2026-02-10 19:30:00
2026年2月2日，教皇利奥十四世在梵蒂冈城圣彼得大教堂举行弥撒。| 摄影：Simone Risoluti/Vatican Media/Getty Images
在美国，一场低调的冷战正在发生——许多美国人可能并未意识到，如果他们没有关注美国基督教社区的变化，就会错过这场斗争。一方面，宗教右翼利用圣经和信仰来支持并捍卫特朗普总统的议程，以及日益增长的基督教民族主义情绪；另一方面，教皇利奥十四世正在重塑美国天主教会。
关键要点：
虽然天主教会在美国政治中一直扮演着角色，但根据黑尔的观点，教皇利奥的干预代表了新的趋势。在美国缺乏一个组织良好的“宗教左翼”背景下，他通过改革和重组美国天主教会，正在重新激发一个“天主教左翼”来参与2020年代的道德斗争，特别是围绕移民和威权主义问题。
我们的对话已进行删减和编辑。
了解教皇利奥如何改变美国天主教会的第一步是什么？
教皇利奥首先是一位神父和主教。他曾在教皇方济各的任期内负责任命主教两年，他的教育背景集中在主教的神学和实践方面，因此这对他世界观至关重要。他非常重视主教和神父在这些职位上的成功要素，但最重要的是他强调与民众的亲近。这与天主教传统中将深陷行政事务的官员提拔为主教的做法形成鲜明对比。例如，纽约的迪兰总主教（Timothy Dolan）在担任主教之前，更多时间是在神学院教育和大学校长职位上，而非牧灵工作。历史上，很少有牧灵神父被提升为主教，教皇方济各希望改变这一现状，而利奥继续推进这一改革。然而，要真正实现这一目标需要很长时间，因为全球有数千位主教。目前，利奥似乎在利用他熟悉的一批来自方济各时代的神父和主教，这些人在他当选教皇之前就已经在他的名单上。
是否可以将利奥过去一年的高调任命和改革视为将美国天主教向左倾斜的尝试？还是更渐进的过程？
我认为利奥的主要担忧是美国天主教会已被视为保守派。例如，纽约的总主教迪兰虽然亲和力强，但明显偏向政治右翼，而他的继任者、总主教罗纳德·希克斯则更不善于与媒体打交道，但深受普通教友喜爱。对于像我这样的进步派来说，用一位更贴近纽约教友的主教取代一位与福克斯新闻关系密切的主教，是件好事。但需要注意的是，美国天主教神职人员和主教普遍比全球其他地区的更保守，因此在选择温和派或进步派时，可选范围有限。
《纽约客》最近将纽约的改革描述为教皇利奥正在组建自己的“美国队”，不仅引导信徒，还批评特朗普政府。这种说法准确吗？
很多美国人高估了教皇对美国具体问题的关注程度。他试图与美国国内的文化战争保持距离，不希望被左翼或右翼利用。但一旦他发言，美国的主教和神父就很难忽视他，也无法声称他不了解美国。移民和大规模驱逐是教皇反复强调的问题。今年夏天，利奥对美国主教会议（USCCB）未能统一发声表示不满，而他本人在10月明确表示，教会不能保持沉默，必须就这一问题发出一致的声音。一个月后，主教们几乎一致地采取了最严厉的立场反对政府，这在利奥之前是难以想象的。
在美国，移民和边境政策是否正在取代堕胎和性伦理问题，成为天主教的主要道德议题？
我认为，正如教皇若望·保禄二世被选为对抗共产主义的象征，教皇利奥十四世的出现也是为了对抗逐渐蔓延的“MAGA威权主义”。但我要强调，若望·保禄二世并非为了波兰人民而当选，而是为了全球教会。同样，我认为利奥十四世看到威权主义可能源自美国，但他并非为了美国本身而对抗，而是为了全球利益。他更关注美国在海外的干预行为，而非国内问题。他的理念是“生命的一致伦理”，即从子宫到坟墓，生命都具有价值。我认为他将威权政权视为对人类生命的威胁。虽然他的前任对堕胎问题非常激烈，但利奥在任一年中，谈论移民、战争和生态问题的频率远高于堕胎。我认为他正在调整方向。这让我想起2013年教皇方济各曾表示，教会过于关注堕胎、同性婚姻和避孕问题，这些议题使教会变成了一个分裂的意识形态平台，仿佛成了一个政治党派。我认为利奥正在延续这一理念。
随着基督教民族主义逐渐主流化，利奥是否在为教会建立一个对抗力量？
是的。我认为基督教民族主义对天主教徒没有容身之地。基督教民族主义本质上是福音派新教的民族主义。需要明确的是，该运动的领导者并不认为天主教徒是基督徒，也不认为他们能获得救赎。我反复强调的正是这一观点。基督教民族主义及其兄弟“MAGA威权主义”本质上都是反天主教的。我在这里提出的是一种阶级论观点：我认为我的阶级和族群被排除在这个项目之外。因此，确实存在一场战争，这是一场文化战争，我欢迎这种文化战争。一场多族群的美国天主教与白人福音派新教之间的文化战争，我认为左翼可以赢得这场战争。
这种“冷战”是否被美国天主教领袖和梵蒂冈的主教们所意识到？
我认为这肯定在利奥的考虑范围内。他相信美国国内的威权主义趋势比任何其他单一问题都更危险，包括移民问题本身，尽管移民问题是他个人最关切的议题之一。即使是保守派天主教主教，也逐渐意识到基督教民族主义项目的局限性。许多主教试图讨好政府，虽然在一定程度上取得了一些成功，但我坚信，从长远来看，这将是一个失败的项目。我们必须更直接地对抗这些势力，而不能依赖总统的好感和意愿。必须更积极地与这些力量进行斗争。在特朗普2.0时代，我一直怀疑美国是否存在“宗教左翼”，但第二任期的特朗普政府让我意识到，美国的天主教左翼确实存在。
A quiet cold war is happening across America — one that many Americans might not be aware of if they’re not tuned into the changes underway in America’s Christian communities.
On one side is the religious right’s use of scripture and faith to justify and defend President Donald Trump’s agenda — and growing Christian nationalist sentiment. On the other side is the reshaping of the American Catholic Church, under Pope Leo XIV.
Through new appointments, orders to his bishops to speak out about immigration, and public comments critiquing the direction of the US under Trump, the pope is setting up his bishops and priests to be evangelizers, to be vocal about human dignity, and to be a counterweight to the authoritarian and nationalist tendencies of the right.
While the church has long played a role in US politics, Pope Leo’s interventions, according to Christopher Hale, a Catholic writer and political activist who writes the Letters from Leo Substack, represent something new.
In the absence of a well-organized “religious left” in America, he told me, Leo’s moves to reform and shake up the American Catholic Church are reinvigorating a “Catholic left” to engage in the moral struggles of the 2020s, specifically around immigration and creeping authoritarianism.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s the first thing to understand about how Pope Leo is changing the American Catholic Church?
Pope Leo is first and foremost a priest and a bishop. He was Pope Francis’s go-to man for appointing bishops for two years, and his education was on the theology and practice of being a bishop, so it’s very crucial to his worldview. He has very strong opinions about what it takes to succeed in these roles, but the most important thing he has emphasized is closeness to the people.
That’s a contrast to the really bad habit in Catholicism to take functionaries and bureaucrats working deep in the weeds and elevate them to be bishops. In New York City, for example, Cardinal Timothy Dolan spent more time as a seminary educator and president of a university than he did as a pastor, a parish priest. There’s been fewer, historically, parish priests that get elevated to the role of bishop, and Pope Francis wanted to change that. Leo is continuing that.
But it takes a long time to actually get one’s personnel in place — there’s thousands of bishops around the world. From what I can tell right now, Leo is working with a pipeline of Francis-era priests and bishops that he is very familiar with, and everyone who’s been named an archbishop and a bishop was on his desk before he was elected pope.
Is it fair to read the flashy appointments and changes Leo has made over the last year as an attempt to move American Catholicism to the left? Or is something more gradual taking place?
Leo’s big concern, very clearly in my opinion, was that the US Catholic Church had become identified as reactionary. New York is an interesting case: Dolan was affable, charming, and friendly, but very clearly identified with the political right. His successor, Archbishop Ronald Hicks, is a bit less comfortable in front of the media, but very good with parishioners, very well-loved among rank-and-file Jane and Joe Catholics.
For progressives like myself, it’s a win to replace the bishop of America’s biggest diocese who was very cozy with Fox and Friends, with someone who’s going to be much closer with the parishioners of New York. What’s not going to happen is the liberal pipe dream of replacing right-wing culture warriors with left-wing culture warriors.
But it’s really important to understand that among the Catholic Church, in the United States, priests and bishops tend to be much more conservative than their global peers. So you automatically have an issue if you’re Leo, and if you were Francis, there’s just not a lot of moderates and progressives to choose from. Your bench is pretty conservative to begin with.
The New Yorker recently described the shake-up in New York as a sign that Pope Leo is forming his own “Team USA,” to not just guide the faithful, but speak out against the Trump administration. Is that accurate?
A lot of Americans overestimate and over-index how much the pope is thinking about the particularities of the United States. He’s trying to separate himself from the culture wars that are happening in the United States, and he doesn’t want to be weaponized by either the left or the right.
But when he does speak, it’s hard now for bishops and priests in the US to ignore him, or say he doesn’t understand the US. And immigration, and mass deportations, are one issue where he has spoken up again and again.
Over the summer, Leo himself seemed to be frustrated that the USCCB (the leadership body of the US church) weren’t speaking as one body on this issue, and instead there was just a hodgepodge of bishops taking action.
So he said very clearly, in October, that the church cannot be silent and they must speak with one voice on this issue. And then a month later, the bishops, in almost a unanimous vote, take the hardest stance against the administration that you’ve seen since the organization existed. That would not have happened under Francis. It would’ve been explained away. The responsiveness of US bishops has gone up extraordinarily in the past year, and especially with conservative US bishops. They have spoken out in ways that I do not think they would have during Francis’s pontificate.
For decades, abortion and sexual ethics were the defining moral issue for the global church, but especially for the American Catholic church. Does it seem, based on Leo’s first year, that immigration and border politics are now taking that space?
