2026-02-02 20:00:00
2026年1月29日，特朗普总统在白宫内阁会议上发表讲话，国防部长皮特·海格塞思在旁观看。| Win McNamee/Getty Images 特朗普经常被指责有独裁倾向，而他似乎乐于接受这一形象，无论是真诚还是故意挑衅。他在达沃斯表示：“他们通常说，‘他是个可怕的独裁者，而我是独裁者’，但有时候我们需要一个独裁者！”过去十年中，他通过制造出格行为和违反美国民主规范的事件来主导新闻，从而建立政治生涯。对特朗普而言，只要他能将自己塑造成每个故事中的至高主角，就没有所谓的坏新闻。他在明尼苏达州的移民行动，以“报复”为口号，数千名装备精良的执法人员涌入一个感到恐惧和愤怒的城市，正是这种风格的体现。这引发了美国民众对自身基本自由面临严重威胁的新一轮担忧。联邦执法人员对Renee Good和Alex Pretti的杀害，使明尼苏达州看起来像是一个测试场，展示了一种由特朗普掌控、资金雄厚、武装力量强大的机构可能实施的更具压制性的暴力形式，这种形式在必要时可能被复制到其他地区。然而，现代独裁政权的生活方式通常并不像我们在明尼苏达州看到的那样夸张。更常见的是那种令人窒息的“常态”：人们上班、养育家庭、创业，甚至加入反对党，但他们知道无法在选举中击败执政党。公开暴力往往只在对政府统治构成直接且现实威胁的罕见情况下才会发生。现代独裁政权通常不会像纳粹德国那样依赖政治表演。纳粹等法西斯政权则热衷于展示独裁权力的视觉形象，例如莱妮·里芬斯塔尔的纪录片《意志的胜利》就展现了极权主义的公开场面。但这类政权在当代极为罕见。因此，政府选择明尼苏达州作为高调反移民行动的试验场，揭示了特朗普个人政治风格与其政府长期反民主议程之间的关键矛盾。通过将他的夸张强人形象推向新的暴力程度，他可能反而挫败了盟友们试图在幕后悄悄建立更隐蔽、更持久的独裁政权的计划。
特朗普第二个任期最令人不安的可能性是，像史蒂芬·米勒和JD·范斯这样的支持者正在超越当前政府，设想一个未来，其中美国的民主制度和独立权力中心（包括司法系统、活动人士、独立媒体以及专业化的官僚体系）可能被削弱或迫使屈服。特朗普的亲密盟友和顾问可以匈牙利的维克托·奥班政府为榜样，该政府逐步在社会各领域集中权力。迄今为止，白宫已经在模仿奥班的做法，例如在华盛顿装饰特朗普的肖像，承诺建设宏伟的新建筑，举行阅兵，并开始重新包装表演艺术以颂扬特朗普。企业领袖们公开支持特朗普，因为他们知道他不会犹豫介入他们的事务，包括要求他们给予有利的媒体待遇或拥有友好的媒体资产。独立的经济机构如美联储也面临日益严重的干预，包括特朗普本人公开提出的要求。司法部现在经常对政治对手展开调查，包括在当前移民冲突中对明尼苏达州领导人的调查。此外，人们担心特朗普会推进他长期试图干预或推翻选举的计划（在令人不安的迹象中，司法部曾要求明尼苏达州交出选民名单，作为最新移民冲突的一部分）。
摧毁民主以建立选举型独裁政权是一项困难且缓慢的工作。最佳方式是秘密进行，远离公众视线，使公民无法察觉，或通过行政和法律手段，使其显得无足轻重且缓慢，从而让公民难以关心。其目的是让公众认为非民主的政治秩序并不可怕。独裁政权可以在这种“无甚可说”的状态下维持数十年，其中政权精英监督和平但缺乏竞争的选举，而选民则在没有政治变革期望的情况下参与投票。这种独裁之所以有效，是因为它显得乏味且可接受：政府为大多数公民提供稳定、可预测和日常的舒适，而公民则容忍他们无法轻易改变的事物。
特朗普对制造轰动的迫切需求意味着他的政府无法隐藏其反民主的意图。相反，政府官员必须不断与公众互动，公开且积极地宣传他们的行动，并持续与对手发生冲突。他们必须在社交媒体上发布挑衅性的表情包，以及在新闻中讲述明显的谎言。在明尼苏达州，一名移民局特工在杀害Renee Good时正在用手机录像，一些人猜测这与白宫推动制造逮捕和冲突的病毒式社交媒体视频有关。通过这种方式，他们反而邀请了公众的密切关注，这可能会阻碍其反民主议程。选举型独裁政权仍可能因内部权力斗争、外部危机或经济冲击而崩溃，但它们通常不会引发大规模的反对或破坏性的抗议。维持一种乏味且可接受的政治秩序的关键在于确保没有值得报道的新事件来激发民众行动。民众不应愤怒，而应冷漠。当这种政权出现大规模抗议时，如阿拉伯之春所发生的那样，通常会出乎所有人意料。事实上，阿拉伯之春的导火索——突尼斯水果商穆罕默德·布阿齐齐自焚的事件——正是那种悲剧性的、引人注目的公共场面，能够激发民众推翻根深蒂固的独裁政权。十年后，美国人可能会回顾对两名和平公民的公开处决，将其视为类似悲剧，集中表达对政府的愤怒。这种视角有助于理解为何政府选择明尼苏达州作为目标，对其实现长期目标造成损害。正是由于明尼苏达人确保了联邦力量暴力行为的公开性，并且政府官员的公开言论似乎沉醉于撒谎，美国人得以看到这一切，并显然不喜欢。公众的反弹已经导致国会开始对国土安全部及其行为进行实质性审查，包括共和党人要求进行透明调查的公开呼吁。特朗普本人一直更关注关注和权力，而非建立一个超越他个人的政治理想。明尼苏达州可能只是他的一次暂时退却，但他的不断制造爆炸性冲突的深层需求不会消失，即使一些盟友希望他能更安静地进行长期布局。对于希望支持民主的美国人来说，应对策略很简单：迎合特朗普对不断寻求自我膨胀的权力确认的渴望，让他的行为更加公开和不可避免，并向选民展示政府行为是不可容忍的。美国人或许渴望乏味且可接受的政治，但在这种情况下，他们将无法获得。
President Donald Trump is frequently accused of authoritarian ambitions. It’s an image he often seems to relish, either sincerely or as trolling. “Usually they say, ‘He’s a horrible dictator-type person, I’m a dictator,” he said in Davos. “But sometimes you need a dictator!” Over the past decade, he’s made a political career by dominating the news with spectacles of outlandish behavior and transgressions against the norms of American democracy. For Trump, there’s no such thing as bad press so long as he can cast himself as the all-powerful main character in every story.
Trump’s immigration operation in Minneapolis, with his loud declarations of “RETRIBUTION” as thousands of heavily armed officers flooded into a frightened and angry city, fit that brand. It has led to a new wave of concern among Americans that their basic freedoms are in acute danger. The killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal officers made Minneapolis look like a testing ground for a new deadly phase of repressive violence by heavily armed and highly funded agencies accountable only to Trump, one that could be replicated elsewhere as needed.
But life in authoritarian regimes today rarely looks like the garish displays of force we saw in Minnesota. More often, it’s marked by a kind of stultifying normalcy: People go to work, raise families, start businesses, and even join opposition parties — they just have no hope of defeating the ruling regime in elections. Open violence is more often reserved for rare situations that pose an immediate and active threat to the government’s grip on power.
