2026, the year of living dangerously.

The era Trump ushered in a year ago is a ‘blitzkrieg’ of greed and inhumanity. The MAGA hat-wearing hordes thought this was gonna be to their benefit because they were blinded by their own racism.

The phrase ‘Make America Great Again’ was interpreted by Trump as ‘Make Me Great Again.’ While the rest of us could see Trump for the malignant narcissist he actually is, those who voted for him celebrated his victory. There’s an old English proverb that goes: ‘There’s none so blind as those who don’t wanna see and none so deaf as those who don’t wanna hear.’

We should all know how the trick of populism works:

Identify an emotive issue with the potential to divide people, (racism); blame immigrants for all the problems of the country so that society is divided into two opposing groups; encourage the group who support you to blame the other group as well as the immigrants for all the country’s problems; now get away with everything you want, knowing the people cannot unite against you.

This and other tricks are the tools of Trump’s trade.

The Democrats are also to blame, they have failed to stop the rise of the billionaires and the power of their technology and it is those billionaires whohave condemned working Americans to a worsening daily struggle, not their brown-skinned neighbours.

But all is not lost; what goes around, comes around. Trump’s popularity has fallen off a cliff. More and more of the MAGA crowd are opening their eyes and ears. So are the more moderate Republicans, including many in high positions in the administration.

The tech billionaires will try to keep Trump, as he's provided them with enormous benefits, but 2026 will be a battle between those billionaires and the vast majority of the American people, who must now see that populism is a trick and the way to defeat it is not by tolerating the intolerable, but by standing against it, by accepting and appreciating cultural diversity and promoting unity. Of course, we are all different, but we are also all the same.

By now you're probably thinking I'm a socialist, but the old argument between capitalism and socialism was settled decades ago and socialism lost because it couldn't accept that so many people want to spend their lives making money. The modern argument is between regulated and unregulated capitalism and should it be obvious that under Trump, that argument too, is in danger of being lost.

Right now unregulated capitalism is turning America into a land where incredible wealth has control over deprived and impoverished millions. No economy can survive this. Right now America is moving in two directions at once; the trump billionaires are moving farther to the extreme right but ordinary Americans are waking up to the danger.

Let's hope they continue to do so and 2026 is remembered as the year Americans and Europeans woke up to the treachery of right wing populism.