2025-11-03
30 分钟This is The Guardian.
Welcome to The Guardian Long Read,
showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.
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A Chinese journalist on the U.S.
under Trump by Lauren Hilgers.
Read by Jinia Cheng.
On a Friday night in late May, Wang Zhen was getting ready to broadcast.
It was pouring outside and he was sitting in the garage apartment behind his house just outside Boston,
eating dinner.
I am very sensitive to what Trump does, Wang was telling me in Mandarin, waving a fork.
When Trump holds a cabinet meeting, he sits there, and the people next to him start to flatter him.
And I think, isn't this the same as Mao Zedong?
Trump sells the same thing, a little bit of populism,
plus a little bit of small-town shrewdness, plus a little bit of, I have money.
Wang was sitting next to a rack of clothing,
the shirts and jackets the 58-year-old newsman wears professionally,
and sipping a seemingly bottomless cup of green tea that would eventually give way to coffee.
By 11 p.m., he would walk across the room and snap on a set of ring lights,
ready to carry on an unbroken string of chatter for a YouTube news program that he calls Wang Zhan's Daily Observations.