The characterization that I’ve made, and I do believe this to be true, is that just as the cardinals elected a Polish pope from behind the Soviet “iron curtain” to defeat communism, I do think that God raised up a pope from the Americas to defeat creeping MAGA authoritarianism. However, I want to be very careful: John Paul II did that not on behalf of the Polish people, but on behalf of the global community.
Similarly, I believe Pope Leo XIV sees authoritarianism as perhaps emanating from America, but he’s not trying to defeat it in service of America itself, but for the global community. He gets much more exercised about any kind of American intervention overseas, as strongly as he does about particular domestic issues.
His framework is the idea of a consistent ethic of life: of life’s value from the womb to the tomb. And I think he views authoritarian regimes as a threat to human life. And while his predecessors were very bombastic about abortion, in the year that Leo has been pope, he’s talked about immigration, he’s talked about war, and he’s talked about ecology at rates of a hundred to one, than when he talks about abortion.
I think he is trying to recalibrate. And it reminds me of Pope Francis in 2013, when he said that the church had gotten obsessed with abortion, gay marriage, and contraception, and it became basically an ideological perch of disjointed ideas that we cared about. We’d become a political party. That was his complaint. I think Leo is carrying forward that idea.
That recalibration is coming as strains of Christian nationalism are going more mainstream. Does it appear like Leo is setting up the church to be a counterweight to that?
Yes. It’s very clear to me that Christian nationalism has no place for Catholics within it. Christian nationalism is evangelical Protestant nationalism. And it’s really pertinent to understand that the leaders of that movement do not think that Catholics are Christian, do not think that we have access to salvation.
That is the argument that I’m trying to make again and again. Christian nationalism and its stepbrother MAGA authoritarianism are both inherently anti-Catholic. To be clear, I’m making a classist argument: I’m saying that my class, my ethnic identity, is excluded from this project. So yes, there is a war at play; it’s a culture war I welcome. A culture war between a multi-ethnic American Catholicism versus white evangelical Protestantism is a culture war that, I believe, the left can win.
Is that something Catholic leaders, bishops in the US and in the Vatican are aware of, this cold war?
No, I think it’s definitely on Leo’s mind. I think the pope believes that the authoritarian creep in the United States is more dangerous than any other single issue, including, in fact, immigration itself, even though that’s one he’s most personally, deeply affected by. And even among conservative Catholic bishops, they are seeing the limits of this Christian nationalist project.
And many bishops think that they can butter up and sweeten up the administration. To some degree they have had some success, but it’s my fervent belief that over the long haul that is going to be a failed project. You’re going to have to stand up to these people more directly, and we cannot rely on the goodwill and the whims of the president. There has to be a more head-on battle against these forces.
In Trump 2.0, there has always been a question to me of whether the religious left exists in this country. I’m not sure that the religious left exists in this country, but the second Trump administration has revealed to me that the Catholic left most certainly does.
2026-02-10 19:00:00
澳大利亚远北昆士兰的Tolga Bat Hospital是一家专门救助蝙蝠的医院，也是世界上少数几家这样的设施之一。志愿者Mia Mathur正在给一只失去母亲的无尾果蝠（又称大果蝠）喂奶。这家医院由创始人兼主任Jenny Mclean运营，她每天工作不停，不给自己发工资。医院每年救助多达1000只蝙蝠，其中大部分是濒危的无尾果蝠。这些蝙蝠通常因疾病、体温过高或被带刺铁丝伤害而被送来。医院还照顾数百只失去母亲的幼蝠，它们依靠人工喂养和安抚才能存活。
无尾果蝠因其眼周较浅的毛发而得名，看起来像戴着墨镜。它们体型巨大，两个月大的幼蝠已经像足球一样大，成年后翼展可达三英尺以上。医院的育婴室是一个两层的小楼，里面有供幼蝠休息的金属架和玩具。这些玩具模仿母蝠，帮助幼蝠获得安全感。一些幼蝠通过奶瓶喂养果蝠奶粉，而更小的幼蝠则需要在恒温箱中照顾，因为它们无法调节体温。稍大的幼蝠则被放在塑料箱中，箱内有加热垫和袜子供它们抓握。为了方便喂养，这些幼蝠会被包裹在布中，形成“蝙蝠宝宝卷饼”的样子。
无尾果蝠面临的主要威胁之一是澳大利亚麻痹蜱，这些寄生虫会通过唾液传播神经毒素，导致蝙蝠瘫痪甚至死亡。在Tolga Bat Hospital，工作人员会在蜱季（通常从10月到12月）中寻找掉落在地上的受感染蝙蝠，并给予治疗。然而，幼蝠通常不会受到麻痹蜱的影响，因为母亲会在觅食时先接触蜱虫，而不会让它们爬到幼蝠身上。
除了麻痹蜱，无尾果蝠还面临其他威胁，如被铁丝缠绕导致翅膀受伤，以及因气候变化引发的极端高温。2018年，远北昆士兰的无尾果蝠因高温死亡约23000只，占总种群的近三分之一。Mclean表示，仅因高温就收到了约500只孤儿蝙蝠。
尽管蝙蝠对人类来说并不构成实际威胁，且人类几乎不会从蝙蝠身上感染疾病，但它们却常常被误解和忽视。Mclean认为，人类对蝙蝠的伤害远大于它们对人类的威胁。她强调，如果蝙蝠继续减少，森林的生态服务，如授粉和种子传播，也将受到影响。她表示：“你不能拥有一个健康的环境，除非你拥有健康的野生动物和健康的生态系统。”
FAR NORTH QUEENSLAND, Australia — Australia is famously a place with some of the world’s most dangerous and frightening animals. Venomous spiders. Deadly snakes. Jellyfish with fatal stings.
But it is also home to one of the world’s cutest: the flying fox, also known as the giant fruit bat. I mean, look at this animal.
This is a baby bat taking a bubble bath. If it doesn’t melt your heart, nothing will.
In northeastern Australia, not far from the coastal city of Cairns, is a place called Tolga Bat Hospital. It is, as its name suggests, a hospital for bats — one of the only such facilities on the planet. And it’s also one of the few places you can see a baby bat getting a bubble bath.
The hospital, which has just one full-time paid employee but a cadre of volunteers, has been treating bats for more than 30 years. It comprises a few small buildings with treatment rooms, cold storage for fruit, and a nursery for orphan bats, as well as several outdoor wire enclosures. The largest cage is akin to a long-term care facility; it’s for bats that can no longer fly and will live out their lives at the hospital.
Tolga Bat Hospital cares for as many as 1,000 bats a year, the bulk of which are spectacled flying foxes, an endangered species and one of four distinct kinds of flying foxes in mainland Australia. They come in with disease, heat stress, or injuries from barbed wire. The hospital also cares for hundreds of baby spectacleds — named for the lighter fur around their eyes that makes it look like they’re wearing glasses — that have lost their mothers and can’t survive on their own.
On a warm afternoon in December, I visited the hospital with Australian photographer Harriet Spark. We met a lot of cute bats — and they were hard not to love. Flying foxes are furry with expressive eyes, large ears, and a dog-like snout. But it was the hospital founder and director, Jenny Mclean, whom I found even more endearing.
“You meet a bat, and they’re worth caring about,” Mclean, 71, told me that afternoon, as she fed a sick adult bat fruit juice from a syringe. “They have serious threats that they’re facing, all of them human-induced.”
Mclean, who works around the clock at the hospital and doesn’t pay herself, said she feels a responsibility to help these creatures — not only because they’re suffering at our expense but because they help keep our planet healthy. Flying foxes are exceptionally good at pollinating plants and dispersing their seeds, Mclean said.
Giving back to these animals in some way, she said, is the least we can do.
The nursery is a small, two-story building with a verandah that looks out onto the lush grounds of the hospital. Most of the babies were outside when we visited, hanging with their feet on several mesh metal shelves. Spectacled flying foxes are enormous: These animals were about 2 months old and already football-sized. By the time they grow up, their wingspan could reach more than three feet.
The bats, still too young to fly, hung upside down, wrapped in their own wings, alongside stuffed animals. The stuffies, which Mclean buys from a local secondhand store, are meant to mimic mother bats, and the babies will often cling to them for comfort, Mclean told me. Some of the bats were drinking from bottles of flying fox formula attached to the shelves.
Even younger bats were in a room inside the building. Infants under one week are kept in an incubator because they have trouble regulating their body temperature. Slightly older babies are kept in plastic boxes with heating pads and socks that they can cling to. For feeding, “box babies” are swaddled in cloth around a small rectangular pillow so their wings are contained — forming baby bat burritos. A few had silicon pacifiers in their mouths.
Nearly all of these orphans lost their moms to Australian paralysis ticks: parasites that carry a potent neurotoxin in their saliva. When paralysis ticks bite bats and other animals without natural immunity, such as pet cats and dogs, the insects can, as their name suggests, cause paralysis and, eventually, heart failure.
During tick season, which typically runs from October to December, hospital workers search the ground below colonies, or “camps,” for infected bats, which often fall out of trees. If the infection is mild, workers treat the animal with an anti-toxin at the hospital. The babies, meanwhile, are often spared from paralysis. Mothers likely pick up ticks while they’re foraging without their young, Mclean said, and the parasites latch on before they have a chance to crawl onto the babies. That leads to an abundance of orphans in need of care.
Paralysis ticks live all across eastern Australia, but they only seem to affect spectacled flying foxes in the Atherton Tablelands, where the hospital is located, Mclean told me. The reason is still a mystery. One explanation, Mclean said, is that spectacleds in this region feed on the berries of an invasive shrub called wild tobacco, where they encounter the ticks. While the plant grows in other parts of Australia where both ticks and flying foxes are found, Mclean said, the moist climate of the Tablelands may make ticks more likely to venture out of the grass and into the branches of the invasive shrub. That’s where the flying foxes feed.
That afternoon, I followed Mclean into the main hospital building, where she treats adult bats with paralysis. Rows of small metal cages and cloth boxes sat on shelves along the wall. In some of the enclosures, large flying foxes hung calmly from the top, whereas in others, the animals — still facing the effects of paralysis — were lying down.
