In 2016, TIME named Donald Trump Person of the Year, just one month after he was elected president in one of the most stunning political upsets in modern history. The magazine will not announce its 2017 pick for the title until Dec. 6, but that didn’…
In 2016, TIME named Donald Trump Person of the Year, just one month after he was elected president in one of the most stunning political upsets in modern history. The magazine will not announce its 2017 pick for the title until Dec. 6, but that didn’t stop the president from commenting on it on Friday. After the president tweeted that he turned down the title after being told he’d “probably” be named TIME’ s Person of the Year, the magazine denounced Trump’s claims as “incorrect.”
In a tweet that quickly went viral, the president claimed that he received a call from the magazine, and was told that he would «PROBABLY» receive the title again this year. «Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named ‘Man (Person) of the Year,’ like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot. I said probably is no good and took a pass,» he tweeted on Friday evening. «Thanks anyway!»
For whatever reason, the president has fixated on receiving recognition from TIME for years. As far back as 2012, he tweeted that the magazine “lost all credibility” when they didn’t include him on their list of 100 Most Influential people. When he was finally named Person of the Year last year, the president told Matt Lauer in an interview that it was “a tremendous honor.” TIME, of course, has selected extremely controversial individuals for the title in the past — from dictators like Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin to authoritarian leaders like Ayatollah Khomeini, the former supreme leader of Iran.
Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named «Man (Person) of the Year,» like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot. I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!
For TIME, the Person of the Year is not a laudatory title, but rather recognition of an individual who «had the greatest influence, for better or worse, on the events of the year.» In an essay published after TIME gave the title to Trump for his outsize influence on the year’s events in 2016, editor Nancy Gibbs wrote that the president would have to reckon with “how profoundly the country disagrees about the answer.”
While it’s unclear if the president has ever truly considered what the title means, Trump’s comments yesterday indicate that he’s still mulling over TIME ’s selections.
More to come…
