好英语网特朗普被弹劾对今日美国意味着什么？
WASHINGTON — For the most unpredictable of presidents, it was the most predictable of outcomes. Is anyone really surprised that President Trump was impeached? His defiant disregard for red lines arguably made him an impeachment waiting to happen.
华盛顿——对于最无法预测的总统来说，这是最可预见的结果。真的有人会对特朗普被弹劾感到惊讶吗？他对红线的轻蔑无视可以说使他无可避免地要面对弹劾。
From the day he took office, Mr. Trump made clear that he would not abide by the conventions of the system he inherited. So perhaps it was inevitable that at some point he would go too far for the opposition party, leading to a historic day of debate on the House floor where he was alternately depicted as a constitutional villain or victim.
从上任之日起，特朗普就明确表示，他不会遵循他继承的这个制度的惯例。因此，或许这是不可避免的：到一定时候，反对党会认为他太过分了，导致在众议院里的一场历史性的辩论，他在其中时而被说成是宪政中的大反派，时而说成受害者。
周三在国会大厦外支持弹劾特朗普总统的示威中，琳达·埃默里克手持一本宪法。
The proximate charge as Democrats impeached him for high crimes and misdemeanors on party-line votes Wednesday night was the president’s campaign to pressure Ukraine to help him against his domestic political rivals while withholding security aid. But long before Ukraine consumed the capital, Mr. Trump had sought to bend the instruments of government to his own purposes even if it meant pushing boundaries that had been sacrosanct for a generation.
民主党周三晚进行党派规矩投票以就特朗普的重大罪行和失当行为发起弹劾，其中最直接的指控是总统竞选团队暂扣安全援助，同时逼迫乌克兰协助其对付自己在本国的政治对手。但是早在首都被乌克兰吞没之前，特朗普已经在企图将政府公器挪为私用，哪怕这意味着要突破在一代人眼里极为神圣的底线。
Over nearly three years in office, he has become the most polarizing figure in a country stewing in toxic politics. He has punished enemies and, many argue, undermined democratic institutions. Disregarding advice that restrained other presidents, Mr. Trump kept his real estate business despite the Constitution’s emoluments clause, paid hush money to an alleged paramour and sought to impede investigations that threatened him.
在将近三年的任期中，他已成为这个充斥着有毒政治的国家中最两极化的人物。他惩罚异己，在很多人看来还破坏了民主制度。特朗普不顾曾约束了其他总统的劝告，尽管有宪法的薪酬条款，他仍保留了房地产业务，他向一个据称是情妇的人付了封口费，并试图妨碍对他构成威胁的调查。
His constant stream of falsehoods, including about his dealings with Ukraine, undermined his credibility both at home and abroad, even as his supporters saw him as a challenger to a corrupt status quo subjected to partisan persecution.
他的谎话连篇，包括他与乌克兰的往来，破坏了他在国内外的信誉，尽管他的支持者将他视为遭受了党派迫害的腐败现状挑战者。
Impeachments come at times of tumult, when pent-up pressures seem to explode into conflict, when the fabric of society feels tenuous and the future uncertain. The impeachment battles over Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton came at turning points in the American story. The time that produced Mr. Trump has proved to be another one, a moment when the unthinkable has become routine and precepts that once seemed inviolable have been tested.
弹劾总是在混乱的时期出现——当被抑制的压力似乎爆发成了冲突，当社会的基本结构感到脆弱而前途未卜。围绕安德鲁·约翰逊(Andrew Johnson)总统、理查德·M·尼克松(Richard M. Nixon)总统和比尔·克林顿(Bill Clinton)总统展开的弹劾之战恰处于美国故事的转折点。事实证明，促成特朗普弹劾案的时代也是这样，这是一个难以想象成为司空见惯的时刻，那些曾经看似不可侵犯的准则在接受考验。
Mr. Trump, in his divisiveness, is the manifestation of a nation fracturing into warring camps and trying to define what America is about all over again, just as it did during Reconstruction, during the era of Vietnam and Watergate and during the rise of a new form of angry partisanship at the dawn of the information age.