Durable authoritarian regimes in the modern era do not embrace the spectacle of politics that characterized regimes such as Nazi Germany. Fascist regimes like the Nazis embrace the visual imagery of authoritarian power, and films such as Leni Riefenstahl’s chilling propaganda piece The Triumph of the Will showcase the public spectacle of totalitarianism. But such regimes are rare in the contemporary era.
In this, the administration’s decision to target Minnesota for a highly publicized anti-immigrant campaign reveals a key contradiction between Trump’s own brand of politics and his administration’s long-term anti-democratic agenda. By taking his cartoonish strongman approach to violent new levels, he may have frustrated a far more dangerous and insidious effort by his allies to quietly lay the groundwork for the more subtle and enduring kinds of authoritarian regimes we see around the world.
The most disturbing possibility of Trump’s second term is that figures like Stephen Miller, JD Vance, and others are looking beyond the current administration, toward a future in which the nation’s democratic institutions and independent centers of power, from the judiciary to activists to independent media to a professionalized bureaucracy, can be hollowed out or bullied into submission.
Trump’s closest allies and advisers can look to countries like Hungary under Viktor Orbán, where the ruling party has gradually consolidated power across civil society, as inspiration in this regard. And so far, the White House has made some early progress in emulating Orbán’s approach. The administration has decorated Washington with Trump’s face, promised to deliver grand new buildings, held military parades, and begun to rebrand the performing arts in honor of Trump. Business leaders have publicly embraced Trump this term, knowing he won’t hesitate to involve himself in their affairs, including by demanding favorable treatment from, or friendly ownership of, major media properties.
Independent economic institutions like the Federal Reserve face growing interference, including very public demands from Trump himself. The Justice Department now regularly opens up investigations into political opponents, including leaders in Minnesota during the current immigration standoff. And then there’s the concern that Trump will make headway in his long-running quest to interfere with or overturn elections themselves (in a chilling possible sign of the administration’s ambitions, the Department of Justice demanded that Minnesota turn over its voter roll as part of the latest immigration fight).
Dismantling democracy to build an electoral authoritarian regime is difficult, slow-going work. It is best done in secret, away from the spotlight, so that citizens do not know what is happening, or through administrative and legal maneuvers that are so uninteresting and gradual that citizens find it difficult to care. The idea is to show that there is nothing particularly menacing or terrifying about an undemocratic political order.
Authoritarian regimes can last for decades in this unremarkable state in which regime elites oversee peaceful but uncompetitive elections and voters participate without any expectation of political change. This kind of authoritarianism works because it is boring and tolerable: The government provides stability, predictability, and everyday comforts for most citizens, and in exchange, those citizens tolerate what they cannot easily change.
Trump’s compulsive need to create a spectacle means that his administration cannot hide its anti-democratic intentions. Rather, administration officials must continually engage with the public, communicating openly and aggressively about their actions and continually picking fights with their opponents. They must post edgy memes on social media, and they must tell obvious lies on the news. In Minnesota, the ICE agent who killed Renee Good was recording the encounter with a cellphone at the time, which some speculated tied into a White House push to aggressively turn out viral social media videos of arrests and confrontations. In doing so, they invite the exact kind of public scrutiny that can frustrate their anti-democratic agenda.
Electoral authoritarian regimes can still collapse due to intra-elite squabbles, external crises, or economic shocks — but they tend not to generate mass opposition or destabilizing protests. The key to maintaining a boring and tolerable political order is to ensure that there is nothing newsworthy to mobilize people into action. The population should not be angry; it should be indifferent.
When destabilizing mass protests do emerge in such regimes, as happened during the Arab Spring revolutions, they usually take everyone by surprise. In fact, the trigger for the Arab Spring — the self-immolation of Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi — is exactly the type of tragic, gripping public spectacle that can mobilize populations to overthrow entrenched authoritarian regimes. In 10 years, Americans may look back on the public execution of two peaceful American citizens as a similar kind of tragedy that focused popular anger on the administration and its excesses.
This perspective helps to make sense of why the administration’s decision to target Minnesota has proven so damaging for its long-term objectives. Precisely because Minnesotans have ensured that the spectacle of violence by federal forces is so public, abetted by administration officials’ own shameful public statements which seem to revel in their mendacity, Americans can see what is happening — and they evidently don’t like it. Public backlash has already led to meaningful Congressional scrutiny of the Department of Homeland Security and its conduct, including public demands from Republicans for a transparent investigation.
Trump himself has always appeared more concerned with attention and power than building a political legacy that outlasts him. Minnesota may represent a temporary retreat, but his deep need to generate more and more explosive confrontations is not going anywhere, even if some of his allies would prefer he give them more room to play the long game in silence. The lesson for Americans who wish to support democracy is simple: Lean into Trump’s need to constantly seek self-aggrandizing confirmation of his own power, make the spectacle public and unavoidable, and show voters that the administration’s actions are intolerable. Americans may yearn for boring and tolerable politics, but they will not get it under these conditions.
2026-02-02 19:30:00
2026年1月27日，唐纳德·特朗普在爱荷华州乌尔班代尔的Machine Shed餐厅发表讲话。| Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images
