Donald Trump told Americans exactly what he planned to do.

特朗普曾清楚地告诉了美国人他打算干什么。

He would use military force against his political opponents. He would fire thousands of career public servants. He would deport millions of immigrants in military-style roundups. He would crush the independence of the Department of Justice, use government to push public health conspiracies and abandon America’s allies abroad. He would turn the government into a tool of his own grievances, a way to punish his critics and richly reward his supporters. He would be a “dictator” — if only on Day One.

他会用军队来对付自己的政治对手。他会解雇成千上万的职业公务员。他会用军事围捕的方式将数以百万计移民驱逐。他会破坏司法部的独立性，用政府部门来推动公共卫生阴谋论，他会抛弃美国的海外盟友。他会把政府变成发泄个人不满的工具，用其来惩罚批评者、大方地奖励支持者。他会当一名“独裁者”——哪怕只是在第一天。

And, when asked to give him the power to do all of that, the voters said yes.

然后，当选民们被要求赋予他做所有这些事情的权力时，他们同意了。

This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.

这是用一张授权单而非武力征服了美国。现在，美国正站在建国248年以来未曾有过的威权式治理的边缘。

After defeating Vice President Kamala Harris, who would have become the first female U.S. president, Mr. Trump will bring his own historic firsts into the White House: the only president convicted of dozens of crimes, accused of dozens more and twice impeached.

在大选中击败副总统贺锦丽后——她本可能成为美国历史上的第一位女总统，特朗普将带着自己的一些“史上第一”入主白宫：他是唯一被判犯有数十项罪行、另外还有数十项指控，并且两次遭弹劾的总统。

Unlike in 2016, when he scored a surprise electoral victory but lost the popular vote, Mr. Trump will go to Washington able to claim a broad mandate. Over his four years out of power, he rebuilt the Republican Party in his image, creating a movement that only seemed to strengthen with every recrimination. He will begin his second term bound by few political norms, after a campaign in which he seemed to defy every one.

2016年，虽然特朗普没有赢得超过半数的全民选票，但他出人意料地赢得了大选。与那一次大选不同，特朗普这次可以宣称自己的第二个任期得到了广泛的授权。在他失去权力的四年里，他按照自己的形象重建了共和党，创造了一场似乎只会随着每次指控变得更强大的运动。展开了一场似乎无视所有政治规范的竞选运动后，他将在几乎不受政治规范的约束下开始他的第二个任期。

He did well in the battleground states, winning at least four of the seven, and appeared on track to win the popular vote — the first time a Republican candidate has done that since George W. Bush in 2004. His party flipped the Senate, and was in range of maintaining control of the House of Representatives. Blue areas shifted toward him, with Mr. Trump improving his performance in places like New York City by double digits. So did suburbs, rural areas, even college towns.

他在战场州表现出色，七个州中至少赢了四个，并且似乎有望赢得超过半数的全民选票——这是自乔治·W·布什2004年赢得了超过半数的全民选票以来，首次做到这点的共和党候选人。他所在的政党改变了参议院的控制权，并有望保持对众议院的控制。与上次相比，特朗普赢得了更多的蓝区选票，他在纽约市等地的表现提高了两位数，在郊区、农村地区，甚至大学城也如此。

“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Mr. Trump told cheering supporters gathered at Mar-a-Lago, his club in Palm Beach, Fla., for a victory party before the result was official. “I will govern by a simple motto: promises made, promises kept.”

“美国已给了我们前所未有的强大授权，”特朗普在佛罗里达州棕榈滩的马阿拉歌俱乐部举行庆祝胜选派对前，对欢呼雀跃的支持者们说。“我将以一个简单的座右铭来治理国家：言出必行。”

在安娜堡的密歇根大学体育馆投票。

That mandate came not just from the American people, he said.

这项授权不只是来自美国人民，他说。

“Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” he said. “That reason was to save our country.”

“很多人对我说，上帝饶了我一条命是有原因的，”他说。“那个原因就是拯救我们的国家。”

His victory was a direct repudiation of some top aides, military brass and Republican officials who served in his first administration. They had publicly warned that he would not save the nation but destroy it.

他的胜利是对其第一届政府中任职的一些高级助手、军队高层，以及共和党官员的直接驳斥。他们曾公开警告，特朗普不会拯救国家，而是会毁灭国家。

Yet the electoral climate was ripe for Mr. Trump — though he had a hand in creating the weather.

