Better late than never. It took eight months for Republicans to wake up to the fact that Donald Trump could make off with the party’s crown. After Marco Rubio’s clinical attacks on Mr Trump last week, the airwaves are suddenly awash with anti-Trump attack ads. But they are almost certainly too late to stop him. That task will fall to Hillary Clinton. It promises to be a spectacle unlike anything we have seen. America should brace for the strangest contest in its presidential history.

迟做总比不做好。共和党人用了8个月时间才幡然醒悟：唐纳德礠朗普(Donald Trump)可能最终赢得共和党总统候选人资格。在上周马可脠比奥(Marco Rubio)有理有据地抨击特朗普后，媒体突然开始充斥攻击特朗普的竞选广告。但几乎可以肯定的是，阻止特朗普为时已晚。这项任务将落在希拉里克林顿(Hillary Clinton)身上。这必将是一场我们从未见过的奇观。美国人应为本国总统制历史上最奇特的一场竞选做好准备。

All things being equal, the outcome should not be in doubt — Mrs Clinton’s victory. Yet there is nothing remotely equal about America in 2016. All that is solid is melting into air. It was not just the Republicans who misread the Trump threat. Just three months ago, Nate Silver, the guru of election forecasters, stuck to his earlier prediction that Mr Trump had only a 2 per cent chance of taking the Republican nomination. He now puts that at 45 to 50 per cent. That still seems too low.

不出意外的话，结果将毋庸置疑——希拉里获得胜选。然而，在2016年的美国，一切都在变。不只是共和党未能识破特朗普的威胁。就在3个月前，选举预测大师纳特缠尔弗(Nate Silver)还坚持自己早些时候的预测——特朗普赢得共和党总统候选人提名的几率只有2%。如今，他将这一几率提升至45%至50%。这看起来仍然过低。

The bookies, meanwhile, give Mr Trump a one in four chance of becoming the next US president. That may also be too low.

与此同时，博彩公司认为特朗普成为下届美国总统的几率为25%。或许同样过低。

How could he pull it off? The demography is stacked against him. As a rule of thumb, Democrats are assured of victory if they take 80 per cent of the non-white vote and 40 per cent of the white vote. The first part ought to be easy. Hispanics, African-Americans, Muslims and others will come out in droves to vote against Mr Trump.

他是怎样做到的呢？人口结构因素对他并不利。根据经验判断，如果民主党能获得非白种人80%的选票以及白人40%的选票，就确定能够获胜。获得第一部分选票应该不难。拉美裔、非洲裔美国人、穆斯林及其他族群将成群结队地投票反对特朗普。

It is the white vote — and particularly white males — that ought to worry Mrs Clinton. Blue collar whites are America’s angriest people. They feel belittled, trod upon and discarded. The future belongs neither to them nor their children. Mrs Clinton personifies an establishment that has taken everything for itself while talking down to those it has left behind. Mr Trump is their revenge.

应该让希拉里担忧的是白人的选票——尤其是白人男性。蓝领白人是美国最愤怒的群体。他们感觉自己被轻视、被践踏、被抛弃。未来既不属于他们，也不属于他们的后代。希拉里代表着自私自利、不把被抛在后面的人放在眼里的当权派。选择特朗普可以让他们雪耻。

His greatest weakness is that he has no policies. As Mr Rubio exposed in last week’s debate, the New York property developer has little clue what healthcare system he would substitute for Obamacare, which he promises to abolish. Nor does he have an idea how his tax plan would work.

特朗普最大的弱点在于他拿不出任何政策。正如鲁比奥在上周的辩论中所言，这名纽约房地产大亨根本不知道将用怎样的医保体系来取代他承诺要废除的“奥巴马医改”(Obamacare)。他也不知道自己的税收计划要如何开展。

Much like estimates of his personal wealth, Mr Trump’s tax cut would be huge — at $10tn it is far larger than anyone else’s. That is about it. The same applies to his plans to bring peace to the Middle East. He merely asserts that he would be the best deal maker the region has ever seen. The only subject on which Mr Trump speaks with any detail or fluency is his poll numbers, which he rattles off like a caffeinated auctioneer.

