This was the year Donald Trump returned triumphantly to the White House, bathed himself in praise, bent US institutions to his will, bullied America’s allies and sucked up to its enemies.
He accumulated political power and personal wealth at a clip, yet ended up looking smaller, pettier and diminished in stature. Trump’s “shock and awe” presidency looks more beatable by the day.
A quiet, decent America remains beneath the brutish invective of the Make America Great Again movement. But will it survive another three years of Trump’s executive overreach?
Even at Christmas, Trump couldn’t resist putting himself front and centre of the narrative. He, or more plausibly, his staff churned out nearly 150 social media tirades. This bilge continued to be pumped out while he was tucking into dinner with Melania and his father-in-law at Mar-a-Lago.
Not a day can slip past in Trumpworld without the President ranting about “Radical Left Scum”, fuming about the unfairnessness of his 2020 election defeat, or raging against his entanglement in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, his current obsession.
And, as a gift to his Christian evangelical supporters, he announced a wave of US military strikes on “Isis Terrorist Scum” in north-west Nigeria, which concluded festively with: “MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead terrorists.”
Trump chronicler Michael Wolff observed on the Daily Beast podcast: “It’s really more helpful to think of him in terms of being an actor than in terms of being a politician… in his courtship of the audience, in his own egomania, in his desire for attention.”
This is true. But it also underplays the real-world havoc unleashed by Trump the politician.
The latest person to be caught in his crosshairs is Imran Ahmed, who worked formerly for centre-left Labour politicians in Britain, and runs the US and UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate.
In microcosm, what is happening to Ahmed is representative of Trump’s macro-ambitions for the US in 2026.
Ahmed is one of five European nationals to be targeted by the Trump administration for their work tackling misinformation on tech platforms, but is the only one to hold a green card and live in America as a permanent resident. He is now threatened with deportation, while the other four, including Clare Melford, co-founder of the Global Disinformation Index, have been banned from entering the US for being part of a “global censorship-industrial complex”.
Announcing the policy, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of exterritorial censorship.”
The hypocrisy of silencing alleged censors of free speech is obvious but irrelevant as far as Maga is concerned. Trump acolytes regard “cancel culture” as a purely left-wing phenomenon and delight in censoring any person or views they dislike.
This, moreover, is a personal crusade for the US President, who set up his own Truth Social platform after being barred by Twitter and Facebook for inciting the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, and spreading election disinformation of the kind he was merrily able to regurgitate on Christmas Day.
The tech bros famously made their peace with him and turned up to pay homage (and donate to his coffers) at his second inauguration in January 2025, enabling his present revenge tour.
One of Ahmed’s biggest sins, as far as Trumpworld is concerned, is that he analysed the extent to which hate speech had multiplied on Twitter (now renamed X) after Elon Musk purchased the platform in 2022.
Musk sued, but a judge threw out his case and said it was “evident” the tech mogul did not like criticism.
It is impossible to overstate the role of Musk in dismantling the apparatus of the federal government at the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). This was disbanded in July, but the process of replacing federal employees with Trumpian acolytes will accelerate in 2026.
Ahmed’s scalp is Musk’s reward for services rendered to the President. Despite this, Ahmed chalked up a temporary legal victory in the early hours of Boxing Day morning when a judge halted the government from “arresting or detaining” him and scheduled a hearing of his case for Monday.
Ahmed said: “I will not be bullied away from my life’s work of fighting to keep children safe from social media’s harm and stopping antisemitism online.”
It is possible that the law will sustain his right to remain in the US. But his case goes beyond the threat posed by Trump to the First Amendment of the US constitution upholding free speech, important though that is to US democracy.
Ahmed’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said: “The federal government can’t deport a green card holder like Imran Ahmed, with a wife and young child who are American, simply because it doesn’t like what he has to say.”
But Trump is determined to alter the definition of who has the right to belong in the US. Green card holders, who used to be treated as quasi-US citizens, are now considered almost as disposable as illegal immigrants if the government doesn’t like their views.
If 2025 has been a year of mass deportations (over 600,000 according to the Department of Homeland Security), 2026 will be the year when the Supreme Court decides on birthright citizenship – the right of children born in America to be US citizens.
A change in this status could fundamentally alter the character of the United States. The new buzzphrase on the right is “Heritage Americans”, which has been held by some to mean Americans who can trace their lineage to the Civil War but is really code for favouring white Americans.
For instance, I can trace my lineage on my grandfather’s side to the Civil War but Trump can’t (he has more recent German-Scottish ancestry). I don’t think Maga believes that makes me, a dual national, more American than the President.
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As for Ahmed’s wife and child, Trump supporters think they should follow him out of America.
There is comfort to be had in Trump’s dwindling approval ratings and the prospect of a bloody nose for Republicans in the mid-term elections next year.
But if Ahmed is deported, Trump will have succeeded in redefining the meaning of free speech and the status of legal immigrants in the US, all while indulging the world’s richest man. This is the direction America is travelling in 2026.
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