The Institutions Failed 机构失败了

Scholars and advocates for democracy who have tried to warn voters about the dangers posed by a second Donald Trump term are, to some extent, victims of their own success—or, rather, the perception of it. Having fought to defend the nation’s institutions during Trump’s first term, they now worry that Americans have become complacent about the risks of a potential second term.
为民主而奋斗的学者和倡导者们试图警告选民关于第二个特朗普任期所带来的危险，在某种程度上，他们是自己成功的受害者——或者说，是对这种成功的认知。在特朗普的第一个任期中，他们为捍卫国家的制度而战，现在他们担心美国人对潜在的第二个任期的风险变得自满。

“There’s this mythology that permeates that Trump didn’t damage institutions in the first term,” Amanda Carpenter, a former GOP staffer who now works for the civil-society group Protect Democracy, told me recently. “And I think that’s completely wrong.”
“有一种神话弥漫着特朗普在第一任期没有损害机构，”前共和党工作人员、现为公民社会组织保护民主工作的阿曼达·卡彭特最近告诉我。“我认为这是完全错误的。”

Indeed, institutions at nearly every level of American society failed during Trump’s first term, which is a big reason a second Trump term is even possible. The press, all three branches of the federal government, nongovernmental organizations such as the Republican Party, and the private sector all crumpled when confronted. The failures were of both personal leadership and systems. A reelected President Trump won’t just have figured out how to better fight a healthy system. He will face one that is already in dire condition.
确实，在特朗普的第一任期内，美国社会几乎每个层级的机构都失败了，这也是特朗普第二任期甚至可能的一个重要原因。媒体、联邦政府的三个分支、像共和党这样的非政府组织以及私营部门在面对挑战时都崩溃了。这些失败既涉及个人领导力，也涉及系统性问题。连任的特朗普总统不仅会找到更好地与健康系统作斗争的方法。他将面临一个已经处于危急状态的系统。

David A. Graham: We’re watching an antidemocratic coup unfold
大卫·A·格雷厄姆：我们正在观察一场反民主政变的展开

An exhaustive account of institutional collapses would be, well, exhausting, but a tour d’horizon should suffice. In 2015 and 2016, a majority of Republican-primary voters and an overwhelming majority of Republican Party leaders opposed Trump’s candidacy for president, but the party revealed itself to be incapable of organizing—one of its most basic functions—to resist the threat posed by a charismatic outsider. The traditional press also showed its susceptibility to a candidate able to attract almost endless attention, and how powerful that attention was, even when negative. The result was a narrow Trump victory in 2016.
对机构崩溃的详尽描述将是，嗯，令人疲惫，但一个全景概述应该足够了。在 2015 年和 2016 年，大多数共和党初选选民和压倒性多数的共和党领导人反对特朗普的总统候选资格，但该党显示出无法组织——其最基本的功能之一——来抵御一个有魅力的外来者所带来的威胁。传统媒体也显示出对一个能够吸引几乎无尽关注的候选人的敏感性，以及这种关注的强大，即使是负面的。结果是 2016 年特朗普以微弱优势获胜。

The first constitutional check on a president is Congress. In the first two years of Trump’s presidency, both the House and the Senate were controlled by Republicans, who showed little interest in serious oversight work. After Democrats took over the House following the 2018 midterms, they began investigating Trump. They even impeached him after he attempted to withhold funds from Ukraine in exchange for helping Trump’s reelection campaign, but the GOP-led Senate declined to convict him, moving the goalposts. Elsewhere, however, Democrats were slow to respond to Trump’s stonewalling. For example, they sought his tax returns and were finally able to release them—in December 2022, nearly two years after he’d left office.
对总统的第一个宪法制衡是国会。在特朗普总统任期的前两年，众议院和参议院都由共和党控制，他们对认真监督工作表现出很少的兴趣。在 2018 年中期选举后，民主党接管了众议院，他们开始对特朗普进行调查。他们甚至在特朗普试图以扣留对乌克兰的资金作为交换以帮助他的连任竞选后弹劾了他，但由共和党主导的参议院拒绝定罪，改变了规则。然而，在其他方面，民主党对特朗普的拖延反应< a id=1>缓慢。例如，他们寻求他的税务申报表，并最终能够在 2022 年 12 月发布这些文件，几乎是在他离任近两年后。

This was in part because Trump was able to recognize that the courts were a weak link in the constitutional order. The justice system is designed with lots of protections to ensure that no one is deprived of due process, but that also means that a defendant with sufficient money and bad faith can manipulate those protections to run down the clock.
这在一定程度上是因为特朗普能够认识到法院在宪法秩序中是一个薄弱环节。司法系统设计了许多保护措施，以确保没有人被剥夺正当程序，但这也意味着一个有足够资金和恶意的被告可以操纵这些保护措施来拖延时间。

The nature of the failures in the executive branch was more complex. Many members of the administration cooperated with Trump on legally, ethically, or morally dubious schemes. Others resisted them, sometimes bravely: Whistleblowing and public testimony from White House and State Department officials rattled by Trump’s pressure on Ukraine was courageous and came at a cost to them. In other cases, administration officials resisted Trump simply by refusing to execute bad ideas. This may have sometimes staved off acute disasters, but the federal government cannot function correctly if unelected officials feel empowered to decide when to follow lawful orders from the president. This is one of the institution’s vulnerabilities: Officials of conscience sometimes have no good options.
行政部门的失败性质更加复杂。许多政府成员与特朗普合作，参与法律上、伦理上或道德上可疑的计划。其他人则抵制他们，有时表现得很勇敢：白宫和国务院官员因特朗普对乌克兰施加压力而感到不安，勇敢地进行举报和公开作证，这对他们来说付出了代价。在其他情况下，政府官员通过拒绝执行糟糕的想法来抵制特朗普。这有时可能避免了严重的灾难，但如果未选举的官员感到有权决定何时遵循总统的合法命令，联邦政府就无法正常运作。这是该机构的一个脆弱之处：良心官员有时没有好的选择。

Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election demonstrated the disastrous convergence of all of these failures. The president’s attempts to railroad state officials into supporting his efforts were prevented by people such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, but Trump demonstrated how brittle the systems were by coming close to subverting the election. Some local election officials also showed far less integrity.
特朗普试图颠覆 2020 年选举的行为展示了所有这些失败的灾难性汇聚。总统试图迫使州官员支持他的努力，但乔治亚州国务卿布拉德·拉芬斯珀格和亚利桑那州众议院议长拉斯蒂·鲍尔斯等人阻止了这一行为，但特朗普通过接近颠覆选举展示了系统的脆弱性。一些地方选举官员的诚信也显得远远不足。

After January 6, the House once more impeached Trump, but the Senate again refused to convict. One major factor was that the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, concluded that Trump’s career was finished, thus excusing himself from taking any political hit by supporting a vote to convict.
在 1 月 6 日之后，众议院再次弹劾特朗普，但参议院再次拒绝定罪。一个主要因素是参议院共和党领袖米奇·麦康奈尔得出结论，认为特朗普的政治生涯已经结束，因此他免于因支持定罪投票而受到任何政治打击。

The judicial branch is frequently celebrated as the institution that best resisted Trump’s election subversion. Courts did reject the Trump campaign’s legalistic efforts to keep him in office, but that is largely because its claims were so flimsy and lacking in evidence that judges had no other choice. The judiciary’s actions since then have revealed it to be as fragile as the other two branches. Trump has managed to thus far avoid criminal trials for his election subversion and for pilfering sensitive national documents and trying to hide them from the government; he has promised that he will obstruct justice to ensure that remains true if he wins. Politico recently reported that judges have repeatedly expressed concerns about Trump gumming up the legal system with frivolous process arguments.
司法部门常常被赞誉为最能抵制特朗普选举颠覆的机构。法院确实驳回了特朗普竞选团队试图让他留任的法律努力，但这在很大程度上是因为其主张如此脆弱且缺乏证据，以至于法官别无选择。自那时以来，司法的行动揭示出它与其他两个部门一样脆弱。特朗普迄今为止成功避免了因选举颠覆和盗取敏感国家文件并试图向政府隐瞒而进行的刑事审判；他已承诺如果当选将妨碍司法，以确保这一点保持真实。最近《政治报》报道，法官们多次表达了对特朗普用无谓的程序论点拖延法律系统的担忧。

Read: Trump is being very honest about one thing
阅读：特朗普在一件事上非常诚实

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has played along with Trump. It ruled this past summer that nearly anything a president does under cover of the presidency is immune from prosecution, giving Trump sanction for past actions and opening up new avenues for future chicanery. One of the justices in the majority is married to a prominent participant in Trump’s election subversion. Another had a pro-Trump flag flying over his house, for which he blamed his spouse.
最高法院与此同时与特朗普保持一致。它在今夏裁定，总统在总统职务掩护下所做的几乎任何事情都免于起诉，这为特朗普过去的行为提供了保护，并为未来的欺诈行为开辟了新的途径。多数派中的一位法官与特朗普选举颠覆的一个重要参与者结婚。另一位法官的房子上悬挂着支持特朗普的旗帜，他将此归咎于他的配偶。

The private sector is no more resilient. After January 6, social-media companies banished Trump, and major corporations pledged not to contribute to politicians involved in election denial. But Trump is back on Facebook and X, and many of the companies that made the pledge have since quietly begun donating to such politicians once again. Major private institutions have continued to bend the knee to Trump, even before the election has taken place. The press has also weakened. The Washington Post spent years warning that “democracy dies in darkness,” but last month, the paper opted not to endorse a candidate for president, reportedly at the direction of its owner, Jeff Bezos.
私营部门并没有更具韧性。在 1 月 6 日之后，社交媒体公司驱逐了特朗普，主要企业承诺不再向参与选举否认的政治家捐款。但特朗普已经回到 Facebook 和 X 上，许多做出承诺的公司也悄悄地再次开始向这些政治家捐款。主要私营机构在选举尚未举行之前就继续向特朗普屈服。媒体也变得虚弱。《华盛顿邮报》花了多年时间警告“民主在黑暗中死去”，但上个月，该报选择不支持任何总统候选人，据报道是根据其老板杰夫·贝索斯的指示。

The bad news is that the only major institution left is the American electorate. That is also the good news. A majority of voters rejected Trump in 2016 and again in 2020. They rejected his party in 2018 and only weakly supported it in 2022, with Trump out of office. In a democracy, the people are the most important institution—the source of legitimacy for all parts of government, and of accountability for the private sector. The choice is in their hands.
坏消息是，唯一剩下的主要机构是美国选民。这也是好消息。大多数选民在 2016 年和 2020 年都拒绝了特朗普。他们在 2018 年拒绝了他的政党，并且在 2022 年特朗普离任时仅对其表示微弱支持。在民主制度中，人民是最重要的机构——是政府各部分合法性的来源，也是私营部门问责制的来源。选择掌握在他们手中。