当特朗普于2025年1月启动他的遣返政策时，他得到了美国公众的广泛支持。在拜登执政期间，未经许可的边境越境人数激增，创下了历史新高，引发了美国社会的排外情绪。2024年11月，CBS News/YouGov的一项民意调查显示，57%的美国人支持“一项全国性计划，以找到并遣返所有非法移民”，而73%的人认为下一任总统应将遣返作为优先事项。特朗普政府乐于配合。在其上任初期，公众似乎对其努力表示满意。2025年初，选民对特朗普处理移民问题的满意度达到12个百分点，对其“非法移民遣返计划”的支持率则达到16个百分点。移民问题成为特朗普政治力量的基石——这是他一贯获得美国超级多数选民信任的议题。然而，仅仅一年后，他却失去了这一优势。
直到本周，白宫对移民政策支持率下降似乎毫不在意。当2025年初，一名37岁的母亲在明尼苏达州被一名ICE特工无故射杀时，特朗普政府立即为凶手辩护。当边境巡逻局特工在周六视频中向抗议者背部连开10枪时，国土安全部迅速将受害者污蔑为国内恐怖分子，要求美国人相信政府的说法而非自己的眼睛。就连保守派也难以接受这一极端行为。政府对Alex Pretti的处理引发了共和党参议员、右翼杂志和美国步枪协会（NRA）的批评。面对如此广泛而强烈的反对声浪，特朗普最终决定做出一些微小的调整。最近几天，他贬低了强硬派边境巡逻局局长Gregory Bovino，向明尼苏达州州长Tim Walz伸出橄榄枝，与参议院少数党领袖Chuck Schumer讨论民主党对国土安全部改革的要求，并表示Pretti的死亡将得到彻底调查（尽管迹象表明这可能并非如此）。鉴于ICE和CBP（边境巡逻局）的执法行为如此不法，这些措施只能被称作半途而废。政府仍然坚决反对那些真正能确保其遣返力量专业性和法律问责的改革。它依然热衷于将移民政策作为恐吓少数族裔和惩罚政治对手的工具。通过纵容这些激进的冲动，特朗普实现了惊人的政治自毁：他将自己最大的政治优势变成了弱点，尽管他在2024年成功解决了选民对移民问题的主要担忧。
拜登政府时期移民激增引发了广泛不满。大量涌入的寻求庇护者往往贫困且无法合法就业，给许多城市的公共服务带来负担，增加了可见的无家可归现象，并引发了长期居住在美国的居民的各种恐惧和不满情绪（尤其是那些最近移民的人）。然而，当特朗普上任时，移民潮已经趋于平缓。这在一定程度上是由于美国劳动力市场趋于疲软。2020年底，随着美国雇主扩大招聘并提高工资以满足复苏的消费需求，边境越境人数开始激增。由于许多移民国家的经济复苏较为缓慢，大量移民向北寻找机会。然而，到2024年，美国的就业增长放缓，经济对移民的吸引力减弱。2023年12月至2024年5月间，非法越境人数下降了53%。随后，拜登在6月实施了多项新的庇护限制政策，使2024年6月至11月间非法移民人数又下降了44%。拜登和哈里斯未能从这一下降趋势中获得政治利益，很可能是因为他们与之前移民激增时期联系在一起。但特朗普则没有这个问题。他因“强硬”移民政策而享有无与伦比的声誉。这不仅让他在上任时立即实现了非法移民人数的大幅下降，还使他成为移民问题上的最大赢家。2025年2月，只有8,326名移民越过了美国南部边境，比2024年12月的47,300人下降了近80%，比2023年12月的249,740人下降了超过90%。换句话说：在特朗普几乎没有改变任何移民政策之前，边境危机就已经基本解决。在这种情况下，特朗普在移民问题上几乎可以无所作为，仍能合理地声称自己成功地控制了边境。如果他采取一个正常的、限制性的政策——增加边境执法预算、更多遣返（即使是低级别）的犯罪移民、限制寻求庇护的机会——他可能既安抚了其核心支持者，也赢得了摇摆选民的支持。但他没有这么做。
当然，治理不仅仅是最大化你的支持率。政治的目的不仅是获得权力，还要使用权力。特朗普及其盟友并不满足于阻止未来的移民或遣返无证犯罪者。他们希望彻底清除所有无证移民——或者至少是那些不为他们服务的移民，比如在酒店和农业行业工作的移民。然而，这可能低估了他们的野心。一些白宫官员显然希望将某些国家的合法移民驱逐出境，理由是他们的族群会腐蚀美国文化并毒害美国社会。显然，比赤裸裸的极权式移民政策更不受欢迎的是民主党政策。然而，即使从推进其激进意识形态目标的角度来看，政府的移民执法方式也显得自我削弱。毕竟，白宫不仅追求激进目标，还大肆宣扬其极端立场和专制倾向。也许，移民执法行动的动机是基于种族偏见，而非维护法律。但即便如此，公开表达这一点也是不明智的：特朗普若没有非裔和移民选民的大量支持，就不可能在2024年赢得选举。然而，他的国土安全部却在官方社交媒体上发布白人至上主义口号，而总统则贬低所有索马里裔美国人，称他们为“低智商的人”。同时，当ICE和CBP的执法行为导致美国人受害的报道不断涌现时，政府却试图削弱其法律问责并放松培训标准。这种态度在Renee Good和Alex Pretti的死亡事件中达到了顶峰。在这些案例中，政府有充分动机采取谨慎态度。视频证据表明，至少这些枪击事件可能是非法的。如果其遣返人员确实非法杀害了美国公民，白宫不应承认这种暴力行为。政府本可以对每起枪击事件表示哀悼，并呼吁调查。甚至可以将凶手称为少数“坏苹果”，其鲁莽行为破坏了ICE的根本使命：保护美国人。但相反，政府却立即为凶手辩护，并诋毁受害者，甚至散布与视频证据明显矛盾的谎言。白宫对这一信息策略的坚持，既在战略上令人费解，又在道德上令人反感。在Good遇害后的几周内，民调显示，大多数美国人并未接受白宫的说法。对ICE的不满率已超过60%。然而，当边境巡逻局向Pretti的倒地身体连开10枪时，政府却更加高调地重复了同样的言论。
鉴于上述情况，特朗普在移民问题上的支持率并未变得更糟，这令人惊讶且不安。移民问题仍然是特朗普最有力的议题。根据进步派数据记者G. Elliott Morris的民调追踪，美国人对特朗普处理移民问题的不满率比对处理通货膨胀问题的不满率低9个百分点。特朗普在其他所有主要议题上的表现都介于这两个极端之间。更令人担忧的是，共和党似乎在移民问题上仍保持优势。在Good遇害后进行的一项《华尔街日报》民调显示，选民认为共和党比民主党更擅长处理移民问题，差距达11个百分点。显然，比赤裸裸的极权式移民政策更不受欢迎的是民主党政策。然而，特朗普毫不掩饰的极端主义使民主党在边境安全方面的弱点变得不那么突出。随着公众对特朗普移民政策的不满增加，民主党在2026年中期选举的民调中领先优势已从今年4月的0.2个百分点扩大到目前的5.5个百分点。特朗普本可以采取一个温和的右翼移民政策，从而在该议题上获得政治成功。或者，他可以像Stephen Miller那样，以一定的隐蔽性和信息控制来推进美国的种族净化计划。然而，他的政府却表现得仿佛只有Truth Social的用户才有投票权。
When President Donald Trump launched his deportation campaign last January, he had the American public at his back.
Under Joe Biden, unauthorized border crossings had soared to record levels — and threw America into a nativist mood. In November 2024, a CBS News/You Gov poll found 57 percent of Americans expressing support for “a national program to find and deport all immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally,” while 73 percent said that the next president should make deportations a priority.
The Trump White House was happy to oblige. And during its first months in office, the public seemed pleased with its efforts. In early 2025, voters approved of Trump’s handling of immigration by as much as 12 points, while favoring his “program to deport immigrants illegally in the US” by 16.
Immigration was the foundation of Trump’s political strength — the issue where he consistently enjoyed the trust of a supermajority of Americans.
And he squandered it within a year.
Once, the phrase “Trump’s immigration policy” evoked images of order in the American imagination: a wall ringing the nation’s borders, migrant panhandlers and criminals airbrushed from city streets.
Today, those words conjure much different pictures — of masked paramilitaries pepper-spraying protesters, breaking into people’s homes, tearing parents from their crying children, and pumping bullets into American citizens.
Voters do not like what they see. Trump’s approval on immigration is now underwater by 12 points. Americans disapprove of his “deportation program” by 8 points and say ICE is making communities “less safe” rather than “more safe” by 21. Not long ago, “Abolish ICE” was among the most politically toxic propositions in American politics. Now, 46 percent of voters — including one-fifth of Republicans — support the idea, according to a recent YouGov poll.
Until this week, the White House evinced little concern for its immigration agenda’s collapsing support. When an ICE agent needlessly shot a 37-year-old mother to death in Minneapolis in early January, the Trump administration immediately rallied to the shooter’s defense. When Border Patrol agents were caught on video Saturday firing 10 bullets into the back of a protester, the Department of Homeland Security swiftly smeared the victim as a domestic terrorist, effectively asking Americans to trust its word over their lying eyes.
Even conservatives struggled to stomach that last act of depravity. The administration’s handling of Alex Pretti’s killing provoked rebukes from Republican senators, right-wing magazines, and the NRA.
Faced with a backlash so broad and overwhelming, Trump finally decided to change course, however minutely.
In recent days, he demoted his hardline Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, extended an olive branch to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, discussed Democratic demands for DHS reform with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and suggested that Pretti’s death would receive a thorough investigation (although, there are signs this may not actually be the case).
Given the scale of ICE and CPB’s lawlessness, it would be generous to call these half-measures. The administration still appears staunchly opposed to reforms that would actually ensure its deportation forces’ professionalism and legal accountability. It is still eager to use immigration policy as a tool for terrorizing ethnic minorities and punishing the administration’s political adversaries.
By indulging these radical impulses, Trump has achieved an extraordinary feat of political self-sabotage: He has managed to turn his greatest source of political vitality into a vulnerability — and done so despite successfully addressing the electorate’s chief complaint on that issue as of 2024.
The Biden-era surge in migration fueled widespread discontent.