然而，竞选的环境对特朗普来说已经成熟——尽管他参与了制造这种环境。

In the wake of the pandemic, which critics said his administration badly mismanaged, the country grew more skeptical of government. Trust in the media, science, medicine, the judicial system and other mainstay institutions of American life plunged as more voters embraced the doubts Mr. Trump had sown for years.

批评人士曾指责特朗普政府在新冠疫情暴发后管理不善，美国民众越来越多地对政府持怀疑态度。随着越来越多的选民开始接受特朗普多年来散播的怀疑，人们对媒体、科学、医学、司法系统，以及美国人生活中的其他主要机构的信任度大幅下降。

Public opinion shifted in his direction on issues that had long been the centerpiece of his political movement. Even Democrats embraced stricter policies on immigration and crime in the 2024 race, underscoring how much his relentless focus on the border had resonated.

在一些长期以来一直是他政治运动核心的问题上，公众舆论开始向特朗普倾斜。甚至民主党人也在2024年的竞选活动中接受了有关移民和犯罪的更严格政策，凸显了他不停地聚焦边境问题在民众中产生了多大共鸣。

After his defeat, Mr. Trump spent four years tightening his grip on the Republican Party, to the point where both lawmakers and voters professed to believe his lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The number of Americans identifying as Republican edged ahead of Democrats for the first time in decades.

2020年大选失败后，特朗普花了四年时间加强对共和党的控制，以至于共和党的立法者和选民都声称相信他的谎言，即2020年的大选是从他那里偷走的。自称是共和党的美国人数量几十年来首次超过了民主党人。

Even the value of democracy itself was in question. In a poll conducted by The New York Times/Siena College last week, nearly half of all voters said they were skeptical that the American experiment in self-governance was working, with 45 percent saying that the nation’s democracy does not do a good job representing ordinary people.

甚至民主价值本身也受到了怀疑。《纽约时报》/锡耶纳学院上周进行的一项民意调查显示，近一半选民说，他们对美国在治理方式上的实验是否有效表示怀疑，45%的人说，美国的民主制度在代表普通民众上做得不好。

Democrats left those concerns unanswered. Instead, Ms. Harris’s condensed campaign largely endorsed the status quo of the Biden administration, offering a rallying cry around protecting democracy without specifics on how to fix what so many said is a broken system — none more so than Mr. Trump.

民主党人没有为这些担忧提供答案。相反，贺锦丽时间大为压缩的竞选活动在很大程度上支持了拜登政府的现状，围绕着保护民主制度提出战斗口号，但没有具体说明如何修复被许多人认为出了毛病的制度——特朗普就是最频繁地这么说的人。

Poll after poll showed that the economy remained the biggest issue, followed by immigration and frustration over the rising prices of groceries and housing. Mr. Trump ran hard on pledges to lower costs and seal the southern border, while offering ideas to eliminate entire categories of taxation, playing on economic anxieties to broaden his coalition.

一次又一次的民调显示，经济仍是人们关心的最大问题，其次是移民，以及对食品和住房价格上涨的不满。特朗普在竞选中坚定地承诺降低生活成本、封闭南部边境，同时提出了取消整个税收类别的想法，利用人们的经济焦虑来扩大他的联合体。

But those economic promises were interwoven with a steadfast refusal to moderate his message. Unleashing a fire hose of insults and conspiracies, Mr. Trump gambled that a nation unmoored by a deadly pandemic and soaring inflation, and deeply dissatisfied with the incumbent who had defeated him, would be ready to re-embrace him as a blunt-speaking, menacing strongman who would fix it.

但那些经济承诺中交织着他对缓和其言论的坚决拒绝。特朗普用辱骂和阴谋论来引起群情激愤，他赌定，这个国家在经历了一场导致上百万人死亡的大流行病和通货膨胀飙升之后，立国之本已经动摇，对在2020年击败了他的现任总统深感不满，已准备重新接受他，认为他这个直言不讳的恶狠铁腕人物会解决这个国家的问题。

特朗普在离开白宫后的四年里按照自己的形象重塑了共和党。

Rather than abandon his false claims of a stolen 2020 election, he leaned further into them. In Mr. Trump’s revisionist history, those convicted of attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, became “political prisoners.” The siege, which killed at least seven people and injured 150 more, was recast as a “day of love.”

他没有放弃2020年大选被盗的虚假指控，而是变本加厉地坚持这些指控。在特朗普的修正主义历史中，那些因参加2021年1月6日袭击国会大厦事件而被定罪的人成了“政治犯”。他把那场造成至少七人死亡、150多人受伤的围攻重塑为“爱的一天”。

Instead of softening the crude rhetoric that has long been one of his hallmarks, he became more obscene, even appearing to pantomime a sex act at a rally in the campaign’s final week. He wooed Black and Latino voters with false claims that migrants were stealing their jobs and were responsible for a wave of violent crime.

