of the status quo, a netherworld of neither war nor peace, in which the U.S. tries to crush Iran through a naval blockade and punitive economic sanctions, while averting the humiliation of a deal on Iran’s terms or the shock of another wave of military attacks across the region.
曾担任美国中东谈判代表数十年的亚伦·大卫·米勒告诉我，自7月份4月的停火在未达成长期休战的情况下破裂以来，“特朗普有三个选择——谈判、升级、扼杀。如果特朗普有战略，这三个选项并不互斥。”但既然是特朗普，而他并没有战略，米勒认为扼杀选项目前最可能成为行动方案。也许这能让霍尔木兹海峡基本保持开放——尽管自周三以来，已有四艘油轮在试图通过时触及伊朗水雷。
Aaron David Miller, who served as an American negotiator in the Middle East for decades, told me that, since July, when a ceasefire from April fell apart without a long-term truce, “Trump’s had three options—negotiate, escalate, strangulate. None are mutually exclusive if Trump had a strategy.”But since this is Trump, and he doesn’t, Miller argued that the strangulation option is the likeliest course for now. Maybe that can work to keep the Strait of Hormuz mostly open—although, since Wednesday, four oil tankers have struck Iranian mines while attempting to pass through.
也许汽油价格将继续下跌。也许这甚至无关紧要，因为正如特朗普周三在演讲中声称的那样，“我们赢了”这场战争，现在只是在等待决定“何时结束”。不管那是什么意思。
Maybe gas prices will keep going down. Maybe it doesn’t even matter, since, as Trump claimed in a speech on Wednesday, “we won” the war already and are now only waiting to decide “when we want to end.”Whatever that means.
关键在于，对于总统而言，模糊策略目前可能是最不坏的选择。拖延时间也非常符合特朗普自己处理陷入困境时的惯用做法——在他漫长而跌宕起伏的人生中，这种情况屡见不鲜。然而，正如米勒所指出的，争取时间几乎肯定长久行不通：“扼杀策略——这种不上不下的选项——唯一的问题在于，它无法改变伊斯兰革命卫队的根本立场，并将迫使伊朗最终突围并升级事态。”
The point is that ambiguity, for the President, may currently present the least bad option. Waiting it out is also very consistent with Trump’s own preferred approach to a situation when he’s boxed himself into a corner—which has been often in his long and eventful life. As Miller noted, however, buying time almost certainly will not work over the long haul: “The only problem with strangulation—the neither-here-nor-there option—is that it won’t change I.R.G.C. foundational positions and will, over time, compel Iran to break out and escalate.”
以色列国家安全专家丹尼·西特里诺维奇也做出了类似观察。“重新升级的风险依然显著，”他在X平台上写道，原因正是特朗普和伊朗双方都不愿做出实质性让步，以达成双方理论上都倾向于达成的协议。“双方可能真心希望避免再次对抗，却仍可能发现自己正走向对抗。”与此同时，特朗普似乎正在经历的对抗是与他自己的副总统之间的，后者在社交媒体上发帖谴责伊朗战争是其政党政治灾难的原因，这构成了我所见过的总统与其“二号人物”之间最重大的公开决裂。
The Israeli national-security expert Danny Citrinowicz made a similar observation. “The risk of renewed escalation remains significant,” he wrote on X, precisely because neither Trump nor the Iranians are willing to make meaningful concessions to reach the deal that each would theoretically prefer. “Both sides may genuinely want to avoid another confrontation and still find themselves heading toward one.”In the meantime, the confrontation that Trump appears to be having is with his own Vice-President, whose social-media post denouncing the Iran war as the reason for his party’s political calamity was as significant a public break between a President and his No. 2 as I’ve ever seen. (Not counting, that is, Trump’s rift with his first Vice-President, Mike Pence, over Trump’s false claims of a “rigged” 2020 election.)
（当然，不算特朗普因声称2020年大选“被舞弊”而与其首任副总统彭斯的决裂。）几个月来，显而易见，万斯从未支持特朗普最初发动战争的决定。但他在大选后的表态——“我们输掉选举的原因是战争”——显著地避免了任何暗示支持总统的立场，即战争是一个艰难但可辩护的选择，旨在防范伊朗未来可能拥有核武器的风险。
For months, it’s been obvious that Vance never backed Trump’s original decision to launch the war. But his statement after the election—“The reason we lost is the war”—notably avoided any hint of support for the President’s position that the war was a tough but defensible choice to head off the future possibility of an Iranian nuclear bomb.
起初，特朗普假装对万斯的背离毫不在意，声称他甚至同意战争导致该党表现不佳这一结论。但在过去几天里，特朗普对万斯的愤怒日益明显。周日，他对记者说，“很多人不喜欢”万斯将选举失利归咎于战争，同时声称这并未影响他们的关系。“完全没有，”特朗普说。这种状况注定无法维持。
Initially, Trump pretended not to be bothered by Vance’s apostasy, claiming that he even agreed with the conclusion that the war had been the reason for the Party’s poor showing. But it became increasingly apparent during the past few days that his anger with Vance was growing. On Sunday, he told reporters that “a lot of people didn’t like” Vance blaming the election losses on the war, while also claiming that it had not affected their relationship. “Not at all,” Trump said. That was never going to last.
副总统一职在最好的情况下也很难干；做特朗普的副总统几乎注定不会给万斯带来好结果。在“选举有后果”这一栏目中，2026年中期选举的一个迅速显现的结果，似乎是加速了那位以“不发动新战争”竞选却最终还是发动了一场战争的总统，与从一开始就未曾支持过他的副总统之间不可避免的决裂。这就是失败的样子。
Being Vice-President is a tough job in the best of circumstances; being Trump’s Vice-President was almost certainly not going to work out well for Vance. In the Elections Have Consequences department, it appears that one swift result of the 2026 midterms was to accelerate the inevitable breakup between a President who ran on “no new wars” and then started one anyway and the Vice-President who never backed him on it in the first place. This is what losing looks like.