You could scream and gnash your teeth all you like, but this one was a tedious inevitability: Donald J. Trump is TIME‘s Person of the Year.
Despite the fact that absolutely nobody reads TIME anymore except when they’re sitting in a dentist’s office and there’s inexplicably a 2004 issue in the waiting room, the Person of the Year still holds a fair bit of clout. The mag awards it to the person who “for better or for worse … has done the most to influence the events of the year”.
Few could dispute that Trump, with his utter domination of the media cycle followed by his election victory, meets that criteria. As editor-in-chief Nancy Gibbs writer:
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 … For reminding America that demagoguery feeds on despair and that truth is only as powerful as the trust in those who speak it, for empowering a hidden electorate by mainstreaming its furies and live-streaming its fears, and for framing tomorrow’s political culture by demolishing yesterday’s, Donald Trump is Time’s 2016 person of the year.
Trump beat shortlisted opponents like Hillary Clinton, Beyoncé, Mark Zuckerberg, Nigel Farage and Vladimir Putin (who ‘won’ in 2007).
Despite the sudden glut of ‘People Are Mad’ headlines, it’s not like there’s much to dispute here – Trump was pretty influential in 2016. He joins Hitler, Stalin and Ayatollah Khomeini as People of the Year that everyone incessantly argues about.
For his part, Trump appeared on America’s TODAY and denied his role in creating the ‘Divided States of America’ as the TIME headline alleged. “When you say divided states of America, I didn’t divide them,” he told the hosts. “I’m not president yet, so I didn’t do anything to divide.”
Trump’s made his opinion on TIME very clear in the past.
Just took a look at Time Magazine-looks really flimsy like a free handout at a parking lot! The sad end is coming-just like Newsweek!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 2, 2013
Sad!
Source: TIME.
Photo: TIME.
