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2024年美国总统竞选的一个显著特点是新闻热点的快速更新。仅仅两周前，有人企图刺杀唐纳德•特朗普(Donald Trump)，当时人们预计这一事件会主导并“重塑”竞选。然而，之后选举新闻的数量之多使得那件事似乎成为了遥远的记忆。事实上，在过去的一周里，“特朗普枪击事件”(Trump shooting)在美国的网络搜索量已被另一个关键词超过： “J•D•万斯沙发(JD Vance couch)”。
One of the manifold remarkable aspects of the 2024 US presidential race is how quickly the news cycle moves on. Just over two weeks ago, an assassination attempt was made on Donald Trump — an episode that was expected to dominate and “reshape” the race. And yet the sheer volume of election news since then has made this feel like a distant memory. Indeed, in the past week, the number of Americans looking up “Trump shooting” online has been eclipsed by the number putting another search term into Google: “JD Vance couch”.
这次搜索与一则谣言有关，谣言称特朗普的竞选搭档万斯在他的畅销回忆录《乡下人的悲歌》(Hillbilly Elegy)中承认自己曾与一张沙发发生性关系——尽管这则谣言毫无根据，但被大家疯狂玩梗。然而，虽然这不能怪罪于万斯，但一系列错误判断、说错话和让人非常尴尬的表现却是他自己的锅。这些因素结合在一起，使得这位俄亥俄州参议员在社交媒体上被持续群嘲。
The search relates to a rumour that Vance, Trump’s running mate, had confessed to having sex with a couch in the pages of his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy — a rumour that, while utterly baseless, has been seized upon by meme makers. But while this is hard to blame on Vance, a series of misjudgments, blunders and a strong cringe factor are not. And those have combined to keep the senator from Ohio trending on social media for all the wrong reasons.
在过去的一周左右，万斯多次尝试向大家展示他是一个你容易产生好感的人，幽默风趣，换句话说，就像另一个特朗普。问题是他似乎做不到。特朗普天生幽默，万斯则不是。而且不知为什么，尽管特朗普生来衣食无忧，而万斯出生在一个贫困家庭，母亲吸毒，却是特朗普显得能与普通百姓打成一片——至少是对他的支持者而言。
Vance has made several attempts, over the past week or so, to come across as a likeable kinda guy who can crack jokes and make people laugh — a guy like Trump, in other words. The problem is that he can’t seem to pull it off. Trump is naturally very funny; Vance is not. And somehow, despite the fact that the former was born into a life of privilege while Vance was born in an impoverished home to a drug-addict mother, it is Trump who manages to come across, to his supporters at least, as a man of the people.
上周一，在他的家乡俄亥俄州米德尔敦的一次集会上，万斯开了个很怪的玩笑，他说他喝激浪轻怡(Diet Mountain Dew)，民主党人很可能会说喝激浪轻怡是种族主义。伴随着稀稀拉拉的笑声，他说：“它是好东西！”然后假笑（假得让人很尴尬）了一下，模仿特朗普的样子朝人群指了指，说：“我爱你们。”
Last Monday, at a rally in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, Vance made a weird crack about how Democrats would probably call the fact that he drinks Diet Mountain Dew racist. “It’s good!” he said as a few members of the crowd laughed halfheartedly, before doing a very awkward faux laugh and pointing his finger at the crowd Trumpily with an “I love you guys”.
把那场演讲中的尴尬片段剪在一起的一支视频被疯转，弗吉尼亚州集会后台的一支意外搞笑的视频也是如此。在视频中，万斯整理了一大堆垃圾（包括激浪轻怡瓶子），然后像《办公室》(The Office)中的迈克尔•斯科特(Michael Scott)那样对着摄像机说：“如果我吃了这些东西的一半，我都当然会像吹气球一样胖起来”，然后请求大家为他的竞选活动捐款。
A montage of awkward moments from the speech was shared widely, as was an accidentally hilarious video of Vance backstage at a rally in Virginia. In the clip, Vance goes through the “ton of crap” (including bottles of Diet Mountain Dew) that had been laid out for him to eat and drink before saying to camera, in distinctly Michael-Scott-from-The-Office fashion, “If I ate even half this stuff of course I’d balloon up like crazy,” and then asking for campaign donations.