Using a towel, Mclean gently grabbed one of the bats from its cage to see if it would eat. The animal was having trouble swallowing, Mclean told me, as she placed a syringe with apple and mango juice in its mouth. The bat took a few sips and then pulled its head away. Mclean moved it into a small plastic bin for plan B: seeing if the animal would eat a small piece of pear instead. The bat began to chew, but then spat it out. “You have not got a good swallow, my girl,” Mclean said.
Tick paralysis is just one of the threats to Australia’s flying foxes, many of which are getting worse. Little reds, another species, get tangled in barbed wire, causing tears in their wings. Spectacleds in the Tablelands, meanwhile, are increasingly born with cleft palate syndrome (for reasons that are not yet clear), which makes it hard for them to feed. And more recently, severe heat waves tied to climate change have decimated flying fox populations. In 2018, unrelenting heat killed about 23,000 spectacled flying foxes in Far North Queensland, nearly a third of the entire population. Mclean says she received about 500 orphans that year from the heat wave alone.
Nonetheless, these animals lack support — they’re “maligned,” Mclean said — especially compared to koalas and other furry animals in Australia. “There are not that many people who will champion them,” she told me.
Bats have a bad rap, in part, because they can carry diseases. Flying foxes are no exception — in rare cases, they can carry Australian bat lyssavirus, a relative of rabies. What gets less attention is the fact that humans almost never contract a disease from flying foxes. “We get about a thousand sick and injured bats a year, and we get a lyssavirus bat once every three years,” Mclean said. (Workers at Tolga Bat Hospital get vaccinated before handling bats as a safety precaution.)
Ultimately, flying foxes are not a real threat to humans, she said. Disproportionately, humans harm them. “It’s this whole thing of, are we willing to share the planet or not?” she said. “If you’re not willing to share the planet, you are going to destroy the planet.”
If flying foxes continue to disappear, so will essential services like pollination and seed dispersal that keep forests alive, Mclean told me. “You can’t have a healthy person unless you’ve got healthy wildlife and a healthy environment.”
2026-02-10 05:55:00
2026年2月，一名联邦移民官员在明尼苏达州明尼阿波利斯将一名抗议者按倒在地。| Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune 通过 Getty Images 提供
美国第五巡回上诉法院的两位法官刚刚裁定，允许特朗普政府将数百万移民关押在得克萨斯州、路易斯安那州或密西西比州的拘留设施中。这一裁决短期内可能会加速特朗普政府已有的做法，即将在明尼苏达州等地被逮捕的移民转移到得克萨斯州，因为那里有支持特朗普的第五巡回法院法官审理他们的诉讼，要求释放他们。
如果最高法院接受第五巡回法院对联邦法律的解释，那么几乎所有被联邦移民执法部门逮捕的移民都将被关押数月甚至更久，无论他们与美国的联系或其合法居留的主张是否成立。
Buenrostro-Mendez 案涉及两项联邦法律条款：一项适用于试图进入美国的非公民，另一项适用于在美国境内被逮捕的移民。前者规定，许多试图入境的移民必须被拘留，直到法律程序决定他们是否可以进入美国。后者通常允许在美国境内被捕的移民在案件审理期间被保释。自1996年这两项法律实施以来，近30年里，包括特朗普政府在内的所有总统行政机构都曾认为，强制拘留仅适用于试图入境的移民，因为法律确实如此规定。
然而，去年7月，特朗普政府宣布，所有在美国境内被发现未通过合法入境程序的移民都将自动被拘留。自那以后，绝大多数联邦法官都拒绝了这一新解释。据Politico的Kyle Cheney报道，“至少有360名法官在超过3000个案件中拒绝了扩大拘留的策略，只有27名法官支持这一策略，涉及约130个案件。”
这些法官分布在全国各地，其中许多是共和党人。许多案件源于特朗普在明尼阿波利斯的政策，联邦法院曾驳回特朗普对移民法的解读，并下令释放被拘留但未缴纳保释金的移民。然而，在Buenrostro-Mendez一案中，两位第五巡回法院法官采纳了少数派观点，认为政府应拘留所有在美国境内被发现的无证移民。
第五巡回法院意见书的撰写者琼斯法官曾是德克萨斯州共和党党务委员会的前法律顾问，她曾裁定一名男子即使其律师在大部分审判中缺席，仍可被执行死刑。目前尚不清楚最高法院是否会接受琼斯的这一非常规立场。但即使最高法院最终推翻琼斯的裁决，其决定的速度也至关重要。在拜登政府期间，当一位非常规法官下令政府采取更严厉的移民政策时，最高法院曾拖延近一年才作出裁决，导致该裁决在那段时间内生效。
如果最高法院采取类似做法，那么在Buenrostro-Mendez一案中，琼斯的裁决将允许ICE（美国移民与海关执法局）将移民逮捕并送往得克萨斯州，根据琼斯的裁决，他们将被长期拘留。
关于在美国境内被逮捕的移民，法律到底怎么说？
联邦移民法包括一项适用于在美国边境入境的非公民的条款（美国法典第8编第1225条），以及一项适用于在美国境内被逮捕的移民的条款（美国法典第8编第1226条）。后者允许在美国境内被逮捕的移民在案件审理期间被保释，有时需缴纳保释金，而前者则没有这一规定。
第1225条规定，如果移民官员确定某人“显然且无可置疑地不被允许入境”，则该人应被拘留，直到移民程序结束。由于该条款仅适用于“申请入境的外国人”，绝大多数法官认为，其强制拘留仅适用于那些试图进入美国的移民，而不适用于已经在美境内但未合法入境的移民。
琼斯法官则试图绕过法律中“申请入境的外国人”的定义，将其类比为一名申请进入大学的高中生。她的论点有两个部分：首先，她指出法律中“申请入境的外国人”这一术语包括那些未通过合法入境程序而留在美国的移民；其次，她认为“寻求入境的外国人”这一术语也应具有相同的定义。琼斯声称，不能说一旦某人提交了大学申请，他们就不再“寻求入境”。同样，她认为，那些在美国被动等待而未正式申请合法入境的移民也应被视为“寻求入境”。
然而，这一论点的问题在于，琼斯的假设中的大学申请者实际上已经采取了积极行动来“寻求”入学：他们提交了申请。琼斯正确指出，某些在美国的移民根据法律定义被视为“申请入境者”，但这并不意味着他们已经“寻求”入境。换句话说，琼斯的类比只有在设想一个学生虽然决定不申请德克萨斯大学，却因某些州或联邦法律被强制提交申请的情况下才成立。因此，强制拘留条款并不适用于所有被法律定义为“申请入境者”的移民，而仅适用于那些同时“寻求”入境的移民。
Buenrostro-Mendez案中的移民现在可以采取哪些行动？
从程序上讲，Buenrostro-Mendez案中的移民有两个途径寻求最高法院对琼斯裁决的审查。一种是提交请愿书，请求最高法院对本案进行完整审理并正式推翻琼斯的裁决，但这一过程通常需要数月甚至更长时间。如果这些移民今天请求最高法院审查，法院可能要到2027年6月才作出裁决，这意味着琼斯的裁决将在一年以上时间内继续生效。
另一种方式是请求最高法院在“影子法庭”（shadow docket）上暂时阻止琼斯的裁决。影子法庭处理紧急动议和其他案件，通常由大法官们在不发布解释性意见的情况下快速决定。如果最高法院在影子法庭上支持这些移民，将暂停琼斯的裁决，直到法院对案件进行完整审理并作出决定。
但目前还不清楚这些大法官是否会给予在得克萨斯州被拘留的移民影子法庭救济，即使他们最终认为琼斯的裁决是错误的。当特朗普政府曾请求最高法院在影子法庭上介入时，大法官们通常迅速作出裁决，往往在几周内就支持特朗普。然而，最高法院的共和党多数派经常拖延由支持移民的当事人提出的案件。
例如，在拜登政府期间，两位特朗普任命的法官曾下令拜登恢复特朗普时期的边境政策，并禁止拜登政府指示ICE官员优先处理那些对公共安全或国家安全构成威胁的移民，而不是那些行为守法的无证移民。虽然最高法院最终裁定这些下级法院的命令缺乏法律依据，但法院拖延了一整年才作出裁决，实际上让这两位特朗普法官在这段时间内主导了联邦移民政策。
因此，即使琼斯的裁决最终被最高法院推翻（考虑到绝大多数联邦法官认为琼斯的裁决错误，这一结果可能性较大），最高法院的共和党多数派仍可能通过拖延裁决，使特朗普获得重大胜利。
Two judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a court dominated by MAGA Republicans, just handed the Trump administration broad authority to lock up millions of immigrants — provided that it can get those immigrants to Texas, Louisiana, or Mississippi.
In the short term, the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi is likely to accelerate the Trump administration’s already-common practice of taking people arrested in Minnesota and other places, and moving them to Texas where their lawsuits seeking release will be heard by the Trump-aligned Fifth Circuit.
Should the Supreme Court embrace the Fifth Circuit’s reading of federal law, moreover, it will mean that virtually any person captured by federal immigration enforcement will be locked in a detention facility for months or longer, regardless of their ties to the United States or, in many cases, the merits of their claim that they are lawfully entitled to remain in this country.
Buenrostro-Mendez turns on two provisions of federal law, one of which applies to non-citizens who are “seeking admission” to the United States, and another which applies to the “apprehension and detention of aliens” within the US interior. The first provision says that many immigrants seeking admission at the border must be held in a detention facility while the legal proceedings that will determine whether they may enter are pending. The later provision, meanwhile, typically permits immigrants who are arrested inside the US to be released on bond.
For nearly 30 years, after these provisions became law in 1996, every presidential administration including the first Trump administration read immigration law to call for mandatory detention only for certain immigrants “seeking admission” at the border, because that’s what the law actually says. But last July, the Trump administration announced that all immigrants who are found in the United States without being lawfully admitted at the border will be automatically detained.
Since then, the overwhelming majority of federal judges have rejected this new reading of the statute. According to Politico’s Kyle Cheney, “at least 360 judges rejected the expanded detention strategy — in more than 3,000 cases — while just 27 backed it in about 130 cases.” These judges are spread throughout the country, and many of the judges who rejected the administration’s novel reading of the statute are Republicans.
Many of these cases arise out of President Donald Trump’s occupation of Minneapolis, where federal courts have rejected Trump’s reading of immigration law and ordered immigrants detained without bond to be released.
