President-elect Donald Trump will be named Time Magazine‘s “Person of the Year” on Thursday, according to Politico.
Having just won a second term in the White House four years after being ejected from it, Trump beat out his general election opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his own billionaire benefactor Elon Musk, and Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, to secure the title. He was named “Person of the Year” once before, in 2016.
Per Politico, Trump will “celebrate the unveiling of the cover” by ringing “the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning.”
In every election year since 2000, the winner of the presidential contest has been named “Person of the Year.” In 2020, Joe Biden shared the honor with Harris, his running mate.
Here’s an excerpt from Time‘s explanation for picking Trump last time around:
This is the 90th time we have named the person who had the greatest influence, for better or worse, on the events of the year. So which is it this year: Better or worse? The challenge for Donald Trump is how profoundly the country disagrees about the answer.
It’s hard to measure the scale of his disruption. This real estate baron and casino owner turned reality-TV star and provocateur—never a day spent in public office, never a debt owed to any interest besides his own—now surveys the smoking ruin of a vast political edifice that once housed parties, pundits, donors, pollsters, all those who did not see him coming or take him seriously. Out of this reckoning, Trump is poised to preside, for better or worse.
For those who believe this is all for the better, Trump’s victory represents a long-overdue rebuke to an entrenched and arrogant governing class; for those who see it as for the worse, the destruction extends to cherished norms of civility and discourse, a politics poisoned by vile streams of racism, sexism, nativism. To his believers, he delivers change—broad, deep, historic change, not modest measures doled out in Dixie cups; to his detractors, he inspires fear both for what he may do and what may be done in his name.
Trump called it a “great honor” to have been picked back in 2016, deeming Time “a great magazine.”
