Lise Hand: It's been a bad decade. I blame Donald Trump and David Bowie

IF EVER THERE was a sign of the times that are in it, surely it’s the fact that Halloween is now regarded as a welcome escape from reality. Festooning one’s living quarters, one’s children, pets and, most of all, one’s own person in blood, axes, cobwebs, claws and skulls to resemble ghouls, skeletons, witches, zombies and assorted undead monsters is a relaxing and fun activity – that is, a far less frightful activity than doomscrolling on antisocial media or tuning into Morning Ireland.

To be honest, really all one had to do for the scary season this time was throw on a white sheet upon which are scrawled the dates ‘2016-2026’ and then observe the colour drain from everybody’s faces.

If – and it feels increasingly like a bloody big if – humanity crawls out of the smoking rubble of the 21st century more or less intact, we’ll wonder how the hell we made it.

So far, and granted there’s a long way to go, this century hasn’t really covered itself in glory.

It more or less kicked off with the horror of 9/11 and the ensuing wars, followed a few years later by the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami in 2005 and a few years after that by a global financial meltdown and pan-continental banking collapse.

Yet somehow the past decade in particular has felt utterly exhausting, a relentless never-ending carousel of crises, chaos and conflicts, ten long years of just one damn thing after another.

2016 was the start of a bad decade

Personally, I blame two people: David Bowie and Donald Trump.

It’s been said before, but it’s an undeniable fact that the Decade of Doom officially kicked off when David Bowie died on 10 January 2016. He had kept his illness private and the unexpected death of an iconic artist whose musical and cultural influence had spanned decades was a huge shock.

In 2025, Bowie’s longtime pal, actor Gary Oldman, voiced the vague suspicions of many. “Don’t you feel that since he died, the world’s gone to shit? It was like he was cosmic glue or something,” he pondered.

Moreover, Bowie’s was only the first of a string of deaths of much-loved stars that year: among others we also lost Muhammad Ali, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Carrie Fisher and George Michael.

In political tragedies (or victories, depending on one’s point of view), it was also the year of Brexit and the protracted period of political pandemonium which followed it, not least the eye-popping spectacle of seven British prime ministers flying in and out of 10 Downing St like besuited fiddlers’ elbows.

And 2016 gifted the world US President Donald Trump.

The Trump era

At first, Trump’s improbable election seemed a bizarre temporal anomaly in the space-time continuum, a once-off cri de coeur from voters for a six-time bankrupt and draft-dodger to restore America to some undefined greatness.

Nope. Nope. The fate of the Decade from Hell was sealed by Trump’s return to the White House in 2024 – after his MAGA troops marked his 2020 loss by instigating an unprecedented riot on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021 over the big lie of a ‘stolen election’.

His second triumph ushered in what has devolved into a literally gilded age of unbridled greed and corruption, of unfettered abuses of power, unrestrained hostility towards longtime allies, unhinged trade wars, unjustified acts of aggression against sovereign nations and unhinged streams of bile, threats, cruelty, misogyny, racism and xenophobia issuing forth endlessly from the commander-in-chief.

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Now, the sensation that the world is careering to hell in a handcart is nothing new. Take this quotation:

“Trust, a mighty god has gone, Restraint has gone from men,
and the Graces, my friend, have abandoned the earth.
Men’s judicial oaths are no longer to be trusted, nor does anyone
revere the immortal gods; the race of pious men has perished and
men no longer recognise the rules of conduct or acts of piety.”

It was written about the myth of Pandora’s Box by 6th century Greek poet Theognis of Megara, but could handily run as either a newspaper editorial or a rant on social media.

Perhaps statistically the past decade hasn’t been any more violent than those preceding it, but there so often seems to be a horrifically cinematic quality to the tragedies, a hateful targeting of happy, busy citizens for maximum impact: a truck ploughs into a crowded promenade in Nice on Bastille Day; suicide bombers target Brussels airport and metro; a terrorist mows down young revellers at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester; two gunmen open fire on Bondi Beach during a celebration of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah; a lone gunman kills 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Given the unrelenting litany of violent events in the U.S. – festival-goers massacred in Las Vegas, nightclubbers mass murdered in Orlando, kids indiscriminately gunned down in multiple elementary schools, high schools and colleges, attempted assassinations of Donald Trump and the killings of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and Democratic politician Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark – it sometimes seems as if America has entered its Mad Max era, with added Teslas.

And of course no tale of Pandora’s Box is complete without a plague escaping into the world, and SARS-CoV-2 obliged, terrifying one half of the world, enraging the other half, and killing at least seven million-plus of us in the process.

And where to start with the wars? The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 which Putin thought would last three days. The genocidal razing of Gaza by Israel which followed the brutal 7 October 2023 attacks spearheaded by Hamas. The hubristic US-Israel war with Iran which was launched in February.

Maybe this war more than any other has added to the dizzying feeling of instability.

After all, it’s the direct cause of high fuel and energy prices which have supercharged inflation, lowered economic growth and driven higher borrowing costs, leading to a global cost of living crisis which in turn is now sparking protests in Europe – including the highly unsettling blockades of roads and ports here in May.

Oh, how we long for un-unprecedented times

Throw in the increasingly apocalyptic prognostications about climate change, scary waves of cyber-attacks, dire warnings that AI will soon regard humanity as supplementary to its requirements, urgent exhortations to prep for disaster, and it’s no wonder that many of us go about our day with a sinking feeling that we are living through an Age of Enshitenment and that things can only get shittier.

Or….maybe not.

Maybe, just maybe, as Bowie would say, ch-ch-ch-ch-changes are afoot.

The stunning outcome of the U.S. midterms – coming right behind good days for democracy in Brazil and in Serbia – is dangling a glimmer of redemption in front of an exhausted world, offering a plot-twist in the horror show of ‘Planet Earth: 2016 to 2026’.

There’s another line in the aforementioned 6th century verse of Greek poetry. It begins with “Hope is the only good god remaining among mankind.”

As this cursèd decade slumps to a battered close, it’s time to force a rewrite of the algorithms which direct us towards despair and dystopian visions of the future. Maybe hope won’t be the thing that kills us, but which will arm us instead.

Of course, the year’s not done with us yet. The last weeks of 2026 have claimed another staggeringly cruel loss, with the death of the inspirational force of nature which was Ciara Mageean.

In one of her last interviews, the Olympian spoke about the power of hope, even after she had been given a diagnosis which offered her none at all. “We need to celebrate the joys in life, and we need to verbalise them a lot more. I think all of us need to take a moment and smell the roses and think, ‘okay, there’s good stuff to celebrate in life.’”

Celebrating the good stuff out loud may not be a path out of the madness of it all, but it makes a damn fine place for us to start.

Lise Hand is a journalist and writer. This column runs every Wednesday.