Nevertheless, in Buenrostro-Mendez, two Fifth Circuit judges adopted the minority view, concluding that the government must detain all undocumented immigrants found anywhere in the country. The author of the Fifth Circuit’s opinion, Judge Edith Jones, is a former general counsel to the Texas Republican Party who once ruled that a man could be executed despite the fact that his lawyer slept through much of his trial.
It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 Republican majority, will accept Jones’s outlier position. But even if the justices ultimately decide to reverse Jones, it matters a great deal how quickly they do so. Twice during the Biden administration, after an outlier judge ordered the government to take a harsher approach to immigrants, the Supreme Court sat on the case for nearly an entire year before ultimately reversing the lower court’s decision. The lower court’s decision remained in effect for that entire time.
If the Supreme Court takes a similar approach in Buenrostro-Mendez, that will allow ICE to round up immigrants and ship them to Texas, where they will be locked up pursuant to Jones’s decision, for as long as that decision is in effect.
Federal immigration law includes one provision (Section 1225, Title 8 of the US Code) which applies to noncitizens arriving at the US border, and a separate provision (Section 1226) which applies to immigrants apprehended within the United States. The latter provision allows immigrants inside the US to be released from detention while their immigration cases are proceeding, sometimes after paying a bond, while the former provision does not.
Section 1225 provides that “in the case of an alien who is an applicant for admission, if the examining immigration officer determines that an alien seeking admission is not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted, the alien shall be detained” pending an immigration proceeding. Because this statute only applies to “an alien seeking admission,” the overwhelming majority of judges have concluded that its call for mandatory detention only applies to, well, immigrants who are seeking to be admitted to the United States.
It does not apply to immigrants who are already in the United States, even if those immigrants are not lawfully present.
Jones’s opinion, meanwhile, tries to get around the law’s reference to “an alien seeking admission” by analogizing this case to a high school senior applying for admission to a college.
Her argument has two parts. First, she notes that the statute defines the term “an alien who is an applicant for admission,” to include immigrants that are present in the United States without going through the legal admissions process. She then argues that the separate term at issue in Buenrostro-Mendez — the words “an alien seeking admission” — should also be read to have the same definition.
Jones claims that “it would make no sense” to say that someone seeking admission to a college is no longer seeking admission “as soon as the applicant clicks ‘submit’ on her application.” Similarly, she claims, an immigrant who passively waits in the United States without formally seeking to be admitted lawfully should also be understood as “seeking admission.”
The problem with this argument, however, is that Jones’s hypothetical college applicant has actually taken an affirmative act to “seek” admission to a college: They submitted an application. Jones is correct that some immigrants within the United States are deemed to be “an applicant for admission” by a statutory definition, but that doesn’t mean that those immigrants have actually sought admission. Jones’s analogy only makes sense if you imagine a high school student who, despite the fact that they decided not to apply to the University of Texas, had an application filed against their will because of some state or federal law.
The mandatory detention provision, in other words, doesn’t apply to all immigrants who are defined by law as an “applicant for admission.” It applies only to a subset of those immigrants who are also “seeking admission.”
One reason why the Fifth Circuit’s decision matters so much is that, in Trump v. J.G.G. (2025), a 5-4 Supreme Court concluded that immigrants who claim that they are illegally detained must do so using a process known as “habeas,” and habeas petitions may only be filed in “the district of confinement” — that is, in the specific place where the person challenging their detention is detained.
Even before the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Buenrostro-Mendez, the Trump administration was already flying many immigrants detained in Minnesota to Texas — no doubt because Trump’s lawyers anticipated that the MAGA-friendly judges on this court would do whatever they could to bolster his deportation plans. One consequence of this already-existing practice is that immigration lawyers in Minnesota must race to file a habeas petition while their client is still located in that state, because if ICE succeeds in removing the immigrant to Texas, then the immigrant will lose their ability to seek relief before a nonpartisan bench.
Another consequence is that, when immigrants sent to Texas are later released, ICE often just kicks them out of the Texas detention facility with no way to make their way back home to Minneapolis.
This practice of snatching up immigrants in non-Fifth Circuit states and flying them to Texas is likely to accelerate, at least while Jones’s opinion in Buenrostro-Mendez remains in effect. Under Jones’s decision, once an immigrant crosses into the Fifth Circuit, they effectively lose their right to seek release or demand a bond hearing until their immigration proceeding is resolved.
Procedurally, the immigrant parties in Buenrostro-Mendez have two paths to seek Supreme Court review of Jones’s decision. One is to file a petition asking the justices to give this case a full hearing and formally reverse Jones’s decision, but that process typically takes months or more. If these immigrants were to seek Supreme Court review tomorrow, the Court is unlikely to release its decision until June of 2027 — meaning Jones’s decision would remain in effect for well over a year.
The immigrants could also ask the Supreme Court to temporarily block Jones’s decision on its “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the justices often decide without issuing an opinion explaining their conclusions. If the Court ruled in favor of these immigrants on the shadow docket, that would suspend Jones’s decision until the Supreme Court could give the case a full hearing and decide it using its ordinarily much slower process.
But it’s far from clear that these justices would grant shadow docket relief to immigrants detained in Texas, even if they ultimately decide that Jones’s Buenrostro-Mendez decision is wrong. When the Trump administration has sought the Court’s intervention on the shadow docket, the justices typically act with lightning speed — often handing Trump a victory within weeks. But the Court’s Republican majority frequently slow-walks cases brought by pro-immigrant parties.
During the Biden administration, for example, two Trump-appointed judges handed down decisions requiring President Joe Biden to reinstate a Trump-era border policy, and also forbidding the Biden administration to tell ICE officers to focus on immigrants who endangered public safety or national security, and not on undocumented immigrants who were otherwise law-abiding. While the Supreme Court eventually concluded that both of these lower court orders were not supported by law, it sat on both cases for nearly an entire year, effectively allowing these two Trump judges to set federal immigration policy during that year.
So, even if Jones’s decision is eventually rejected by the Supreme Court — and given the overwhelming consensus among federal judges that Jones is wrong, this outcome is fairly likely — the Court’s Republican majority may still hand Trump a significant victory by sitting on its hands.
2026-02-09 20:30:00
在美国的许多地区，外面的天气确实显得阴沉。天气寒冷，积雪从美丽纯净变得肮脏且结冰，人们外出的动力也较低。美国精神病学会2024年的一项调查发现，近一半的美国人表示冬季情绪会变差，5%的人则会经历一种更严重的季节性情绪障碍（SAD）。不过，对于那些情绪变化较轻的人，有什么解决办法呢？心理学家卡里·莱布诺维茨（Kari Leibowitz）认为，有意识地接受季节的变化可能有所帮助。她是《如何度过冬天：在寒冷、黑暗或艰难的日子里运用心态实现成长》一书的作者。莱布诺维茨承认，现在的冬天是现实的，但过去并非如此。她说：“我是在新泽西海岸长大的，那是一个以夏天为中心的小镇，我小时候真的非常讨厌冬天。”她的研究最终帮助她改变了对冬天的看法。“在大学期间，我开始对幸福感的科学和人类如何实现繁荣产生浓厚兴趣。我了解到一位名叫乔尔·维特瑟（Joar Vittersø）的教授，他是全球研究人类幸福的专家，而且他任教于世界上最北端的大学——挪威北部的特罗姆瑟大学。”她开始思考，这位研究幸福的专家为何会住在冬季太阳连续两个月不升起的地方？莱布诺维茨后来在挪威北部生活了一年，研究她所说的“冬季心态”。她在Vox的每周问答播客《Explain It to Me》最新一期中解释了这种心态以及如何利用它来克服冬季忧郁。以下是与萨缪尔（Samuel）的对话摘录，内容经过删减和润色。你可以通过Apple Podcasts、Spotify或其他播客平台收听完整节目。如果你想提交问题，可以发送电子邮件至[email protected]，或拨打1-800-618-8545。
你从在没有直接阳光的地区生活和研究中学到了什么？我们发现，特罗姆瑟的人对冬天有着不同的感受。他们并不专注于冬天的缺点，比如寒冷、不便和不适。相反，他们更关注冬天带来的机会。黑暗和寒冷被视为一个适合舒适、放慢节奏、休息的季节。冬天的光线被看作是特别、神奇和美丽的。他们倾向于关注自己喜欢的季节特点，而不是仅仅把它看作需要忍受的季节。
你体验过这种光线吗？那非常神奇。极夜是冬季的一个时期，太阳不会直接升起。当人们听说太阳在冬天两个月都不升起时，可能会想象成完全的黑暗，但特罗姆瑟并非如此。他们每天还能看到几小时的“民用暮光”，也就是太阳尚未升起或刚刚落下的时间，此时太阳仍位于地平线以下。因此，他们能获得间接的光线，天空呈现出粉红、紫色、深蓝色和黄色，形成一种美丽的水彩效果。他们能看到壮观的日出和日落色彩，但这些色彩持续的时间比我们大多数地方的要长得多，每天可达两到三小时，因为太阳在冬季的每一天都会在地平线以下徘徊。在这些时间段前后，还有“蓝色时间”。光线的角度、雪地、山脉和太阳的组合，使世界看起来仿佛你戴着钴蓝色的太阳镜，整个世界都染上了蓝色的色调。你向外看去，天空可能是深蓝、皇家蓝或浅蓝色，取决于时间。这种体验在地球上其他地方是难以找到的。我认为，特罗姆瑟的人非常享受并珍惜他们在一年中最黑暗的日子里所拥有的这种特别的光线。
不过，即使如此，每天仍然有大约18小时的黑暗，天气依然寒冷、多风、潮湿和下雪。因此，我认为这种神奇的光线帮助当地人更好地利用冬天的潜力。这种适应冬天的心态也让他们更享受冬天。
为什么即使在恶劣天气下也要外出呢？有几个原因。首先，我们知道新鲜空气、与自然的接触和运动都是天然的抗抑郁剂。其次，我认为如果你在冬天待在室内的时间越长，你就会越觉得冬天是无法克服的障碍，这会限制你做任何事情。因此，冬天是进行室内活动的好时机。在世界上的大多数地方，人们在冬天都会花更多时间待在室内。但即使你想看电影、参观博物馆、参加舞蹈或绘画课程、语言课程，或者与朋友聚会、去健身房，这些活动都需要你离开家，面对各种天气条件。我认为在美国，人们在冬天更容易孤立，但在许多寒冷地区的文化中，冬天反而是社交的高峰期。
你如何看待这种文化差异？如果你生活在历史上长期寒冷的地方，这种文化可能代代相传。如果在寒冷、黑暗和下雪的月份中，你不依靠邻居，没有可以依靠的人，那可能会面临生死攸关的处境。这可能就是区别在于你是否能度过冬天。我也认为，美国文化希望我们全年保持一致，无论季节如何，都期望我们同样高效、有生产力和精力充沛。如果做不到，就会觉得是意志力的失败。我认为人们在冬天花费太多精力去对抗季节，导致他们感觉没有剩余的精力去投入其他事情，于是就向内收缩，变得抑郁、孤僻和孤立。我们是否在对抗我们自然的休息需求？
如果你观察地球上的其他生物，无论是植物还是动物，它们在冬天都会改变行为。动物们都会以某种方式放慢节奏。因此，感觉冬天更加疲惫、想要放慢节奏是很自然的。但我们却欺骗自己，认为我们可以在全年无休地持续成长和生产。我认为，我们应学会接受个人或自然的季节性，比如空闲、休息、放慢节奏、恢复和重新充电。如果有人想采用一种更北欧的方式来看待季节，有什么小的仪式可以借鉴，以帮助他们现在在黑暗中发现美呢？
“关掉大灯，改用小灯，最好是蜡烛或台灯。”这是你在北欧地区会看到的一种做法。在地球上一些最黑暗的地方，比如哥本哈根、挪威的特罗姆瑟、冰岛的雷克雅未克，人们在最黑暗的季节里并不会把家里所有的灯都打开。相反，他们家里的灯光是柔和的、闪烁的蜡烛和台灯。这句常见的冬季建议是：“如果你想更好地享受冬天，点一支蜡烛，所有问题都会消失，你会变得快乐。”显然，这句话并不完全正确，但有意识地接受黑暗确实有其意义。它将一种负担转化为一种机会，让你在温暖、宁静、舒适的灯光下休息，有助于改善睡眠，让你更好地享受和拥抱冬天。
Across much of the United States, it’s downright dreary outside. It’s cold, the snow has gone from beautiful and pristine to dirty and crusted over, and the motivation to get outside is low. A 2024 poll from the American Psychiatric Association found that nearly half of Americans say their mood takes a dip in the winter, and 5 percent experience an acute version of these feelings called seasonal affective disorder. (SAD can be treated with antidepressants, cognitive behavioral therapy, and light therapy under the guidance of a professional.)