就像对他个人财富的估值一样，特朗普的减税幅度将是巨大的——10万亿美元，远远大于任何其他参选人的方案。除此之外就什么也没说了。他为中东带来和平的计划也是如此。他只是断言自己将成为该地区有史以来最佳的调停者。特朗普唯一能够详细或流畅谈论的主题就是自己的民意支持率——他可以像一位打了鸡血的拍卖师一样滔滔不绝。

But not having policies is also Mr Trump’s greatest strength. It makes him nimble. He can discard whatever Republican orthodoxy he felt obliged to adopt and pivot to Mrs Clinton’s left in a general election. If you want to take on Wall Street — something the country is itching to do — vote for the man who has continually outwitted the banks in his bankruptcy-ridden career. While Mrs Clinton was giving $225,000 speeches to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — transcripts that she still refuses to release, by the way — Mr Trump was imposing haircuts on his creditors. Mr Trump may be a “con artist”, as Mr Rubio is belatedly pointing out. But he knows how to make a deal. He also knows what America’s middle classes want to hear. Mr Trump will protect their entitlements, scale down costly overseas military bases and revamp trade deals with China, Mexico and others.

但是，没有具体政策也是特朗普最大的优势。这让他表现得灵活。他可以抛弃自己认为根据共和党传统立场必须接受的任何观点，并在大选中偏向希拉里的左派观点。如果你想拿华尔街开刀——全美国都渴望这么做——那么就把票投给这个在从事破产业务的职业生涯中智胜银行的人吧。尽管希拉里曾收取22.5万美元在高盛(Goldman Sachs)和摩根士丹利(Morgan Stanley)发表演讲——顺便说一下，她仍拒对外界公开演讲稿——而特朗普则迫使他的债权人进行资产减记。正如鲁比奥（说得太晚了）指出的那样，特朗普或许是一个“行骗高手”。但他知道如何做成交易。他也知道美国的中产阶层想听什么。特朗普将保护他们的权利，减少代价高昂的海外军事基地，并修改与中国和墨西哥等国的贸易协议。

The chances are that Mr Trump would still lose in a landslide to Mrs Clinton. Over the coming days and weeks, Republican-affiliated funding groups will air advertisements that feature the victims of Trump Inc. These will include people who paid $35,000 to study real estate management at Trump University only to discover it was not what it was cracked up to be. They will feature Americans who tried to find work at Mr Trump’s luxury Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida only to discover the jobs had been taken by imported Romanians. They will also include victims of Mr Trump’s ruthless use of eminent domain — the power of the state to compel people to sell land needed for public projects — to evict people unlucky enough to be living near one of his casinos.

特朗普可能惨败给希拉里。在未来的几天和几周里，支持共和党的募资团体将发布以“特朗普公司”(Trump Inc)受害者为主题的广告。其中包括那些支付3.5万美元在“特朗普大学”(Trump University)学习不动产管理的人——他们最终发现教学水平根本达不到该校自吹自擂的水平。广告中还将出现那些尝试在特朗普在佛罗里达州的马阿拉歌俱乐部(Mar-a-Lago)度假胜地找份工作的人——他们最终发现工作岗位都给了外来的俄罗斯人。也将出现特朗普鲁莽使用征地权的受害者——不幸的是，他们居住的地方距离特朗普所经营的俱乐部太近了。征地权是指州政府为建设公共工程而强迫民众卖地的权力。

You can bet that white victims will feature prominently. Look at how Mr Trump treats the little guy, they will say. His campaign is a fraud.

你可以断定，白人受害者将是这些广告中的重要角色。他们将说，看看特朗普是如何对待这个“小家伙”的。他的竞选充满欺骗。

All of which may be true. But they are almost certainly too late to stop Mr Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican party. Mrs Clinton, on the other hand, has plenty of time to acquaint voters with Mr Trump’s biography before the general election. Do not expect her to hold back. She will mercilessly expose his thin grasp of policy. He does not even know what a “nuclear triad” is for goodness sake. He believes global warming is a hoax dreamt up by China to con America into shutting down its manufacturing. He thinks that Mexico will pay for a wall to keep Mexicans out.

所有这一切或许是真的。但是，他们要阻止特朗普“敌意收购”共和党，几乎注定是太迟了。另一方面，在大选之前，希拉里有足够的时间让选民了解特朗普的生平。不要指望她会有所保留。她将无情地暴露特朗普不懂政策的形象。天啊，他竟然连“三位一体核力量”都不知道。他认为，全球变暖是中国捏造的一个骗局，意在哄骗美国关闭自己的工厂。他觉得，墨西哥应该出钱造一面墙，把墨西哥人挡在美国外面。

When it boils down to it, most Americans would not want such a person in the White House — or so believe the best and the brightest. A Trump presidency is too preposterous to imagine, they say. They may be right on that. But so far in this cycle they have been wrong about everything else. Should we put faith in their judgment now?

总之，大多数美国人不会希望这样的人入主白宫——或者说，最优秀、最聪明的美国人是这么认为的。他们说，让特朗普当总统太荒谬了。他们在这一点上或许是对的。但在这个竞选周期中，迄今为止，他们在其他方面的看法都是错误的。那么，我们现在应该相信他们的判断吗？