他不仅没有软化长期以来一直标志性的粗俗言论，反而变得更加粗俗，甚至在最后一周的一次竞选集会上做出模仿性行为的动作。他用虚假指控来吸引黑人和拉丁裔选民，谎称移民抢走了他们的工作，制造了一波暴力犯罪。

Mr. Trump uttered the kind of insults about Ms. Harris and other prominent female politicians that were once unthinkable to say in public. Even his appeals to women, a group he was struggling to win, were laced with a sense of menace: In the final weeks of the race, he promised to protect women — “whether the women like it or not.”

特朗普对贺锦丽和其他著名女性政客的公开人身侮辱，以前曾是不可想象的。就连在吸引他一直难以争取到的女性选民时，他说的话也带有一种威胁感：在竞选活动的最后几周，他承诺要保护女性——“不管女性喜欢还是不喜欢”。

He proudly flouted the backlash to one of his signature accomplishments — overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision guaranteeing a constitutional right to an abortion — and appeared to pay little price at the polls.

他傲慢地藐视其标志性的成就之一所引发的强烈反弹，而且在大选中似乎并没有为之付出太大代价。这里指的是美国最高法院推翻了罗诉韦德案对堕胎是受宪法保护的权利的裁决。

And he ended the race by insulting the Puerto Rican voters his campaign had spent months trying to woo.

他在竞选活动快结束时还侮辱了波多黎各选民，而他的竞选团队曾为争取这些选民花了数月时间。

Throughout the race, Mr. Trump’s most faithful supporters showed little discomfort with this abrasive style. As for his policies, they embraced some and chose to disregard others. When asked about his most divisive plans — like wide-scale deportations and a radical reassessment of American commitment to NATO — many of his voters shrugged, saying they doubted that such extreme measures would ever come to fruition despite his repeated promises.

在整个竞选过程中，特朗普最忠实的支持者对这种粗暴的做派几乎没有表现出任何不舒服。至于他的政策，他们选择性接受其中的一些，漠视另外一些。当被问及他最具争议性的计划（比如将移民大规模驱逐出境、彻底重新评估美国对北约的承诺）时，许多支持他的选民只是耸耸肩说，尽管他一再承诺，但他们怀疑这些极端措施永远不会实现。

在整个竞选活动期间，特朗普的支持者们会在许多集会开始前做祷告。

For these supporters, Mr. Trump’s win represents both the dawn of a new future and a rightful restoration. Yet whether Americans — even some of those who voted for him — will like the reality of Mr. Trump’s plans remains to be seen.

在这些支持者眼里，特朗普的胜利既代表着一个新未来的到来，也是一次合法的复辟。然而，美国人——甚至是一些投票给他的人——是否会喜欢特朗普计划带来的现实情况尚有待观察。

Throughout the campaign, economists said his policies would raise inflation, increase costs for families by thousands of dollars annually and spark global trade wars. His promises to empower public health officials who oppose vaccines could spark national outbreaks of disease not seen in decades. And his plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants could cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.

在整个竞选过程中，经济学家们说，他的政策会推高通货膨胀率，让家庭每年多花数千美元的生活成本，并引发全球贸易战。特朗普承诺赋予反对疫苗的公共卫生官员权力，这可能会引发数十年来未曾见过的传染病全国性暴发。他驱逐数百万非法移民的计划可能会花掉纳税人数千亿美元。

It’s also unclear how Democrats will respond to these policies and their sudden ejection into the political wilderness. In 2016, they quickly organized into a self-proclaimed resistance movement that helped elect Democrats to Congress and send President Biden to the White House. Now, that movement has run its course, plunging the party into what is likely to be a new round of recriminations and soul-searching about its future.

民主党人将如何应对这些政策，如何应对他们被突然赶出政治中心的境地，目前也不清楚。2016年大选失败后，民主党人迅速组织起一个他们自称的抵抗运动，帮助民主党候选人当选了国会议员，后来还把拜登总统送进了白宫。现在，那场运动已经走到尽头，民主党可能会陷入新一轮的相互指责和对党的未来的反思。

What is clear, in the end, is that Americans wanted change. And now, they will surely get it.

到头来很明显的是，美国人要的是改变。现在，他们的确将得到一个改变。