But what are the solutions for those who struggle with less severity? Psychologist Kari Leibowitz says intentionally embracing the season may be helpful. She’s the author of How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days.
Leibowitz accepts winter for what it is now, but it wasn’t always that way. “I grew up at the Jersey Shore in a very summer-centric town, and I grew up reall,y really disliking the winter,” she says. Her work is what eventually helped her come around. “During undergra,d I became really interested in the science of well-being and studying human flourishing and how we can help people thrive. I learned about the work of this professor Joar Vittersø, who just happens to be this world expert on human happiness, and who lives and teaches at the northernmost university in the world, the University of Tromsø in northern Norway. And then I sort of started thinking about — isn’t it kind of funny or weird or surprising that this professor who is a world expert on happiness lives in a place that is so far north that the sun doesn’t rise for two months each winter?”
Leibowitz eventually moved to northern Norway for a year to research what she calls “the wintertime mindset.” She explains that mindset and how we can use it to beat the winter blues on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Samuel, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.
What did you learn from living and researching in a place that has no direct sunlight for two months?
What we found is that people in Tromsø relate to winter differently. They’re really not focused on the downsides of winter, the unpleasantries of winter, the discomforts of winter. Broadly speaking, they’re oriented to the season’s opportunities. The darkness and the cold are seen as a time of year to be cozy, to slow down, to rest. The winter light is really seen as special and magical and beautiful. They tend to orient towards the things that they like about the season instead of just seeing it as a time of year to endure.
I’ve seen pictures of that time of year in Norway and even though the sun doesn’t rise, it’s this gorgeous blue light. What was it like to experience that?
It is so magical. The polar night is this time of year where the sun doesn’t rise directly above the horizon. And when you hear that the sun doesn’t rise for two months, maybe like me, you’re picturing total pitch blackness, but that’s not what they get in Tromsø. They get a few hours of what’s known as civil twilight each day. This is the same as that time right before the sun rises or just after it sets, when the sun is still below the horizon. So you’re getting indirect light, and you have the sky that’s pink and purple and deeply blue and yellow. You’re getting this really amazing watercolor effect. You can get these magnificent sunrise and sunset colors, but instead of getting them for 15 or 20 or 30 minutes like we do in most places on earth, you can get them for two or three or four hours as the sun is skirting below the horizon for a couple of hours each winter day.
And then before and after that period, you have the blue hours. There’s something about the angle of the light and the snow and the mountains and the sun that makes the world, it almost looks like you’re wearing cobalt glasses, like you’re wearing sunglasses that are tinting the world blue. You look outside, and it’s somewhere between a navy, a royal, or a pale blue, depending on what time of day. And it’s really like something I have not experienced anywhere else on earth. And I think that people in Tromsø really revel in and appreciate this extra special light that they get during the darkest days of the year.
That said, it still is a nighttime level of darkness for about 18 hours a day. It still is cold and blustery and wet and snowy. And so I think that the magic helps people there tap into the possibilities of winter. And I think this adapting to the winter really helps people enjoy it.
Why is getting out, even in bad weather, so important?
It’s important for a number of reasons. First of all, we know that fresh air, connection with nature, and movement are all natural antidepressants. The other thing that I think is so important is that the more you stay inside in winter, the more it gets built up in your head as something you can’t do. That’s going to limit you from doing anything. So winter is a great time of year for indoor activities. In most places in the world, you’re going to spend way more time inside in winter than outside. But even if what you want to do is go to the movies, go to museums, go take a dance class or a painting class or a language class, meet up with friends, go to the gym, all of those things require you to leave your house and brave the elements in some way, shape, or form.
I think here in the US we tend to isolate more during the winter, but in a lot of cold-weather cultures, winter is peak social season. What do you make of that cultural difference?
If you’ve lived in a place that has historically been cold for thousands of years, that culture might be passed down. It would literally be life or death if you didn’t bring your neighbors close, if you didn’t have people that you could rely on in the cold, dark, snowy months. That might be the difference between you surviving the winter and not. I also think that so much of the culture in the US wants us to be the same year-round. The expectations are that you should be equally productive and energetic and efficient no matter the season, no matter what’s going on outside, no matter what’s going on in the world; that it’s almost like a willpower failure if you’re not. I think people are spending so much energy fighting the season that then they feel like they have nothing left to give, and so they just draw inwards and are hibernating. Not in an indulgent, intentional way, but in sort of this depressive, reclusive, isolating way.
Are we fighting this natural need for us to rest?
If you look at every other living thing on earth, plant or animal, they all change their behavior in the winter. Every animal slows down in the winter one way or another. And so I think it’s very natural to feel more tired in the winter, to feel that call to slow down. But we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we can and should be growing and producing more and more without breaks year-round. And I think that there is a lot to be gained from instead embracing personal or natural seasons for fallowness and rest and downtime and rejuvenation and recovery.
If someone wanted to adopt a more Nordic way of thinking about the seasons, what’s a small ritual that they can borrow to start finding that beauty in the dark right now?
Big light off: so no overhead lights, just small lights, preferably candles, but also lamps. This is something you’ll see throughout the Nordics. If you go to some of the darkest places on Earth: In Copenhagen, in Tromsø, Norway, in Reykjavik, in Iceland, in the darkest times of year, you will not see homes that are brightly lit with every light on inside the house. Instead, you’ll see homes that are lit with soft, glowing candles and lamps, and it’s kind of cliche winter advice: “So if you want to enjoy winter more, light a candle and then all your problems will go away, you’ll be happy.” And obviously that’s not exactly right, but there is something to intentionally embracing the darkness. It transforms something that feels like a burden into this opportunity for this cozy, moody, peaceful, restful lighting that will help you sleep better and will help you enjoy and embrace the winter.