Vast and sudden influxes of asylum-seekers — who were often both indigent and legally barred from employment — burdened many municipalities’ social services, increased visible homelessness, and sparked an array of fears and resentments in longtime US residents (not least, among those who had themselves immigrated in the recent past).
By the time Trump took office, however, the migrant wave had already crested.
This was partly due to America’s softening labor market. Border crossings had first started soaring in late 2020, as US employers expanded hiring and hiked wages to satisfy rebounding consumer demand. Faced with more tepid recoveries in their home countries, many migrants went north in search of opportunity.
By 2024, however, job growth in the US was slowing — and the American economy’s magnetic force was weakening. Illegal border crossings fell by 53 percent between December 2023 and May 2024.
The following month, Biden enacted various new restrictions on asylum, which helped reduce unauthorized migration by another 44 percent between June and November of 2024.
Biden and Kamala Harris derived little political benefit from this decline, likely because they were associated with the spike that had preceded it.
But Trump did not have that problem. His reputation for “toughness” on immigration was unquestioned.
And it served the new president in more ways than one: Upon his inauguration, unauthorized immigration immediately plunged to its lowest point on record. In February 2025, only 8,326 migrants crossed the US southern border, down from 47,300 in December 2024 — and 249,740 in December 2023.
In other words: Before Trump had changed virtually anything about immigration policy, the border crisis was effectively solved.
Given these conditions, little stood between Trump and political success on immigration. He could have done nothing and still credibly claimed to have secured the border. Had Trump pursued a normal, restrictionist agenda — higher spending on border enforcement, more deportations of (even low-level) criminal offenders, restrictions on opportunities for asylum — he likely would have appeased his base and swing voters alike.
But he didn’t.
Granted, there is more to governance than maximizing your approval rating. The point of politics is not merely to gain power but to use it. Trump and his allies were not content to deter future immigration or deport undocumented criminals. They wanted to purge America of all undocumented immigrants — or at least, all those who did not work for their cronies in the hospitality and agricultural sectors.
Yet even this may undersell their ambitions. Some in the White House plainly wish to exile legal immigrants from certain countries, on the grounds that their ethnic groups corrode our nation’s culture and poison its blood.
Apparently, the only thing more unpopular than a nakedly authoritarian immigration policy is a Democratic one.
Nevertheless, even from the standpoint of advancing its incendiary ideological goals, the administration’s approach to immigration enforcement appears self-undermining. After all, the White House hasn’t just pursued radical objectives, but made a big show of its own extremity and authoritarianism.
Perhaps, the administration’s immigration enforcement operations were motivated by racial animus rather than a desire to uphold the law. But it still would not have been wise to say as much: Trump would not have won the 2024 election without substantial support from both nonwhite and immigrant voters.
And yet Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has chosen to post on social media white nationalist slogans from its official social media accounts, while the president has derided all Somali-Americans as “low-IQ people.”
Meanwhile, it seems obvious that, if you want to limit backlash to intensive deportation operations, you must ensure that they burden US citizens as little as possible.
And yet, even as stories of ICE and CBP’s maltreatment of Americans piled up last year, the administration sought to reduce their legal accountability while loosening training standards.
This posture reached its apotheosis with the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
In each of those cases, the administration had every incentive to proceed cautiously. Video evidence of both shootings indicated that — at the very least — they may have been illegitimate.
And if its deportation forces had in fact lawlessly executed an American citizen, the White House would be ill-advised to take ownership of such violence.
The administration could have responded to each killing with expressions of sorrow and calls for investigation. It might have even declared the killers a few bad apples, whose recklessness undermined ICE’s fundamental mission: to keep Americans safe.
Instead, it chose to immediately defend the killer and defame the victim — by telling lies blatantly contradicted by video evidence.
The White House’s commitment to this messaging strategy was as strategically puzzling as it was morally odious. In the weeks following Good’s killing, polling revealed that a supermajority of Americans had not bought the White House’s line. Disapproval of ICE shot up past 60 percent.
Nevertheless, when Border Patrol fired 10 bullets into Pretti’s prone body, the administration sang an even shriller rendition of the same tune.
Given all this, it is remarkable — and disconcerting — that Trump’s standing on immigration is not even worse.
Immigration remains the president’s best issue. According to the progressive data journalist G. Elliott Morris’s poll tracker, Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration by 9 points — while disapproving of his handling of inflation by 26. Trump’s marks on all other major issues fall between those two poles.
More troublingly, the GOP seems to have retained an advantage on immigration. In a Wall Street Journal poll taken after Good’s killing, voters said that the Republican Party was “better equipped” to handle immigration than the Democrats by an 11-point margin.
Apparently, the only thing more unpopular than a nakedly authoritarian immigration policy is a Democratic one.
Nevertheless, Trump’s unabashed extremism has made the Democratic Party’s vulnerabilities on border security less salient. As the public has soured on the president’s immigration agenda, the Democrats’ lead in 2026 midterm polling has grown from a measly 0.2 points last April to 5.5 points today.
Trump could have embraced a center-right immigration agenda and coasted to political success on the issue. Or he could have pursued Stephen Miller’s radical plans for America’s ethnic purification with a modicum of stealth and message discipline. Instead, his administration has behaved as though only Truth Social users have voting rights.
2026-02-02 19:00:00
类人机器人——真正实用的那些，你可能在日常生活中遇到的——长期以来一直是科幻小说的领域，而非现实。但它们在科幻作品中的普遍性使它们成为一个令人向往的前景，而“具身人工智能”（即赋予AI实体）已经在改变世界。这是否意味着类人机器人终于迎来了它们的时刻？在本月的封面故事中，Adam Clark Estes分享了他观察机器人制作柠檬水的经历，以及这对我们未来类人机器人发展的启示。本期其他文章还包括：无就业的繁荣期、小型宠物饲养的伦理问题，以及纪念那位帮助人类消灭天花的英雄。
《我们医疗保健成本危机的积极面》 作者：Dylan Scott
《我们正处于经济繁荣期，就业机会在哪里？》 作者：Heather Long
《被遗忘的英雄：消灭人类最古老杀手之一的人》 作者：Bryan Walsh（2月3日出版）
《地球上还有谁没有电？》 作者：Umair Irfan（2月4日出版）
《我们真正需要的机器人》 作者：Adam Clark Estes（2月5日出版）
《反对饲养小型宠物的理由》 作者：Kenny Torrella（2月6日出版）
Humanoid robots — actually useful ones, the kind you might encounter in day-to-day life — have long been the territory of science fiction, not reality. But their sci-fi ubiquity makes them an understandably tantalizing prospect, and “embodied AI” — AI given a physical system — is already making a difference in the world. Could this finally be their moment? In this month’s Highlight cover story, Adam Clark Estes explains what he learned watching a robot make lemonade, and what it tells us about the future of humanoid robots. Also in this issue: A jobless boom. The ethics of small pet ownership. And remembering the man who killed smallpox.
