【中美创新时报2024 年 6 月 13 日编译讯】（记者温友平编译）这一刻终于来了。周二（11日）上午晚些时候，在共和党首次追捕亨特·拜登近五年后，总统的儿子终于可以被称为被定罪的重罪犯了。《纽约时报》记者乔纳森·斯旺（Jonathan Swan）、玛吉·哈伯曼（Maggie Haberman）和迈克尔·戈尔德（Michael Gold）对此作了下述报道。
但唐纳德·特朗普和其他共和党人似乎并不热衷于这个机会。陪审团对亨特·拜登三项重罪枪支指控的有罪判决的早期反应就像一个萎缩的气球。
“坦白说，亨特·拜登的枪支定罪有点愚蠢，”特朗普的一位亲密盟友、佛罗里达州众议员马特·盖茨在社交平台 X 上的一篇帖子中说道，他使用了“说实话”的缩写。另一位特朗普的助手查理·柯克 (Charlie Kirk) 称这是一场“假审判”。
许多特朗普的盟友一直在暗中支持无罪释放。谈话要点不言而喻：这将是美国司法系统被操纵以偏袒拜登家族、反对特朗普家族的更多证据。周二的有罪判决对这一说法不利。
一位了解特朗普竞选筹款计划的匿名人士表示，他们曾讨论过无罪释放对特朗普有多大帮助，可能会筹集数千万美元的额外资金，因为他们计划将其作为司法系统被操纵的更多证据。这位人士说，在特朗普在曼哈顿被判 34 项重罪后，他的竞选团队在网上筹集了创纪录的资金，他的一些顾问意识到，拜登儿子的无罪释放有可能为特朗普筹集比定罪更多的现金。
包括特朗普竞选团队在内的知名共和党人立即淡化了这三项重罪枪支指控，抱怨称这些指控将公众的注意力从他们声称拜登总统犯下的未指明的罪行和他们坚称仍高度两级化的司法系统上转移开。
特朗普阵营的第一反应并非直接来自特朗普本人，这说明了很多问题，在判决结果公布数小时后，特朗普本人仍未就判决发表任何言论。相反，他的竞选团队发表了一份声明，称定罪是一种“干扰”。
特朗普竞选团队的全国新闻秘书卡罗琳·莱维特 (Karoline Leavitt) 表示：“这场审判只不过是转移了人们对拜登犯罪家族真正罪行的注意力，该家族从中国、俄罗斯和乌克兰攫取了数千万美元。骗子乔·拜登对拜登家族犯罪帝国的统治将于 11 月 5 日结束，拜登家族再也不会出卖政府渠道以谋取私利。”
总统尚未受到犯罪指控，众议院共和党领导层也放弃了弹劾拜登的努力，因为有太多共和党人认为他们缺乏足以弹劾的不法行为证据。亨特·拜登将于 9 月再次接受审判，他被控 9 项罪名，罪名是 2016 年至 2019 年未缴纳 140 万美元的税款。
据接近这位前总统的人士称，在这一切背后，曾在 2020 年大选中猛烈攻击亨特·拜登的特朗普现在改变了主意，认为这样做的政治价值至少在小拜登的个人问题上是如此。
据一位不愿透露姓名的出席会议的人士描述私人谈话内容时透露，在去年的一次会议上，特朗普私下向一位同事承认，对总统儿子的攻击可能会在政治上产生适得其反的效果。这位知情人士说，特朗普表示共和党人需要小心，“不要在亨特·拜登的攻击上做得过火”，特别是在吸毒问题上，因为这可能会引起同情，让人们把总统看作一个有爱心的父亲。
特朗普今天谈论亨特·拜登案的方式与他在 2020 年谈论他所谓的“来自地狱的笔记本电脑”的方式截然不同。
在 2020 年 9 月的第一次总统辩论中，特朗普直接攻击总统的儿子吸毒。
“亨特被赶出了军队，”特朗普在辩论中说。“他因吸食可卡因而被开除，不光彩地退伍。”
他的攻击在技术上并不属实。总统的儿子在可卡因检测呈阳性后被美国海军预备役行政开除——而不是不光彩地开除。但不管真假，这次攻击被广泛视为政治误导。这让拜登有机会在辩论舞台上与特朗普并肩作战，与数百万在电视上观看的、认识受毒品影响的人的美国人产生情感共鸣。
拜登说：“我的儿子和很多人一样，像你认识的很多人一样，都曾有过吸毒问题。他已经克服了，他已经解决了，他一直在努力，我为他感到骄傲。”
特朗普似乎从那次经历中吸取了政治教训。现在，他有时会以同情的态度来引导人们了解毒瘾的困境和他自己家庭的经历，包括最近接受福克斯新闻肖恩·汉尼提的采访。
“我有一个哥哥，他因酗酒和酒精而遭受了巨大的痛苦，”特朗普告诉汉尼提，他的哥哥小弗雷德·特朗普经常将自己不喝酒的原因归功于他与毒瘾的斗争。“看他喝酒真是一件可怕的事情。他是一个不可思议的人，性格很好。他是你见过的最帅的人。一切都很完美。但他有瘾。所以我理解瘾。”
本文最初发表于《纽约时报》。
题图：周二，总统乔·拜登（左）与儿子亨特在特拉华州纽卡斯尔的特拉华空军国民警卫队基地合影。MANUEL BALCE CENETA/美联社
附原英文报道：
Hunter Biden conviction undercuts a Trump narrative, and a fund-raising pitch
By Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Michael Gold New York Times,Updated June 12, 2024
The moment had finally come. Late Tuesday morning, nearly five years after Republicans first went after Hunter Biden, the president’s son could finally be called a convicted felon.