2026-02-09 20:00:00
2026年1月22日，世界经济论坛在瑞士达沃斯举行期间，人们注意到美国总统唐纳德·特朗普左手背有一处淤青。据Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images报道，特朗普在过去的十年中多次在国际舞台上发表冗长的演讲，尽管他自称这是一种“精彩的”表达方式。然而，最近他的言语混乱似乎有所加剧。自他一年前重返白宫以来，互联网上关于他健康状况的讨论一直此起彼伏。他的言语混乱、手部淤青以及脚踝肿胀，引发了人们对他是否健康的疑问。
《纽约杂志》的Ben Terris最近撰文探讨了特朗普的健康状况，他在与Today, Explained节目主持人Astead Herndon的访谈中提到，这个问题的答案相当复杂。以下是他们对话的节选，内容经过删减和润色。完整访谈可在各大播客平台收听，包括Apple Podcasts、Pandora和Spotify。
这篇文章的写作契机是什么？我们多年来一直在关注他，但过去一年，关于他的健康状况、手部淤青、脚踝肿胀以及在会议中打盹等问题的讨论明显增多。在与他见面之前，我阅读了一些他家族成员的书籍，并与他的侄女玛丽·特朗普进行了交谈。玛丽说，有时她看到特朗普在公开场合讲话时，会想起她祖父在患阿尔茨海默病时的样子。虽然我不确定他是否患有阿尔茨海默病，但我还是想向他询问这个问题。特朗普一开始说：“我父亲非常健康，没有任何问题。他的心脏非常强壮。”然后他补充道：“不过他晚年有一个问题。”他指着自己的头，说：“阿尔茨海默病。”接着，坐在旁边的新闻秘书卡罗琳·利维特立刻补充道：“是的，他有阿尔茨海默病，但我不有。”特朗普则回应说：“我当然没有。”
你发现特朗普健康状况存在哪些担忧？我最初想写的文章是探讨他是否健康，但最终演变成关于政府是否健康的问题。在特朗普的圈子中，似乎有一种“感染”，每个人谈到他时都用最夸张、最类似朝鲜领导人的方式。他们不是简单地说他作为一个近80岁的老人还算健康，而是用“超人”、“世界上最健康的人”等极端词汇来形容他。他声称自己比40年前更健康，但事实上，他并不锻炼，饮食也不健康，甚至喝大量的无糖可乐。而且，他身边的人也不值得完全信任。我发表的文章不仅反映了特朗普的健康状况，也反映了特朗普所代表的美国。
关于手部淤青，你有没有得到任何解释？在进入白宫椭圆形办公室进行采访时，我们握手。他的手很柔软温暖，这让我感到意外，但手背却非常干燥，看起来像是一块犀牛皮上的淤青。我问他这是怎么回事，他解释说，他正在服用比医生建议更高的剂量阿司匹林，以保持血液稀薄。他说，因为服用大量阿司匹林，所以很容易淤青。他经常握手，所以总是会留下淤青。医生证实了这一点。
在报道特朗普健康状况时，你有没有遇到什么困难？我认为，我们经历了拜登时代，这在某种程度上让报道变得更加容易。虽然仍然困难，但人们更愿意谈论这个问题了。在拜登时期，他逐渐老去，人们在某些方面过于谨慎，不敢谈论他的健康问题。这可能让记者们更愿意去挖掘类似的故事。
你认为将特朗普与拜登进行比较是公平的吗？我认为这是公平的，因为两人年龄相仿。特朗普即将年满80岁，这本身就值得报道。他之所以能“逃避”一些衰老迹象，可能是因为这些迹象也可能是他一贯的风格。他一直是个混乱的人物，说话冗长，常常发表不切实际的言论。这种风格在15年前就存在，现在依然如此。不过，他现在的表达方式与过去有所不同，但不像拜登那样明显显示出衰退迹象。拜登一直是个严肃的人，说话方式比较传统，一旦出现偏差，人们更容易察觉。
你提到特朗普及其助手经常告诉你不该相信自己的眼睛，比如他在会议上打盹，而助手则说那是他的“思考姿势”。我之前没有提到的一点是，我曾与一些来自拜登政府的人交谈过。他们不愿公开身份，但其中一人告诉我，看着特朗普的情况确实让他们感到有些熟悉。我手头有一段关于拜登健康问题的引述：“我认为，我们否认得太多，导致人们看到的和听到的之间出现了差距，这引发了不信任。我认为，人们现在已经无法再否认他们所看到的事实了。他们正陷入与我们当年相同的困境。”
特朗普的广泛支持和吸引力部分来自于他能够让追随者相信他所描绘的现实。你认为他在健康问题上的这种策略对他有帮助吗？我认为这和他处理其他问题的方式类似：他的支持者会相信他的一切说法，而中间群体则不太容易被说服。特朗普似乎正在失去对自身故事的控制。他的民调数据并不理想，中期选举的走势也不如他所愿，移民问题也未能按照他的预期发展。他试图控制健康状况的叙事，就像他试图控制其他一切一样，但我觉得他正在失去这种控制。这种情况在总统中并不少见，这就是他们成为“跛脚鸭”的原因。不过，对特朗普来说，这种情况发生得比传统总统更早。他已经被称为“跛脚鸭”，而通常这种情况要等到总统任期的第三年才会出现。
President Donald Trump has been on the world stage for more than a decade now, during which he has given his fair share of rambling speeches — although he claims it’s a “brilliant” way of speaking. But is the rambling getting worse?
Since Trump returned to office a year ago, the internet has gone back and forth on whether the 45th and 47th president is healthy. The rambling paired with a mysterious bruise on his hand and swollen ankles has people wondering: Is Trump okay?
New York magazine’s Ben Terris, who recently wrote about Trump’s health, told Today, Explained co-host Astead Herndon that the answer was quite complicated.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What was the catalyst for this piece?
We’ve all been watching him for years now, but especially in the last year, there’s been more questions about him: his health, the bruising on his hands, the swollen cankles, the falling asleep in meetings.
Before sitting down with him, I’d been reading some books by members of his family. I talked to his niece, Mary Trump. Mary Trump says sometimes when she looks at Donald Trump speaking in the public square, she sees flashes of her grandfather when he had Alzheimer’s. I don’t know if he has it or not, but I wanted to ask him about it.
He started saying, “My father was so healthy; he had no problems. His heart couldn’t be stopped.” “He did have one problem though,” Trump told me. And he said, “Late in life, he had, what’s the word for it?” And he pointed to his head. And Caroline Levitt, the press secretary sitting next to me, she kind of rescued him in that moment and said, “Alzheimer’s.” And he said, “Yeah, yeah, he had an Alzheimer’s thing. Well, well, I don’t have it.”
What are the concerns with Trump’s health that you uncovered?
The story I set out to write about was to figure out whether he is healthy or not, and it kind of ended up being a story about whether the government is healthy or not. There’s kind of an infection that has spread throughout Trump’s inner circle where everybody who talks about him talks about him in the craziest, most North Korean-type, dear-leader way.
Instead of just saying he’s healthy for an almost 80-year-old, that he’s slowing down a little bit, but he’s certainly healthy enough to be president, people talk about him in these terms that are just completely outrageous: superhuman, the healthiest man alive. He told me he was healthier than he was 40 years ago.
The guy doesn’t exercise; he doesn’t eat well. He drinks enough Diet Coke to fill a football stadium. And you just can’t quite trust the people around him. And I felt like the story I published said a lot about Trump’s America, not just Trump’s health.
I want to ask about the bruised hand. Did you get any answers on what that is coming from or the level of severity?
When I got to the Oval Office for my interview, we shook hands. He had a really soft, warm hand, which was surprising, but on the back it was very dry. [He had] a big kind of rhino hide — like bruise on the back. I asked him about it, and what he claims is that he’s on an aspirin regimen, on a much higher dose than even his doctors want him to be on. He says he’s on aspirin because he wants thin blood. And because he takes so much aspirin, he bruises very easily.
The doctors confirmed this is what’s going on. He says, because he bruises easily and because he shakes just a ton of hands, he’s always bruising.
I’m curious about some of the logistics and how open they were to this discussion of his health.
I went into the White House early in my process and I was transparent about what I wanted to write about. I said, look, there’s a big question about the president’s health. Lots of people think they have the answer. I want to clarify the picture, and there’s not a lot of people who really know the answer. There’s Donald Trump; there’s his inner circle; there’s his doctors — and they made a lot of people available.
It was not clear I was going to get to talk to Donald Trump, but before I talked to him, they made time for me to go to the White House and sit down with Marco Rubio. He’s got 40 jobs, and he took time out of his busy day to sit with me in Caroline Levitt’s office and talk to me about how the president was, quote, “too healthy.”
He was telling these stories [that were so embarrassing] that he was debasing himself in a way. “When I ride on Air Force One, I need to take a nap, and so I hide in a blanket. I wrap myself like a mummy covering my head and I do that because I know that at some point on the flight, [Trump’s] going to emerge from the cabin and start prowling the hallways to see who is awake. I want him to think it’s a staffer who fell asleep. I don’t want him to see his secretary of state sleeping on a couch and think, Oh, this guy is weak.”
What did his doctors tell you about his health?
When I showed up to the Oval Office, they were holding pieces of paper that said “Talking Points” on the top of it. So they had things they wanted to get through. They told me that he was as healthy as he says he is. One of them said that they did an EKG of his heart, and he appears to be a 64-year-old or a 65-year-old, according to the AI data that they found. At the end of my interview, Caroline Levitt turns to one of the doctors and says, “oh, you worked for the Obamas, didn’t you?” So I asked the doctor, well, who’s healthier? President Obama? Or President Trump? And Trump is sitting right there staring across the desk at the doctors making direct eye contact. And without any hesitation, the doctor says, “Oh, President Trump.”
Did you experience any skittishness when it came to reporting on Trump?
I think the fact that we went through the Biden era has made reporting on this topic easier in a way. It’s still difficult because you can’t get to the bottom of it, but it made people more willing to talk, maybe?
[The Biden era] made journalists more willing to go for these stories [and] for editors to assign them, because we went through this period of time with Biden where he aged in front of all of our eyes and people were too skittish in some ways to write about it.
Does that comparison feel fair?
I think it’s definitely fair to draw some comparisons if for no other reason than they’re both old. Donald Trump is about to be 80 years old. Just by dint of that fact, it’s a worthwhile story to cover.
One reason I think that Trump is able to “get away” with some things that could be signs of aging is that they could also just be signs of Donald Trump being Donald Trump. He has been a chaotic figure for a long time. He’s got this rambling way of talking. He says unhinged, outrageous stuff. He did that 15 years ago. He does that now. Are there differences in the way that he communicates between now and then? Sure, of course. But it’s not as stark as if and when Biden starts to show signs of deteriorating. Because Biden was such a serious guy who kind of spoke in your traditional politician way, as soon as there was slippage, you could notice it a lot easier.
I want to ask about something that does seem similar: The president and their aides basically kept telling you not to believe your own eyes. In this instance, you have Trump dozing off in meetings and aides saying, oh, that was just his thinking pose.
One thing that did not make it into the story — I’ll talk about it with you for the first time. This is a little exclusive.
I did talk to some people from Biden’s White House for this story. They didn’t want to put their name out there, obviously, but one person was telling me that watching this happen did kind of feel similar to them. I have a quote [about Biden’s health issues] in front of me here I can read, which is: “I think there’s a world where we denied it so much that there was a delta between what people were seeing and hearing, and that led to distrust. I think that denial of the thing people are seeing — you just can’t get away with that anymore. I think they’re making the same kind of mistake in backing themselves into the same kind of corner that we were in.”
Part of Trump’s broader success and appeal is that he can get his followers to believe his own version of reality. Do you think this strategy on this issue of his health is actually working for him?
I think it’s like a lot of issues for Trump these days: He’s got a base of support that’s going to believe everything, and then there’s this group between his supporters and his detractors who are going to be less convinced by this.
