President-elect Trump has been named Time magazine’s 2024 “Person of the Year.”
The legacy news magazine announced the decision Thursday morning.
In a feature announcing the magazine’s honoree, Time noted that the president-elect is now the “world’s most powerful man.”
“Trump’s political rebirth is unparalleled in American history,” the feature reads. “His first term ended in disgrace, with his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results culminating in the attack on the U.S. Capitol. He was shunned by most party officials when he announced his candidacy in late 2022 amid multiple criminal investigations.”
“Little more than a year later, Trump cleared the Republican field, clinching one of the fastest contested presidential primaries in history.”
Time added that Trump has “realigned American politics” and remade the Republican Party. The most recent election in which he defeated Vice President Harris, according to the feature, left Democrats “reckoning with what went awry.”
“While Democrats estimated that most of the country wanted a President who would uphold the norms of liberal democracy, Trump saw a nation ready to smash them, tapping into a growing sense that the system was rigged,” the author wrote.
The news outlet noted that as Trump prepares to enter the White House again, he has to contend with everything he campaigned on, including a globalized economy, mass migration and China. He will also inherit a rocky international situation, with wars raging between Ukraine and Russia, and in the Middle East.
Time also highlighted the July assassination attempt against Trump, a moment that he told the magazine “changed” a lot of people.
Trump was also named Time’s Person of the Year in 2016, when he won his first presidential election. Last year, pop star Taylor Swift was the magazine’s top choice.
Who else could have possibly taken the title?
Certainly not President Joe Biden, who spent 2024 slowly fading from the national stage after suffering the humiliation of having his party force him from the presidential race over the summer. Kamala Harris? Not even Time magazine’s editorial board was coconut-pilled enough to go for that.
Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping? Both men have caused their share of mischief, but neither has bestrode the world’s stage this year.
No European, South American, or African political leader or cultural figure has risen above the level of pygmy.
I can see only two legitimate alternatives: Benjamin Netanyahu and Elon Musk.
In 2024, under Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel decisively defeated Hamas and humiliated and castrated Hezbollah (literally) while systematically eliminating the leaders of both groups, punched Iran in the nose, exploited the fall of Bashar al-Assad to destroy Iran’s ability to threaten Israel from Syrian territory, and avoided being pressured into a Biden–Blinken-brokered cease-fire before Israel had achieved its war aims. That’s impressive no matter how you stack it.
Elon somehow managed to make himself even more ubiquitous this year than he already had been (he was named Man of the Year in 2021). His ownership and management of Twitter and his stance on free expression stood in marked contrast with the organs of the legacy American press in the hot summer months when Biden and his allies were attempting to convince a skeptical American people that everything was A-OK under the president’s hood. I have my doubts about just what effects Elon’s open entry into partisan politics had at the ballot box. But there’s no question in my mind that his political action committee and campaigning in support of Trump made news. After Trump’s election, he was named co-leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Oh, right — and he also became the first person to ever amass a net worth estimated at $400 billion, oversaw SpaceX as its Falcon 9 rockets became a reliable ride to and from orbit (and as they performed spectacular recovery operations when landing back on Earth), and championed Tesla’s launch of the (hideous!) Cybertruck on a large scale. Wild.
But still, . . . I think Time is right. Donald Trump — love him or hate him; whether you think he’s a hero or a villain — is the man that dominated 2024 from start to finish. He survived the first near-miss assassination attempt on an American president or major presidential candidate in a generation (on live TV!); he was tried and convicted of a felony in New York City only to squirm out of that jam by winning the presidency; he worked as a McDonald’s fry cook and a garbage man in iconic photo ops; he has been courted by Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau and Volodymyr Zelensky; he was everywhere and inescapable.
Indeed, his victory in November was the most remarkable political comeback in American history.
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