导致不和的特朗普是一个国家的表现，这个国家正分裂为激烈交战的阵营，并试图重新定义美国，就像它在重建时期、在越战和水门事件时代、在信息时代来临之际新形式的愤怒党派偏见崛起时所做的那样。
“In each of these impeachments, they are not taking place during periods of quietude,” said Jay Winik, a prominent historian and author of “The Great Upheaval” and other books on pivot points in United States. “In a sense, what we’re seeing is a cap coming off a simmering volcano. We see it with each of these presidents — we see it with Johnson, we see it with Nixon, we see it with Clinton and we see it now with Trump. These impeachments are emblematic of periods of profound transition.”
“在这些弹劾事件中，没有哪次是在平静时期发生的，”著名历史学家、著有《大动荡》(The Great Upheaval)等有关美国转折点的书的杰伊·威尼克(Jay Winik)说。“在某种意义上，我们现在看到的是一座蓄势待发的火山正在打开。我们在这些总统的身上都看到了这一点——我们在约翰逊身上看到了，在尼克松身上看到了，在克林顿身上看到了，现在我们在特朗普身上看到了。这些弹劾事件是大转变时期的象征。”
As it happened, much of the debate on the House floor on Wednesday proved less dramatic than the times that prompted it. The chamber through much of the day had little of the electricity it had on the day Mr. Clinton was impeached, when the country was bombing Iraq, the incoming House speaker suddenly resigned after admitting adultery and the White House feared Mr. Clinton would be forced to follow suit.
周三在众议院会议上的辩论大多没有比促使它发生的时候那样激烈。相比之下，会议厅并没有克林顿被弹劾之日那样的激烈气氛，当时美国正在轰炸伊拉克，即将上任的众议院议长在承认通奸后突然辞职，而白宫担心克林顿会被迫步其后尘。
Instead, the debate over Mr. Trump seemed more like a scripted program with everyone playing their assigned parts, each side sticking to its talking points, speaking not to the half-empty galleries but to the country at large. Words and phrases like “no one is above the law” (used in some form or another 60 times) and “sad day” and “sham” (29 times each) were among the favorites. Only when the votes neared in the evening did the chamber fill and the energy level rise.
相反，关于特朗普的辩论似乎更像是一个编排好的节目，每个人都在扮演自己被分配的角色，每一方都坚持自己的谈话要点，不是对着半空的座席而是对整个国家说话。“没有人可以凌驾于法律之上”（以各种形式出现了60次），“悲伤的日子”和“骗局”（各出现29次）之类的单词和短语是他们最爱用的。只有到了晚上投票临近时，会议厅的人才多起来，气氛越来越热闹。
But at points, the lawmakers touched on the larger ramifications, reflecting the broader forces at play. For the Democrats, there was a sense of mission, of reining in an outlaw president who threatened the pillars of the republic. For the Republicans, a party once wary of Mr. Trump but now in full embrace, it was about stopping what they insisted was an illegitimate, unconstitutional attempt to reverse an election victory.
但在某些时候，立法者谈到了在更大层面上的影响，反映出这其中有更广泛的力量在起作用。对于民主党人来说，有一种使命感要他们去阻止一个无法无天的、威胁到共和根基的总统。对于共和党人来说，他们对特朗普从曾经的警惕到现在的全面支持，则是为了制止这个他们坚持认为是非法的、违宪的、旨在推翻选举胜利的企图。
“I don’t want generations to come to blame me for letting democracy die,” said Representative Cedric L. Richmond, Democrat of Louisiana.
路易斯安那州民主党人塞德里克·L·里奇蒙(Cedric L. Richmond)说：“我不希望子孙后代责怪我坐视民主死去。”
“Please stop tearing this country apart,” implored Representative Debbie Lesko, Republican of Arizona.
亚利桑那州共和党代表黛比·莱斯科(Debbie Lesko)恳求说：“请不要再把这个国家拆散。”
The country, of course, was being torn apart long before the clerk called the roll, just as it was in the Johnson, Nixon and Clinton eras, but the divisions were surely widened by the time the gavel came down.