Donald Trump does seem to be losing his ability to control his story. His poll numbers are not what he wants them to be. The midterms are trending in the wrong direction. The immigration story is not even going the way he wants to go, and that was kind of a top issue for him.
The way that he tries to control the narrative, so to speak, of his health is sort of akin to how he’s trying to control everything, and I just feel like he’s sort of losing some of that control. This happens to presidents; this is why they become lame ducks. It’s just happening a little earlier for Trump than is traditional for a president. He’s been referred to as a lame duck by pundits already, and that doesn’t normally happen until the third year of a presidency.
2026-02-09 19:00:00
美国总统唐纳德·特朗普于2026年1月27日抵达爱荷华州克利夫市发表讲话。| 约翰·博内斯沃斯基/法新社/盖蒂图片社 自2025年1月美国将总统职位交给了一个曾试图发动政变的人以来，许多美国人担心该国未来选举的公正性。这种担忧并非毫无根据。特朗普在2021年1月6日明确表达了对民主的蔑视。在去年重新上任后，他赦免了以他的名义闯入国会大厦的暴徒，削弱了保护美国投票基础设施免受网络攻击的机构，试图违宪地阻止大量邮寄选票的计票，并威胁要起诉那些忠实地执行2020年选举的官员。尽管对特朗普可能在2026年中期选举中不当干预的担忧并非新事物，但过去两周这些担忧变得更加可信。
2026年1月下旬，FBI从佐治亚州富尔顿县的一个政府设施中没收了2020年大选的记录，包括选票、选民名单和扫描图像。这次突袭标志着总统利用联邦执法机构来推进其关于选举不公的阴谋论的新阶段。与此同时，当美国移民与海关执法局（ICE）的人员在明尼苏达州暴力镇压抗议者时，司法部长帕姆·邦迪给该州州长蒂姆·沃尔兹写了一封信，似乎提出了一个奇怪的交易：如果沃尔兹希望“结束明尼苏达州的混乱”——并暗示减少ICE在该州的行动——他应该向司法部提供该州的选民名单。
如果这些行动的潜台词不够明确，总统本周在与前FBI副局长丹·邦吉诺的采访中就明确表达了这一点。他说，华盛顿的共和党人应该“控制至少15个地方的投票”。这些发展正值共和党民调支持率下降之际，也加剧了人们对总统可能通过非民主手段维持国会控制的担忧。
“对于任何怀疑这一政府正在为干预选举铺路的人来说，过去两周的大量活动应该让他们不再怀疑。”纽约大学法学院布伦南司法中心民主副总裁温迪·维瑟说道。这种干预可能以多种形式出现，但最近的事件使专家对两种可能性更加担忧：
下面我将解释最近的事件如何使这些假设变得更加现实，以及为什么特朗普试图影响中期选举的企图很可能不会成功。
今年选举的“最坏情况”一直被认为是：众议院的控制权取决于少数几场紧绷的选举。选举日时，共和党在这些竞争激烈的选区中领先，但随着邮寄选票的陆续抵达，他们的优势逐渐缩小。白宫将这些不利趋势归咎于大规模选民欺诈，并要求停止计票。当各州拒绝服从时，白宫可能会下令军队在选举日当天夺取关键选区的选票和投票机。这样，选票的保管链就会被破坏，使得选举的真实结果无法确定。众议院的现任共和党多数派则可能宣称拥有决定争议选举结果的权力，从而终结美国民主。
即使在过去的两周之前，也有理由认真对待这一假设。事实上，特朗普政府在上任第一年似乎已经为这种行为奠定了基础。今年春天，特朗普签署了一项行政命令，声称如果邮寄选票在选举日后到达，各州不能合法计票。目前，许多州——包括内华达州和弗吉尼亚州——仍然接受在选举日之后但邮戳及时的邮寄选票。在同一条行政命令中，特朗普还要求选举援助委员会（EAC）取消美国所有投票机的认证，然后只重新认证那些符合严格标准的机器。正如《大西洋》杂志的戴维·格雷厄姆所指出的，政府可能无法在11月中期选举前采购足够的投票机以满足这些新标准。然而，法院已经阻止了这两项措施。尽管如此，这些措施为行政机构拒绝不喜欢的选举结果提供了理由：今年11月，一些州将按照白宫正式宣布非法的方式计票邮寄选票，而全国几乎所有投票站都将使用白宫认为不可靠的投票机。
此外，众议院有宪法赋予的权力来“判断其成员的资格”。1985年一次激烈竞争的选举后，众议院曾选择推翻州认证的选举结果，并确认了输掉选举的候选人。如果白宫在11月的关键选举中阻碍计票，那么众议院共和党人可能会依据这一先例采取行动。
FBI在富尔顿县的突袭使这一系列事件更容易想象。这次行动的名义目的是寻找选民欺诈的证据，但特朗普关于此类行为的指控毫无根据。富尔顿县2020年的选举结果已经多次被重新计票、审计和法院挑战，其合法性也得到了充分确认。然而，白宫还是成功地从一位地方法官那里获得了搜查令，以没收该县的选票。尽管该调查明显带有政治动机且法律上存疑，但白宫获得司法批准的行为仍让许多法律专家感到不安。一些人现在担心，特朗普可能在选票尚未计数之前，就能获得地方法官的批准，非法夺取中期选举的选票。
“过去，人们认为特朗普会援引叛乱法并命令军队在选举之夜夺取摇摆州的选票和投票机，”威斯康星大学法学院国家民主研究倡议的高级顾问德里克·克林格表示。“但富尔顿县的事件表明，一种更为现实的场景：即通过看似合法的程序来夺取选票。我认为这种方法更有可能发生，而且在现实中更难以挑战。”
然而，克林格描述的旧版最坏情况——即特朗普以国家安全为由命令军队干预计票——也因最近的事件而变得更加现实。要理解这一点，必须考虑富尔顿县突袭的最奇怪之处：国家安全局局长图尔西·加巴德亲自出席了这次行动。国家安全局局长（DNI）没有法定职责监督联邦选举法的执行，因此许多现任和前任政府官员最初对此感到困惑。但《华尔街日报》随后披露，加巴德被指派领导一项全政府范围的调查，寻找2020年选举中外国干预的证据。本周，我们得知加巴德负责调查所谓针对波多黎各选举基础设施的网络攻击，特别是试图找到证据表明委内瑞拉黑客攻击了该岛的投票机。据报道，调查未能找到相关证据。
“我认为，不幸的是，ICE的准军事力量可能会被滥用于阻止人们参与选举，”前司法部官员、洛约拉法学院教授朱利安·利维特表示。
此外，最近的事件也加剧了人们对政府会利用ICE进行选民压制的担忧。邦迪试图通过暗示如果明尼苏达州不配合，就将延长ICE在该州的行动，来获取敏感的选民信息，这令许多民主党人感到不安。一些党内人士认为，邦迪的请求表明，政府将移民执法视为干预选举的工具。他们担心白宫可能会在选举日当天派遣ICE人员到关键投票站附近，以阻止选民参与投票。他们的理由很简单：如果ICE在民主党选区骚扰居民并造成交通堵塞，那么这些地区的选民就可能无法前往投票站。特别是那些有无证移民家庭的选民，可能更倾向于不去投票。
尽管专家们对这些假设更加重视，但他们普遍认为特朗普的选举干预企图将失败。布伦南司法中心的维瑟告诉我：“我认为，行政机构将使用其所有工具来获取投票机或选票，以影响即将到来的选举，但我不认为他们成功的可能性很高。”维瑟和其他人警告不要过度解读白宫成功获得富尔顿县2020年选票记录搜查令的情况。“我认为，全国每个地方法官都会清楚区分一个搜查令用于获取五年前的选举材料，和一个搜查令用于获取正在进行中的选举材料之间的区别，”利维特说。“我理解人们为何担忧，但这与现实相差甚远。”
此外，与米切尔的说法相反，美国宪法中并没有赋予总统在外国攻击（无论真实与否）发生时对选举管理的权力。因此，任何通过军事命令夺取选票或投票机的尝试，都可能遭遇司法、当选官员以及可能军队本身的强烈抵制。事实上，特朗普本周关于控制选举管理的言论已经引发了一些共和党的批评。而过去一个月的一个令人鼓舞的教训是，这种反对声音仍然可以限制总统的行动：边境巡逻局杀害亚历克斯·普雷蒂后引发了跨党派的批评，特朗普因此解除了该机构指挥官的职务，并从明尼苏达州撤走了700名ICE特工。在周三晚的一次采访中，特朗普表示这些行动是出于负面新闻报道的考虑，他对NBC新闻提到枪击事件时说：“我甚至不想谈论这件事。在数万名选民中，只有两人死亡，却引发了坏的舆论。”
显然，如果白宫下令军队中断计票，特朗普将面临更糟糕的“舆论”。与此同时，尽管将ICE用作选民压制工具是令人震惊的，但这种做法也很可能不会帮助特朗普赢得选举。利维特表示：“特朗普希望将ICE描绘成无所不能的力量，但事实上，明尼阿波利斯的案例表明，他们并非如此强大。在这样一个大国中，很难通过制造恐惧来控制一切。”
即使在双城（明尼苏达州）——特朗普在那里部署了约3000名移民执法人员——ICE的存在似乎反而动员了民主党选民，而不是阻止他们投票。1月27日，明尼苏达州第64A选区举行特别选举，民主党候选人以91个百分点的优势击败了共和党对手。2024年，该席位由民主党以66.6%的得票率赢得。
“显然，有迹象表明政府正在试图干预我们的选举，这确实令人担忧，”维瑟说。“但这种干预是可以阻止的，而且必须阻止。”
Ever since the United States entrusted its presidency to a would-be insurrectionist in January 2025, many Americans have feared for the integrity of their nation’s future elections.
And not without reason. President Donald Trump made his contempt for democracy clear on January 6, 2021. Shortly after retaking office last year, he pardoned the rioters who’d stormed the Capitol in his name, gutted the agency that protects America’s voting infrastructure from cyberattacks, attempted to unconstitutionally deter the counting of many mail-in ballots, and threatened to prosecute officials who had faithfully administered the 2020 election.
If concerns that Trump might unduly influence the 2026 midterms aren’t new, however, they’ve grown markedly more plausible over the past two weeks.