By Dylan Scott
By Heather Long
Coming February 3
By Bryan Walsh
Coming February 3
By Umair Irfan
Coming February 4
By Adam Clark Estes
Coming February 5
By Kenny Torrella
Coming February 6
2026-02-02 19:00:00
美国参议院少数党领袖、纽约州民主党人查克·舒默在上个月参议院对医疗补助计划投票失败后发表讲话。| 索尔·洛埃布/法新社/盖蒂图片社
美国应对最新医疗成本危机的另一个窗口即将关闭。国会为自己设定了1月30日的最后期限，以达成一项协议，延长《平价医疗法案》（ACA）下的财务援助。不出所料，截至目前，仍未达成协议。已有约400万美国人失去了政府补助，其中许多人选择不再参保，因为他们无法负担没有补助的医疗保险费用。这就是美国医疗体系的故事：在无法承受的成本面前，政治瘫痪。对数百万受影响的人来说，这是沉重的打击。我从事这一领域报道已有15年，医疗保险的费用一直在上涨，这是选民最常抱怨和感到痛苦的问题之一。与其它能够以更低成本提供全民医疗的富裕国家相比，这显得非常尴尬。再次未能采取行动，使局势显得更加绝望。但情况可能并非如此。尽管国会议员们仍在僵局中，但改善美国医疗体系的条件实际上正在酝酿。在即将到来的又一次医疗政策失败前夕，我们或许可以稍微乐观一点。
本周（非事件）特别令人沮丧的是，近三分之二的美国人认为联邦政府有责任确保人们拥有医疗保险。现在，仔细看看这张图表。美国人最后一次如此统一地支持政府保证医疗保险是在2008年左右，也就是我们上次重大医疗改革法案《平价医疗法案》通过之前。医疗政治具有周期性。大致流程如下：一个问题让政治家们无法忽视，他们通过（或试图通过）一项不完美的计划来应对——然后，选民对该计划感到愤怒——然后，反弹使得政治家们不敢再推动更重大的改革，直到公众再次感到极度不满，迫使领导人采取行动。
美国医疗史学家保罗·斯塔尔（Paul Starr）为这种循环创造了一个术语：“补救与反弹”。过去16年，我们处于对《平价医疗法案》的反弹阶段：民主党试图降低中产阶级和贫困人口的无保险率，于是出台了《平价医疗法案》；选民最初在共和党及某些商业行业的游说下拒绝了这项法律；而那次反弹的余波使许多民主党人十年来都不敢提出重大改革。但现在，这个循环可能终于开始逆转了。
要推动一次重大的医疗改革，需要几个要素：足够的政治支持、扎实的政策基础，以及至少一些主要医疗利益集团的认同。《平价医疗法案》就是一个例子，它源于奥巴马的广泛选举授权、至少可以追溯到克林顿早期的数十年政策规划，以及医院和制药巨头的默许，他们当时并未进行重大抵制。如今，这三个因素正在重新对齐。
我们已经看到公众对医疗问题的态度。《平价医疗法案》补贴悬崖和共和党对医疗补助的削减可能会加深他们的愤怒和对变革的渴望。直接面向消费者的医疗销售模式（例如人们在好市多（Costco）用现金购买奥兹empic）将进一步加剧医疗体系中的不平等，同时挤压许多人的钱包。
在政策制定方面，表面之下，齿轮正在缓慢运转，为未来的行动铺路。这是这个循环中的关键部分：动力缓慢积累，只有密切关注的人才能察觉，直到出现短暂的窗口期，才可能推动政策变革。在2020年总统初选期间，民主党就曾就下一次医疗改革可能的形态展开激烈辩论：全民医保、自愿全民医保、或更针对性的私人保险改革。他们已经讨论和打磨这些概念十年之久。最近，像华盛顿这样的州开始实施州级公共保险计划，并显示出积极成果；这些经验可能在制定全国性计划时非常有价值，就像马萨诸塞州的医疗改革法案曾为《平价医疗法案》的制定提供借鉴。
目前，一个新的跨党派议员团体正在努力就药品管理公司和更多相关改革达成协议。另一个迹象表明风向正在转变，特朗普政府正在采取措施降低药品价格，例如尝试将美国药品价格与国际价格对齐，这在十年前对共和党来说是不可想象的。
在第三点上，一些主要利益集团也正经历自身的危机，并开始考虑重大改革。美国医学会（AMA）长期以来反对单一支付者医疗体系，但现在其立场正在逐渐软化，还呼吁恢复《平价医疗法案》的财务援助并在此基础上进行扩展。即使真正的单一支付者体系在美国仍难以推广，这些迹象也表明，美国最具影响力的医生游说团体可能不再反对政府在提供保险和控制成本方面发挥更积极的作用。
此外，正如我之前报道的，一些公司开始认真思考雇主提供的医疗保险的未来，因为提供这种保险的成本持续上升。这些由雇主提供的保险计划覆盖了美国约一半的人口，长期以来被视为不可触碰，因为它们提供了免税的医疗福利，这对私营部门来说是一个重要的价值。尽管一些公司仍认为这种价值存在，但如果更多公司决定不再充当保险管理员，这将是一次重大的政治转变，可能带来各种新的可能性。
那么接下来会发生什么？全国政治将很重要：民主党比共和党更有可能发起一次重大的医疗改革。但即使在这一点上，你也可以认为星星正在对齐：现任总统唐纳德·特朗普目前非常不受欢迎，民主党赢得参议院是有可能的。然后他们只需在2028年赢得总统选举，改革的窗口至少在理论上就会再次打开。医疗问题始终是选民的首要关注之一，这一点不会改变。
Another window to stem America’s latest health care cost crisis is about to close. Congress set a self-imposed deadline of January 30 to reach a compromise to extend financial assistance available under the Affordable Care Act, and — not surprisingly — at least so far, a deal has failed to materialize. Already, about 4 million Americans have lost their government aid, and many of them have chosen to go uninsured because they can no longer afford their health insurance premiums without it.
This is the American health care story: political paralysis in the face of unaffordable costs. For the millions of people directly impacted, it is a terrible blow.
I’ve been working on the beat for 15 years, and health insurance keeps getting more expensive. It is one of the most consistent sources of frustration and pain for voters. It is an embarrassment compared to other wealthy countries that manage to deliver universal health care at a lower cost.
This failure to act, yet again, makes the moment feel more hopeless than ever.
But it may not be.
Despite lawmakers’ ongoing impasse, the conditions are actually ripening for another serious attempt to improve the American health care system. Here’s the case for a little optimism on the eve of yet another health care policy failure.
What’s particularly galling about this week’s (non)event is that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure people have health coverage.
Now, take a closer look at that chart.
The last time Americans were this unified around the idea of the government guaranteeing health coverage was around 2008 — shortly before our last major health reform law, the Affordable Care Act, passed. The politics of health care are cyclical. It goes something like this:
A problem becomes impossible for politicians to ignore, and lawmakers pass (or try to pass) an imperfect plan to address it — and then…
Voters become incensed over that specific plan — and then… The backlash leaves lawmakers too afraid to try to pass any more significant reforms until the public becomes so fed up again that our leaders feel compelled to act.
Paul Starr, the preeminent historian of American health care, coined a term for this cycle: remedy and reaction.
For the past 16 years, we have been in a period of reaction to the ACA: Democrats sought to reduce the persistently high uninsured rates among the working class and people in poverty, they came up with the ACA to achieve that goal, voters initially rejected the law after campaigning from Republicans and some corner of the business industry, and the lingering bruises from that backlash made many Democrats reluctant to propose major changes in 2016, 2020 and 2024.
But now the wheel may finally be coming back around.
You need a few things to make a big health care push: that critical mass of political support, serious policy chops, and buy-in from at least some of the major health care business interests. The ACA, for example, resulted from Barack Obama’s massive electoral mandate, decades of policy planning dating back to at least the early Clinton years, and acquiescence from hospitals and Big Pharma that opted not to mount a major resistance.
All three factors are starting to align again.
We’ve covered the public’s attitude on health care already. The ACA subsidy cliff and Republicans’ Medicaid cuts could deepen their anger and their desire for change. The shift to direct-to-consumer health care sales — like people paying cash for Ozempic at Costco — will further heighten the inequities in our system while squeezing many people’s wallets.
On policymaking, below the surface, the gears have been slowly churning, setting the stage once again for future action.
This is a key part of the cycle: Momentum builds slowly, imperceptibly except to those paying close attention, before short windows open that allow for bursts of policymaking.