当然，在书记员唱票前，这个国家早就已经被拆散了，就像约翰逊、尼克松和克林顿时代一样，然而随着木槌的落下，分歧肯定已经扩大了。
In Johnson’s case, his impeachment in 1868 was not really about his decision to fire his war secretary in violation of a later-overturned law but about what kind of country would emerge from the Civil War. A Southern white supremacist who ascended to the White House after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson wanted to ease the Confederate states back into the Union with little change while his Radical Republican opponents sought a new order guaranteeing equal rights for freed slaves.
以约翰逊为例，1868年对他的弹劾实际上不是因为他解雇战争部长的决定违反了一条后来被撤销的法律，而是关于南北战争将会产生什么样的国家。约翰逊是一个南方的白人至上主义者，在亚伯拉罕·林肯遇刺后入主白宫，他想在不做什么改变的情况下让联盟国慢慢回到联邦，而他的激进共和党反对者寻求一种新秩序，确保得到自由的奴隶有平等权利。
More than a century later, Nixon’s near-impeachment in 1974 was the climax of a decade of social upheaval — the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, women’s liberation, the sexual revolution and finally the Watergate scandal. With the country roiling, Nixon resigned before the House could vote on articles of impeachment.
一个多世纪之后，尼克松在1974年险些遭到的弹劾是十年社会动荡的高潮——约翰·F·肯尼迪(Robert F. Kennedy)、罗伯特·F·肯尼迪(Robert F. Kennedy)和马丁·路德·金(Martin Luther King Jr.)牧师遭暗杀、民权运动、越南战争、女性解放、性革命，最后是水门事件。随着国家动荡，尼克松在众议院就弹劾条款进行投票之前辞职。
Mr. Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 came in a time of peace and prosperity, but it was nonetheless a moment of transition when the first baby boomer had arrived in the White House along with a history of philandering, drug use and draft avoidance that offended traditionalists. The emergence of Speaker Newt Gingrich’s take-no-prisoners Republicans coincided with the opening of the internet era that would eventually Balkanize America.
1998年对克林顿的弹劾是在一个和平与繁荣的时期，然而也是一个过渡时期，第一个属于婴儿潮一代的人入主白宫，随之而来的是令传统主义者不满的玩弄女性、吸毒和逃避兵役。像议长纽特·金里奇(Newt Gingrich)那样赶尽杀绝的共和党人的出现正赶上互联网时代的开端，最终使美国分裂。
“It may be that impeachment is a fairly blunt instrument for dealing with periods of intense partisan division,” said Eric Foner, the noted Reconstruction historian whose latest book, “The Second Founding,” was published this fall. “In a way, we’re in another moment where the fundamentals of the system are being fought over, not just whether the president stays.”
“应对激烈的党派分裂时期，也许弹劾是一种相当直接的手段，”研究重建时期的历史学家埃里克·方纳(Eric Foner)说。他的新书《第二次建国》(The Second Founding)于今年秋天出版。“从某种意义上说，我们正在就体制的根本展开斗争，而不仅仅是关乎总统去留。”
Mr. Trump’s improbable rise to power reflects a transformation of American politics, with separate narratives fueled by separate news media.
特朗普不可思议的政治崛起反映了美国政治的转变，不同的新闻媒体推动了不同的叙述。
For some, his election was the revolt of everyday people against coastal elites, what Mr. Winik called “the age of the forgotten man.” Empowering a rich showman to take on the system, they made him the first president in American history without a day of experience in either government or the military, gambling that he could do what most or all of his 44 predecessors had not.
对于某些人来说，他的当选是普通人对沿海地区精英阶层的反抗，即威尼克所说的“被遗忘者的时代”。他们将权力赋予一个爱作秀的富人，让他去挑战体制，使他成为美国历史上第一个没有任何政府或军队经验的总统，赌他能做的比44位前任中的大多数或全部都要好。
“We may have been overdue for some reconsideration of the whole political system,” said John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale. “There are times when the vision is not going to come from within the system and the vision is going to come from outside the system. And maybe this is one of those times.”
”我们可能早就该重新考虑整个政治体制了，”耶鲁大学历史学家约翰·刘易斯·加迪斯(John Lewis Gaddis)说。“有时候这种构想不会出现在体制内，而是来自体制外。也许现在就是这样的时代之一。”