• Trump has said he regrets not ordering the military to seize voting machines in 2020.
• The president has called for Republicans to “take over the voting” in at least 15 places.
• The FBI’s seizure of ballots and voter information from Fulton County, Georgia, sets an alarming precedent.
• Despite these threats, experts believe election interference attempts will likely fail due to institutional resistance.
In late January, the FBI seized 2020 election records — ballots, voter rolls, and scanner images — from a government facility in Fulton County, Georgia. This raid represented a new frontier in the president’s use of federal law enforcement to advance his conspiratorial claims of electoral impropriety.
Meanwhile, as ICE agents brutalized and killed protesters in Minnesota, US Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote a letter to that state’s governor, Tim Walz, in which she appeared to propose a bizarre quid pro quo: If Walz wished to see “an end to the chaos in Minnesota” — and, implicitly, a pullback in ICE operations there — he should give the Department of Justice access to his state’s voter rolls.
If the subtext of these actions was unclear, the president spelled it out this week. In an interview with his former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, Trump said that Republicans in Washington, DC, should “take over the voting” in at least “15 places.”
These developments came amid a decline in the GOP’s poll numbers. And they have intensified fears that the president may try to preserve his party’s control of Congress through undemocratic means.
“For anybody who doubted that this administration is laying the foundation to interfere in elections, the deluge of activity over the last two weeks should lay those doubts to rest,” said Wendy Weiser, vice president of democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, a legal think tank at NYU Law School.
This interference could take many forms. But recent events have increased experts’ level of concern about two possibilities in particular:
Below, I explain how recent events have made these hypotheticals more thinkable — and why the administration’s efforts to unduly sway the midterms in its favor are, nonetheless, unlikely to succeed.
The “nightmare scenario” for this year’s elections has long gone something like this: Control of the House comes down to a small number of close races. Republicans lead on Election Day in many of these contests, but their advantage steadily erodes as mail-in ballots arrive. The White House attributes these adverse trends to mass voter fraud and demands a halt to vote counting.
When states refuse to comply, the White House orders the military to seize ballots and voting machines from pivotal precincts before all votes have been tallied. The chain of custody over these ballots breaks down, making the elections’ true winners impossible to determine. The House’s incumbent GOP majority then asserts the authority to seat the Republican candidates in the contested races. American democracy, as we’ve known it, ends.
Even before the past two weeks, there was reason to take this hypothetical seriously. Indeed, throughout its first year in office, the second Trump administration appeared to be laying the groundwork for such treachery.
In an executive order last spring, Trump asserted that, if a mail-in ballot arrives after Election Day, states cannot legally count it. Currently, many states — including Nevada and Virginia — count ballots that arrive shortly after Election Day, if they were postmarked on time.
In that same executive order, Trump called on the Election Assistance Commission to decertify every voting machine in the United States — and then recertify only those that met an exacting set of requirements. As The Atlantic’s David Graham notes, it’s not even clear that the government could procure enough voting machines to meet these new standards in time for November’s midterms.
Regardless, courts blocked both of these measures. Yet each established a rationale for the administration to reject any future election results that it did not like: This November, several states will count mail ballots in a manner that the White House has formally declared illegal, while virtually every precinct in the country will use voting machines that it has deemed untrustworthy.
Meanwhile, the House of Representatives has the constitutional authority to judge “the qualifications of its own Members.” And in the wake of a closely contested race in 1985, the House did choose to override a state-certified election result, and seat the candidate who had officially lost, on the basis of its own recount. Were the White House to impede vote counting in critical contests this November, it is conceivable that House Republicans could act on this precedent.
The FBI’s raid in Fulton County makes this series of events a bit easier to envision.
That raid’s ostensible aim was to search for evidence of voter fraud. But the president’s allegations of such malfeasance are baseless. Fulton County’s 2020 results have already been recounted, audited, and challenged in court multiple times. And the legitimacy of those results has been unfailingly affirmed.
Yet the administration was nonetheless able to secure a search warrant from a magistrate judge to seize the county’s ballots.
The White House’s success in garnering judicial approval for its confiscation of voting records — despite the overtly political and legally dubious nature of its investigation — has unnerved many legal experts. And some now fear that Trump could conceivably win a magistrate’s approval to seize midterm ballots before they have been counted.
“The nightmare scenario used to be that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act and have the military seize ballots and machines from a swing state on election night,” said Derek Clinger, senior counsel at the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “But Fulton County suggests a much more plausible scenario: one where the seizure of ballots is conducted with the appearance of a legal process. I think that approach is both more likely to happen and also harder to challenge in real time.”
This said, what Clinger describes as the old worst-case scenario — in which Trump orders the military to interfere with vote counting, on grounds of national security — has also become more thinkable in recent days.
To see why, one must consider the oddest aspect of the Fulton County raid: the fact that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard personally attended it.
The DNI (aka America’s spy chief) has no statutory role in overseeing the enforcement of federal election law. Gabbard’s involvement therefore initially mystified many current and former government officials.
But the Wall Street Journal subsequently revealed that Gabbard had been tasked with leading an administration-wide effort to find evidence of foreign interference in the 2020 election.
This week, we learned that, as part of that effort, Gabbard oversaw an investigation into alleged cyberattacks on Puerto Rico’s election infrastructure. Specifically, the probe reportedly tried — and failed — to find proof that Venezuela had hacked voting machines on the island.
“I think it is, tragically, an unfortunate possibility that ICE paramilitary forces will be misused in an attempt to deter people from participating in elections.”
Justin Levitt, former DOJ official
There is no public evidence that any foreign government interfered in the 2020 election. But Trump and his allies have long taken a “the more, the merrier” approach to explaining away his defeat that year: In their account, mass voter fraud by undocumented immigrants, chicanery by American election administrators, and cyberattacks from Venezuelan hackers were all responsible for Joe Biden’s victory.
That last theory first took off in November 2020, when Trump’s attorney Sidney Powell falsely claimed that the voting machine companies Dominion and Smartmatic were secretly Venezuelan. In Powell’s telling, those firms’ machines were designed by the Chavez regime to facilitate election rigging. It quickly became gospel on parts of the right that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had exploited secret programming within Dominion’s machines to flip votes to Biden.
In December 2020, on the basis of such conspiracy theories, Powell pitched the president on an audacious plan: Declare a national security emergency and order the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states. In an interview with the New York Times last month, Trump said that he regretted not acting on this advice.
Given this context, Gabbard’s presence at the Fulton County raid — and her newly revealed search for evidence of Venezuelan hacking in Puerto Rico — are alarming. They indicate that the White House may be trying to engineer a pretense for (illegally) seizing voting machines this November, in the name of protecting America’s national security.
Such a plan would be consistent with remarks that Cleta Mitchell — a conservative lawyer, “Stop the Steal” activist,” and outside adviser to Gabbard’s election interference probe — made last fall.
In September, Mitchell said that the president “is limited in his role with regard to elections, except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States.” She suggested that Trump was therefore “thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.”
Finally, recent events have also amplified fears that the administration will use ICE as a means of voter suppression.
Bondi’s attempt to extract sensitive voter information from Minnesota — by implicitly threatening to prolong intensive ICE operations in that state if it failed to comply — alarmed many Democrats.
To some in the party, Bondi’s request signaled that the administration sees immigration enforcement as a tool for meddling in elections. Specifically, they fear that the White House may order ICE operations in the vicinity of key polling places on Election Day, so as to deter turnout.
Their reasoning is simple: If ICE is harassing residents and causing traffic jams in heavily Democratic precincts, fewer Americans will make it to the voting booth in those areas. And voters with undocumented family members may be especially likely to stay home.
“I think it is, tragically, an unfortunate possibility that ICE paramilitary forces will be misused in an attempt to deter people from participating in elections,” said Justin Levitt, a former DOJ official and professor at Loyola Law School.
Nevertheless, although experts are taking these hypotheticals more seriously, they generally believe that Trump’s attempts at election interference will fail.
“There is a very high risk that the administration will use every tool at its disposal to get voting machines or ballots in the course of an upcoming election,” the Brennan Center’s Weiser told me. “But I don’t think there is a high risk that they will succeed.”
Weiser and others warned against reading too much into the administration’s success at securing a search warrant for Fulton County’s 2020 voting records.
“I think every magistrate judge in the country would understand the difference between a search warrant to seize materials for an election that happened five years ago and a search warrant to seize election materials from an election in progress,” Levitt said. “I understand why people are worried. But it’s not remotely the same.”
Further, contrary to Mitchell’s claims, there is no clause of the Constitution that gives the president authority over election administration, in the event of a foreign attack (whether real or imagined). Thus, any attempt to seize ballots or voting machines through military order would likely encounter vigorous resistance from the judiciary, elected officials, and perhaps, from the armed forces themselves.
Indeed, Trump’s mere remarks about taking control of election administration provoked rebukes from some Republicans this week. And one heartening lesson of the past month is that such backlash can still constrain the president: After Border Patrol’s killing of Alex Pretti sparked bipartisan criticism, Trump demoted the agency’s commander and pulled 700 ICE agents out of Minnesota.
In an interview Wednesday night, Trump indicated that these moves were motivated by negative press coverage, telling NBC News of the shooting, “I hate even talking about it. Two people [get killed] out of tens of thousands and you get bad publicity.”
Needless to say, were the White House to order the military to interrupt vote counting, Trump would suffer even worse “publicity.”
Meanwhile, although it would be outrageous for the president to use ICE as a voter suppression tool, it would also be highly unlikely to flip elections in his favor.
“Trump wants to project ICE as an all-powerful force everywhere,” Levitt said. “And they are, as Minneapolis is proving emphatically, not. There simply aren’t enough ICE personnel to blanket a modestly large city. We live in a big country. And it is hard to control through fear.”
Even in the Twin Cities — where Trump deployed some 3,000 immigration enforcement agents — ICE’s presence seems to have mobilized Democratic voters, rather than deterring them. In a special election on January 27 for Minnesota House district 64A, the Democratic candidate defeated her Republican opponent by a 91-point margin. In 2024, a Democrat had won the seat by 66.6 percentage points.
“There is clearly an effort afoot to interfere in our elections and that is something that people should be alarmed about,” Weiser said. “But this can be thwarted. And it must be.”