Democrats went through a robust debate around what their next health care overhaul might look like during the 2020 presidential primary: Medicare-for-all, Medicare for all who want it, more targeted reforms to private insurance. They have been vetting and finetuning these concepts for a decade at this point. More recently, state-level public insurance options have gotten off the ground in states like Washington and started to show promising results; those experiences could be valuable when lawmakers are crafting a national plan, just as an existing Massachusetts health care reform law informed the ACA’s development.
Right now, there is a new bipartisan group of lawmakers trying to deliver a deal on reforms for pharmacy benefits managers and more. In another sign of the shifting winds, the Trump administration has made moves to reduce drug prices, taking steps — such as trying to align US prices with international prices — that would have been unthinkable for a Republican a decade ago.
On our third point, some major special interest groups are having their own moments of crisis — and they’re in the mood to consider serious reforms. The American Medical Association, long an opponent of single-payer health care, has been gradually softening its stance; it has also advocated for restoring the ACA financial assistance and building upon the law. Even if a true, single-payer system remains a tough sell in the US, these are notable signals that the nation’s most powerful physician lobbying group may not oppose a more muscular government role in providing health insurance and trying to limit costs.
And as I have reported, some companies are starting to seriously ponder the future of employer-sponsored insurance as the cost of providing it continues to grow. Those employer-sponsored plans, which insure about half the US, have long been considered untouchable because they offer tax-free health benefits — a major value for the private sector. And some companies say they still see that value. But if more firms decide they want to stop playing the role of health insurance administrator, that would be a massive political shift that could open up all kinds of new possibilities.
So what comes next?
National politics will be important: Democrats seem more likely than Republicans to mount a major health care reform effort. But even there, you can argue that the stars are aligning more than it might seem: President Donald Trump is so unpopular right now that the Democrats winning the Senate is plausible. Then they only need to take the presidency in 2028, and the window will, at least in theory, be open. Health care is a top priority for voters. That won’t change.
2026-02-01 20:00:00
2026年1月29日，美国总统唐纳德·特朗普在白宫内阁会议上讲话，国防部长皮特·海格塞思在旁观看。尽管特朗普曾承诺专注于“美国优先”，但他的全球野心却显而易见。近期，美国在委内瑞拉采取行动，对格陵兰、欧洲和伊朗发出威胁，并公开寻求诺贝尔和平奖。特朗普最新的全球举措是成立“和平委员会”，其终身会费高达十亿美元，被一些人视为试图取代联合国的尝试。截至目前，加入该委员会的国家大多是国际舞台上的次要角色，包括白俄罗斯、阿塞拜疆和萨尔瓦多。
然而，无论该委员会是否能成功建立一个“更灵活、更有效的国际和平建设机构”，它都是特朗普试图重新确立美国在国际事务中影响力的新尝试，尤其是在美国的邻国中。塔夫茨大学弗莱彻国际关系学院的国际政治教授莫妮卡·杜夫·托夫指出，特朗普试图重新确立美国的影响力范围，即“势力范围”，这种影响力体现在对盟友和伙伴国家的控制上，而非直接统治。
特朗普的“势力范围”包括委内瑞拉和格陵兰，但他的目标还远不止于此。他希望美国在西方世界保持主导地位，同时在全球其他地区如中东和亚洲也拥有影响力。然而，这种做法可能引发其他国家的反弹，尤其是中国和俄罗斯。中国和俄罗斯都试图在国际事务中发挥更大作用，而美国的这种行为可能让它们觉得可以效仿。
特朗普的“和平委员会”被视为对联合国的挑战，但其影响力有限。尽管美国在委内瑞拉和伊朗采取了一些强硬措施，但这些行动并未真正改变国际秩序。相反，它们可能削弱美国的国际声誉，并导致盟友的不满。目前，盟友国家正在团结起来，因为他们认为美国不再是可靠的伙伴。与此同时，俄罗斯和中国则在观察美国的行动，并可能采取类似策略。
总的来说，当前的国际局势似乎正在走向一种“无政府状态”，各国都在争夺影响力，而美国的政策可能正在加剧这种趋势。
It’s no secret that President Donald Trump has global aspirations — despite his promises of focusing on “America First.” The past few weeks have seen US action in Venezuela; threats to Greenland, Europe, and Iran; and Trump’s open solicitation of a Nobel Peace Prize.
The president’s latest global push: the Board of Peace.
With its billion-dollar lifetime membership fee, the new body has been labeled a minor bid to replace the United Nations. So far the countries who have joined are relatively minor players on the world stage, including Belarus, Azerbaijan, and El Salvador.
But whether or not the board ends up successful in its mission to create “a more nimble and effective international peace-building body,” it’s Trump’s latest attempt to exert a new kind of international power, especially over America’s neighbors.
“He’s trying to reestablish the US sphere of influence, its control over the Western Hemisphere,” said Monica Duffy Toft, professor of international politics at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and director of the Center for Strategic Studies.
Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Toft about where our idea of a “world order” came from and where it may be headed after Trump’s shakeup. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
It is unbelievably still January of 2026, and we have had really significant events in Venezuela, over Greenland, with the EU and NATO. And all of this is leading people to say President Donald Trump is trying to remake the world order.
What is the world order?
So the world order was established after World War II. The United States and its Western allies decided to establish rules that would govern the international system and along with that a series of institutions, including, by the way, the United Nations. And what they were trying to do is set up a system of law — international law, norms, and rules in order to prevent a third world war.
The idea was that the use of force — the use of the military — was no longer going to be an acceptable form of international politicking on the global arena.
This is the thing that President Trump seeks to change or to undo or to disrupt. You’ve written about a philosophy that you think is relevant right now. What’s the philosophy?
He’s trying to reestablish the US sphere of influence, its control over the Western Hemisphere. And a sphere of influence, it’s best understood as control without rule. States within a sphere are sovereign on paper; they have their own government, their own borders, their own money, and they have international recognition. But their strategic choices are restrained by the great power, and in this case, it’s the United States.
What [the US] is doing is saying, under President Trump and his administration, [countries within its sphere] can’t freely choose alliances, trade partners without crossing lines or without getting agreement from the United States.
What’s the sphere of influence that the US is seeking? We clearly want to have a lot of influence in Venezuela. Greenland, the president has been very clear there as well. But what other nations and regions do we see Trump wanting to have influence over? And what does he want them to do or not do?
We know that he wants the Western sphere under US control. This was part of the National Security Strategy that was released. And it’s very clear that the United States is going to dominate the region. You can look at what is done in Venezuela, where it just said Venezuela can no longer have [formal trade] relations with China and with Russia.
But paradoxically, [the Trump administration] also wants to have global reach. And so now we’re seeing the tensions. There’s a flotilla moving to the Middle East in order to get Iran to behave. And then also the United States wants to maintain its leverage in Asia. It has allies there, of course: Japan and Taiwan and South Korea.
So on the one hand, it’s really pressing its case in the Western Hemisphere, but then it’s also insisting that it should have some leverage in these other regions. And the one that is probably most problematic is Asia. Because of course if the United States can have pointy elbows in its own sphere, China could make the argument, then why can’t we?
This makes me wonder then: Who are the other great powers? Who are the other nations trying to influence the smaller nations here?
The top two are probably the Russian Federation, of course, which invaded Ukraine in 2014 and then again in 2022. And [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s made it very clear that he wants to determine Ukrainians’ foreign policy so much so that it doesn’t want to join in the EU or NATO, and it doesn’t want NATO expanded. So the Russian Federation is one.
And of course, the other one is China, whose economy is booming, as a huge population and a large landmass.