But Donald Trump and other Republicans did not seem to be relishing the opportunity. The early reaction to a jury’s guilty verdict against Hunter Biden on three felony gun charges resembled a shriveling balloon.
“The Hunter Biden gun conviction is kinda dumb tbh,” said one close Trump ally, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, in a post on the social platform X, using an abbreviation for “to be honest.” Another Trump associate, Charlie Kirk, called it a “fake trial.”
Many Trump allies had been secretly rooting for an acquittal. The talking points wrote themselves: It would have been yet more evidence that the US justice system was rigged in favor of the Bidens and against the Trumps. Tuesday’s guilty verdict was inconvenient to that narrative.
A person with knowledge of the Trump campaign’s fund-raising plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said there had been discussions about how much an acquittal would help Trump, potentially raising tens of millions of additional dollars as they planned to cite it as more evidence the justice system was rigged. After Trump was convicted in Manhattan on 34 felony counts, his campaign raised record sums online, and some of his advisers recognized that an acquittal of Biden’s son had the potential to raise Trump far more cash than a conviction, the person said.
Prominent Republicans, including those in the Trump campaign, immediately minimized the three felony gun charges, complaining that the charges steered public attention away from unspecified crimes that they claimed President Biden has committed and a justice system that they insisted was still very much two-tiered.
It spoke volumes that the first reaction from the Trump camp did not come directly from Trump himself, who had still not posted a word about the verdict hours after it landed. Instead, his campaign issued a statement that described the conviction as a “distraction.”
“This trial has been nothing more than a distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family, which has raked in tens of millions of dollars from China, Russia, and Ukraine,” said Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary. “Crooked Joe Biden’s reign over the Biden Family Criminal Empire is all coming to an end on November 5, and never again will a Biden sell government access for personal profit.”
The president has not been charged with crimes, and House Republican leadership abandoned its effort to impeach Biden after it became clear that too many Republicans thought they lacked evidence of wrongdoing sufficient to impeach. Hunter Biden is facing another trial in September, on nine charges stemming from failure to pay $1.4 million in taxes from 2016 through 2019.
Behind all this, Trump, who aggressively attacked Hunter Biden in the 2020 election, has changed his mind about the political value of doing so now, at least over the younger Biden’s personal issues, according to people close to the former president.
In a meeting last year, Trump acknowledged privately to an associate that attacks against the president’s son had the potential to backfire politically, according to a person who attended the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation. Trump said Republicans needed to be careful, the person said, “not to go overboard” on the Hunter Biden attacks, especially on the drug addiction issue, because it could elicit sympathy and make people view the president as a caring father.
The way Trump speaks today about the Hunter Biden case is markedly different from his drumbeat over what he called “the laptop from hell” in 2020.
In their first presidential debate, in September 2020, Trump directly attacked the president’s son over his drug use.
“Hunter got thrown out of the military,” Trump said at the debate. “He was thrown out, dishonorably discharged, for cocaine use.”
His attack wasn’t technically true. The president’s son had received an administrative discharge from the US Navy Reserve — not a dishonorable discharge — after he tested positive for cocaine. But true or not, the attack was widely seen as politically misguided. It gave Biden an opportunity to stand beside Trump on the debate stage and connect emotionally with millions of Americans watching on television who knew somebody affected by drugs.
“My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem,” Biden said. “He’s overtaken it, he’s fixed it, he’s worked on it, and I’m proud of him.”
Trump appears to have learned a political lesson from that experience. Now, he sometimes leads with empathy about the plight of addiction and his own family experience with it, including in a recent interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News.
“I had a brother who suffered tremendously from alcoholism and alcohol,” Trump told Hannity of his older brother, Fred Trump Jr., whose fight with addiction Trump often credits for why he himself does not drink. “And it was a terrible thing to watch. He was an incredible guy with the best personality. He was the best-looking person you have ever seen. Everything was perfect. But he had an addiction. And so I understand addiction.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
