Donald Trump is TIME’s Person of the Year pic.twitter.com/CVHX9o0DB3
— TIME (@TIME) December 12, 2024
Well … yeah, yeah, there would have been doubt that the obvious choice would be made. In the last couple of decades, Time Magazine has routinely botched its Person of the Year choices to the point that most people have stopped paying much attention to it. Even this time, rumors emerged that Time would make Kamala Harris its POTY and probably would have done so … had Harris managed to carry even one swing state.
As it happens, though, Time may not have had much choice. Politico leaked the plans last night:
Donald Trump is expected to be named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” — and to celebrate the unveiling of the cover, the president-elect will ring the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning, according to three people familiar with the plans granted anonymity because they were not authorized to divulge the plans. …
Trump was also named Time Person of the Year in 2016 after he won the presidential election. He joins 13 other U.S. presidents who have received the recognition, including President Joe Biden.
A short list for Time Person of the Year was announced Monday on NBC’s “The Today Show” and included Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris, Kate Middleton, Elon Musk and Benjamin Netanyahu.
If that’s the short list, then Trump only really had one real competitor. Harris ran one of the worst presidential campaigns in modern history despite the mainstream media’s relentless propaganda on her behalf. That’s one reason why the rumors of Harris getting POTY remained believable until the end; the Protection Racket Media has mainly blamed Joe Biden for her loss rather than Harris’ utter incompetence. (Note well that Biden himself was not on Time’s short list.)
Almost equally silly was the inclusion of Middleton. She survived cancer this year and her tenacity is laudable, but how did Middleton impact this year otherwise? There’s a better case for Musk, but his greatest impact in politics and culture came a couple of years ago when Musk bought Twitter and exposed government-directed censorship. Musk will always be relevant, but his impact this year has mainly come in how he subordinated himself to support Trump and help him win the election.
The only other figure on this list to have a competitive argument is the man who just reshaped the Middle East — and that’s definitely not Biden or Antony Blinken. In the past 14 months but particularly in the last three, Netanyahu demolished two Iranian proxy armies, destroyed Iran’s “Shiite Crescent” strategy, and set the stage for the collapse of Syria’s Assad dynasty. Rarely has one man made that much of an impact on a region in such a short period of time. And if the mainstream didn’t despise Netanyahu as much as they do and symp for the Palestinians on a constant basis, maybe Netanyahu would have gotten the nod.
On that note, consider how miserable Time’s editors had to be to have to choose between Trump and Netanyahu for their POTY. At least Time tries to put a positive face on this dilemma:
On the cusp of his second presidency, all of us—from his most fanatical supporters to his most fervent critics—are living in the Age of Trump. He dispatched his Republican rivals in near record time. For weeks, he campaigned largely from the New York courtroom where he would be convicted on 34 felony counts. His sole debate with President Joe Biden in June led to his opponent’s eventual exit from the race. Sixteen days later, he survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally. In the sprint that followed, he outlasted Vice President Kamala Harris, sweeping all seven swing states and emerging from the election at the height of his popularity. “Look what happened,” Trump told his supporters in his election-night victory speech. “Isn’t this crazy?” He almost couldn’t believe it himself.
Trump has remade American politics in the process. He won by enlarging his base, seizing the frustration over rising prices and benefiting from a global turn against incumbents. With those tailwinds, exit polls suggest that he won the largest percentage of Black Americans for a Republican since Gerald Ford and the most Latino voters of any GOP nominee since George W. Bush. Suburban women, whose anger over restrictions to reproductive rights was thought to be a bulwark for the Democrats, moved not away but toward him. He became the first Republican in 20 years to win more votes than the Democrat, with 9 of 10 American counties increasing their support for Trump from 2020.
Now we watch as members of Congress, international institutions, and global leaders once again align themselves with his whims.
Indeed, and the other people on the short list fade in comparison. None of these figures save maybe Netanyahu dominated the news like Trump did this year. Not only did he fight lawfare campaigns against him on four fronts, he also survived two assassination attempts — one in which he actually got shot — to become only the second American in history to win a non-consecutive term as President (Grover Cleveland being the other). And if that were not enough, Trump has essentially become the head of state in the vacuum left by Biden and Harris since the election, and has already started to shape world events. No president since Ronald Reagan has had that kind of impact during the transition, and America hasn’t needed it more since that time, either.
So yes, Trump clearly has been the “person of the year” in any definition of that term, whether one likes Trump or not. It’s so obvious that even Time Magazine couldn’t mistake it.