This makes me think of the way [China’s leader] Xi [Jinping] and Putin talk about their objectives in the world. Let’s go back to early January, after the United States spirited [Venezuelan President] Nicolas Maduro out of Venezuela.
Stephen Miller got on television and he said to CNN’s Jake Tapper, “We live in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world — since the beginning of time.”
It was striking. It reminded me of the way Vladimir Putin talks about the world and the way Xi talks about the world.
Is the United States just doing what Russia and China are already doing?
Noel, that is a great way to put it. But what I would say is we were already there.
The United States superpower has always been [about] trade, and free trade. And so what’s paradoxical here is that we did not need to use force to do that. Now we’re using force, but at a time in history when we’re finding that it’s not as effective in securing our national strategic goals.
What’s kind of a shame here is that the United States is, under President Trump — he seems to like this muscular foreign policy. You get the quick victories, [like] Venezuela. But over the longer term, it’s eroding the American reputation. And over the longer term, it’s actually undermining our interests.
What you’re going to see is a balancing against the United States. You’re already seeing the hedging, where you’ve got [Prime Minister] Mark Carney of Canada declaring,“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it.” That we’re in a new world order, and we cannot rely on our allies — we cannot rely on the United States. And he’s not alone.
You said the United States is using force, and I wonder to what degree you think that’s true. So Venezuela, yes, we did go in. It was a quick mission, I think we could put it that way. Greenland, we did not actually do anything, nor did we even end up levying tariffs on Europe over the whole Greenland fight. President Trump backed off.
So when you say we’re using force, how do you see that? You’re not talking boots on the ground, right?
Potentially.
The Trump administration did say with the Greenland operation, before it deescalated, thankfully, that they wouldn’t discount putting American forces in there and reestablishing those bases.
I wasn’t fully confident that the US wasn’t going to deploy troops. And I’m pretty sure the Europeans feared that the US was going to take that step.
We love sanctions and Trump loves tariffs, and we’re using them not only against adversaries, but against allies. Noel, that’s the difference, right? Is that we’re threatening our allies, and because the United States is so quick with the trigger, we can’t be trusted that we’re not going to use force.
It feels like we are barreling toward something in this moment. Trump’s Board of Peace, at this juncture, is this minor bid to replace the United Nations. We’ve talked about the international norms that are being upended. What do you think we are barreling toward?
What’s unnerving is that it really does seem to be one individual within this administration that has a lot of say about where we’re headed.
But the question is: How far is the administration willing to push this? And my concern, Noel, is that [bombing] Iran [in June 2025] was a successful operation. At least, they’ve sold it as that. The experts say, “No, we didn’t denude the nuclear capacity of Iran for that long,” but [the Trump administration] sees it as a victory.
And then secondarily, Venezuela was quick and dirty, right? We got in and we got out.
These mini successes may embolden them a little bit more. And the question is: How are our allies going to respond? And we see how they’re responding; they’re uniting. They’re saying, we’ve got to keep this together because the United States is now not a reliable partner. They feel as if they’re fighting for that Western liberal order and that Ukraine is the front line.
And then the adversaries — the Russian Federation and China — what lessons are they taking from this? China under President Xi is kind of thumping [its] chest and saying, “I’m the big boy in the room,” right? “We’re stable. We’re not going to use force.” And then Putin is looking at this smirking, thinking, “Great, if the United States can get away with these shenanigans, then I can too” — right?
We’re in kind of a Wild West situation. And the question is: How are they going to respond to it?
2026-02-01 20:00:00
2025年12月21日，在亚利桑那州凤凰城举行的Turning Point USA年度AmericaFest会议上，与会者佩戴特朗普帽子。今年的会议是为了纪念在9月于犹他州大学校园遇害的右翼活动家查理·克里克（Charlie Kirk），这一事件引发了保守派的深切哀悼，并促使特朗普威胁要对“激进左翼”采取行动。（图片由Olivier Touron / AFP via Getty Images）
查理·克里克创立了Turning Point USA，旨在影响他所认为正在被自由派大学灌输思想的大学生群体。他的努力得到了保守派名人的广泛支持，包括特朗普和副总统JD·范斯（JD Vance）。然而，自克里克遇害后，Turning Point USA在校园中的影响力迅速扩大，会员数量在某些地区激增数千人；而克里克的遗孀埃里卡·克里克（Erika Kirk）则名义上接管了该组织。但正如《纽约杂志》的Simon van Zuylen-Wood在最新一期《Today, Explained》中告诉Noel King的那样，还有其他右翼超级明星正在争夺组织领导地位，而许多年轻保守派人士则开始接受比克里克更为黑暗和阴谋论的世界观。
以下是他们对话的节选，已进行删减和润色。完整内容请收听《Today, Explained》节目，可在Apple Podcasts、Pandora和Spotify等平台获取。
在查理·克里克于9月在犹他州遇害后，人们开始思考：Turning Point USA会如何发展？这不仅关乎TPUSA本身，也关乎青年保守主义的未来。我曾前往亚利桑那州的NFL体育场参加克里克的纪念活动，并与大学生们交谈，发现要了解“查理·克里克之后”的情况，校园是最关键的场所。9月中旬和12月中旬的答案截然不同。如果我在查理·克里克遇害三周后撰写这篇文章，我可能会认为一场全国性的宗教复兴正在发生。无论人们对查理·克里克的右翼政治持何看法，他的存在在某种程度上遏制了更恶劣的势力在年轻右翼群体中的渗透。而查理·克里克的离去，使得这些势力变得更加明显。
在报道过程中，我采访了许多年轻人。其中最突出的人物是俄亥俄州立大学（Ole Miss）Turning Point USA分会的主席莱斯利·拉奇曼（Lesley Lachman）。她20岁，来自纽约威斯特彻斯特县。她代表了一种微趋势：来自东北部的年轻人希望进入南方的“全美”大学。她不仅代表了校园组织的增长，也象征着其社会地位的提升。她被称为“蜂后”，人人皆知她的名字。
如今，校园中的保守派生态由多个组织构成，其中Turning Point USA目前处于主导地位。此外还有Young Americans for Liberty、Young Americans for Freedom以及传统的College Republicans组织，后者本身也分为多个小组。我的文章主线是Z世代的激进化趋势。例如，莱斯利·拉奇曼虽然拥有坚定的保守派背景，但她的许多同学甚至比她更右倾，认为特朗普过于温和，而JD·范斯则令人怀疑。查理·克里克在他们眼中甚至算不上“温和”，但他们依然热爱他，因为他的理念。
查理·克里克的离去对特朗普和MAGA（让美国再次伟大）运动意味着什么？在文章中，我提到的两位主要人物——康达·欧文斯（Candace Owens）和尼克·弗恩特斯（Nick Fuentes）——在这些年轻人的社交媒体上占据主导地位。欧文斯是一位阴谋论者，她的关于查理·克里克死亡的极端理论在Spotify播客排行榜上迅速攀升；而弗恩特斯则是一个公开的反犹主义者。从选举角度来看，这种纯粹的身份政治和仇恨驱动的策略对MAGA的前景更为不利。如果采取弗恩特斯式的极端立场，可能会直接摧毁特朗普在2024年11月当选时所依赖的多民族联盟。
我文章中一个引人注目的特点是年轻女性的大量参与。我认为Turning Point USA对年轻女性的吸引力并不完全来自埃里卡·克里克，尽管她现在成为组织的象征人物，这将加速Turning Point USA女性主导的趋势。许多这些年轻共和党组织，尤其是那些对尼克·弗恩特斯感兴趣的群体，都极度男性化，以至于我与他们交谈时，他们几乎都在抱怨：“为什么没有女孩来参加我们的会议？”此外，Turning Point USA还关注一些特定议题，如“让美国健康起来”（Make America Healthy Again）运动，以及涉及跨性别运动员和非法移民的问题。这些议题对保守派女性具有很强的吸引力。例如，Turning Point USA有一位名叫亚历克斯·克拉克（Alex Clark）的网红，她主持播客并是“让美国健康起来”运动的重要人物。该运动目前在年轻保守派女性中非常受欢迎。
此外，还有两位名叫莱利（Riley）的女性：莱利·拉金（Lakin Riley）和莱利·格莱恩斯（Riley Gaines）。前者是一名护理学生，2024年在佐治亚大学校园附近被一名非法入境的委内瑞拉移民杀害；后者则是一名游泳运动员，曾在肯塔基大学与跨性别运动员莱亚·托马斯（Leah Thomas）进行比赛，后者代表宾夕法尼亚大学。跨性别运动员问题和非法移民问题成为Turning Point USA关注的重点。
这些年轻人认为，自由派已经出卖了像他们这样的女性。莱斯利·拉奇曼在2024年春季莱利·格莱恩斯演讲时，就已经开始参加Turning Point USA的活动，随后她成为了分会主席。
如果你是查理·克里克的追随者，你会追随这位已故的“殉道者”，还是追随仍在YouTube和Twitter上活跃的其他人？你认为他们接下来会往哪个方向发展？
根据我所看到的一切，他们正朝着他们所关注的社交媒体内容的方向发展。这一点不可忽视，康达·欧文斯和尼克·弗恩特斯在他们的信息流中占据主导地位。在一个推崇阴谋论的文化环境中，美国右翼，尤其是年轻右翼，对阴谋论的胃口是无穷无尽的。查理·克里克每天在播客和校园中出现的视频，如今被他的最大敌人尼克·弗恩特斯所取代。到12月底，围绕尼克·弗恩特斯及其影响力的话题已无法回避。我问莱斯利，尼克·弗恩特斯在你生活中扮演什么角色？她告诉我，当她感到悲伤或孤独时，通常会查看查理·克里克的动态。但自从查理·克里克去世后，她有时会忍不住直接观看尼克·弗恩特斯的内容。