特朗普永远不会这样做。万斯可能是千禧一代，但更加了解影像和互联网运作方式的却是那位婴儿潮一代的前总统——也许是因为他与电视界的渊源和对电视的喜爱。特朗普经常发表非常冗长而杂乱无章的演讲——我听了他2022年宣布再次竞选总统的演讲，许多超级粉丝都没听完就想走——但他明白，真正会被数百万人观看的是那些剪辑和金句，并且只有这些才真正重要。
Trump would never. Vance might be the millennial, but it is the boomer former president — perhaps because of his background in and affection for television — who has a better sense of how the moving image and the internet work. Trump often gives incredibly long and rambling speeches — I was in the crowd in 2022 when he announced he would run for the presidency again and many superfans were trying to leave before he’d finished — but he understands that it is the clips and soundbites that will be watched by millions of people and that only they really count.
特朗普对合理否认的魔力也有着敏锐的把握。万斯在2021年上电视时发表了针对不生孩子喜欢猫的“猫娘”的言论，并在社交媒体上再次发表了同样的言论，而特朗普则往往更加狡猾。他使用诸如“很多人都在说”或“我一直听说”之类的词语，以便让自己与冒犯性评论保持一定的距离，并通过肢体语言来传达他真正的意思。
Trump also has a keen grasp on the magic of plausible deniability. While Vance went on television in 2021 to rally against childless “cat ladies” — and doubled down by posting the same phrase on social media — Trump often tends to be more cunning. He deploys phrases like “a lot of people are saying” or “I’ve been hearing” in order to put some distance between himself and an offensive comment, and uses body language to signal what he really means.
“他说的话有一个剧本，但他对人们表达出来的意思还有一个元剧本，”科罗拉多大学博尔德分校(University of Colorado Boulder)的人类学家、2016年一篇关于特朗普娱乐价值的论文的合著者唐娜•戈尔德斯坦(Donna Goldstein)告诉我，“其中的重要内容涉及欺凌他人，但都是以小丑般的姿势完成的……他经常用几个手势来表达他想说的最后一句话，而手势有很大的诠释空间，这样他就可以逃脱责罚。”
“There’s a script of what he’s saying, but then there’s also a meta script of what it means to people,” Donna Goldstein, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and co-author of a 2016 paper on Trump’s entertainment value, tells me. “A lot of it has to do with bullying other people, but it’s all done in this clownish, gesture-ish way . . . He often just gestures the final sentence, which is then highly interpretable, and so he’s off the hook.”
万斯还有一个特朗普所没有的问题：他有一个真正的意识形态。例如，特朗普在堕胎问题上多次改变立场；而万斯公开呼吁全国禁止堕胎。特朗普开始呼吁团结，而万斯谈论“完全用另一个统治阶级来取代现有的统治阶级”、需要“推翻现在实际控制这个国家的人”。
Vance has a further problem that Trump doesn’t share: he has a real ideology. Trump has changed his position on abortion many times, for instance; Vance has openly called for a national ban. While Trump has started calling for unity, Vance talks about “completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class” and the need to “overthrow” the “people who currently actually control the country”.
万斯说的东西太严肃了，听众不能轻易地以“他只不过在开玩笑”——这句话是我经常从特朗普支持者口中听到的——的方式将这些话打发掉。他缺乏特朗普的魅力、自信和喜感，也缺乏特朗普风格中常常被低估的含蓄。如果前总统想要一个能很好地衬托他光芒的竞选伙伴，万斯是一个很好的选择。
Vance is too serious for listeners to brush off his comments with an “oh he’s only joking” — something I often hear from Trump’s supporters. He lacks Trump’s charisma, confidence and comedy value, and he also lacks the subtlety of Trump’s style, which is often under-appreciated. If the former president wanted a running mate who would make him shine, Vance was a great pick.