Charlie Kirk started Turning Point USA to reach college-aged kids he believed were being indoctrinated by liberal universities. His efforts were thoroughly embraced by conservative luminaries, all the way up to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
But since Kirk was assassinated in September, TPUSA’s popularity has exploded on college campuses with membership increasing by the thousands in some places; and Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, has nominally taken over the organization in her late husband’s stead.
But as New York magazine’s Simon van Zuylen-Wood told Noel King for the latest episode of Today, Explained, there are other right-wing superstars who are jockeying for position in the organization, and many young conservatives are embracing a worldview that is darker and more conspiratorial than Kirk ever was.
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.
After Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah, in September, the question was: What would happen to Turning Point USA?
The question was not only what is going to happen to TPUSA, his campus and electoral apparatus, but also what was going to happen to youth conservatism?
I went to the [Kirk] memorial [at the NFL stadium in Arizona] and started talking to college kids, and it became evident that the place to go investigate the post-Charlie Kirk moment was the campus.
The answer in mid-September looked really different from the answer in mid-December. If I had written my story three weeks after Charlie Kirk was killed, I would’ve thought that there was a sort of nationwide religious revival taking place.
Charlie Kirk, whatever people thought of his right-wing politics, was playing a role that only became more evident to me after he was gone. He was serving as a sort of stopgap against even more malign forces that were creeping up on the young right.
And without Charlie Kirk there, they started to become much more prominent. They see the murder of Charlie Kirk as evidence of left-wing intolerance, but they also no longer have Kirk as this kind of role model who is actually keeping these darker forces at bay.
You talked to a lot of young people as you were reporting this piece. Who stood out to you?
The main character of my piece is the president of the TPUSA chapter at Ole Miss, Lesley Lachman.
She’s 20 years old. She’s from Westchester County, New York. She represents a kind of micro-trend, which is kids from the Northeast who want to go to college at these big “All-American” schools in the South.
She represents what appeared to be kind of the boom where not only does the campus organization grow, but her social status grows. She’s a queen bee, everybody knows who she is.
What’s the conservative ecosystem on campuses look like now?
There are a bunch of different groups, [with] TPUSA being the sort of top dog right now; but there’s Young Americans for Liberty, Young Americans for Freedom, and there’s the classic College Republicans groups, which are themselves divided into groups.
The radicalization of Gen Z is the through line of my piece, and what happens is that a young woman like Lesley Lachman, she’s got impeccable conservative bonafides, but actually there are many, many students even to her right, who feel like Trump is too moderate, [and that] JD Vance is suspect.
Charlie Kirk was barely acceptable as a “moderate,” but they loved him anyway because of what he stood for.
What does it mean for Trump and for MAGA that Charlie Kirk is gone and now there are lots of kids to the right, even the far right of Charlie Kirk?
It’s extremely troubling that two main figures in my piece that are just dominating the feeds of these students are Candace Owens — who’s a conspiracy theorist [who] has rocketed-up the Spotify podcast charts by spreading really out-there theories about his death — and Nick Fuentes, who’s an outright antisemite.
But as an electoral consequence, it’s actually arguably more troubling to MAGA’s chances. If you are doing pure identitarian, hate-driven politics in the Fuentes vein, you probably instantly just doomed the multiracial coalition that brought Trump to office in November 2024.
One of the things that was striking about your piece was the presence of so many young women.
I think the TPUSA’s appeal to young women is actually not quite about Erika Kirk, although Erika Kirk now being the figurehead is going to accelerate the female-dominated nature of TPUSA.
A lot of these young Republican groups, especially the ones that are sort of interested in Nick Fuentes, are extremely male, to the point where I was hanging out with these kids and they were basically kind of complaining like, “Why can’t we get any girls to come to our meetings?”
There’s also a handful of issues that TPUSA really hones in on that is activating for conservative women in Kirk Country, as I call it.
TPUSA has an influencer called Alex Clark who hosts a podcast and she’s a big Make America Healthy Again influencer. MAHA is extremely popular right now with young conservative women.
There’s also the issue of the two Rileys, Lakin and Riley and Riley Gaines.
Lakin Riley was a nursing student who was killed by a Venezuelan migrant in 2024 near the University of Georgia campus, a Venezuelan who entered illegally during the Biden administration.
And then there’s Riley Gaines, who is a swimmer who was at the University of Kentucky who competed against the trans athlete, Leah Thomas, who swam at University of Pennsylvania.
Trans sports issues and illegal immigration are issues that TPUSA focused on a lot. They feel like liberals have sold women like them out.
And Lesley, who’s TPUSA president at Ole Miss, she was already kind of going to meetings last fall, last spring 2024 when Riley Gaines came and spoke. That’s when she threw herself into TPUSA and then became the president.
If you’re a Kirk acolyte, do you follow the “martyr,” the person who has passed on, or do you follow the person who’s still available, still on YouTube, still on Twitter? Where do you think they’re headed?
Based on everything I saw, they are headed where their feed is headed, and it cannot be overemphasized how dominant Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes are in their feeds.
In a culture that rewards conspiracism, the appetite on the American right, the young American right, for conspiracy is just bottomless. Absent clips of Charlie Kirk on his podcast every day or on the campus, his greatest enemy, Nick Fuentes, is there.
By the end of December, the discourse around Nick Fuentes and his influence was inescapable. And I asked Leslie, well, how does he factor into your life?
And she told me that, when she was sad, when she was feeling lonely, ordinarily she would’ve scrolled over and seen what Charlie Kirk was up to. [But since Kirk’s death,] she couldn’t help herself; she’d sometimes just watch Nick instead.