Time Magazine revealed its selection for the publication's annual "Person of the Year" issue for 2016 on Wednesday morning as the recent President-Elect Donald Trump. The selection comes as unsurprising to some, given that Trump has been one of the most widely discussed public figures of the year, but of course, his name brings with it a slew of controversy and dissent.
Get your look at the new Time cover below.
Though Donald Trump's selection for the "Person of the Year" cover is inciting anger among his many detractors, it's important to remember that Time Magazine does not consider this cover to be an "honor," but rather an arbitrary presentation of the most newsworthy person of the year. The publication defines the selected person as the man or woman who "for better or for worse...has done the most to influence the events of the year," so it is not necessarily meant to have any positive spin. To illustrate this point, readers have pointed to the fact that reviled political leaders including Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Vladimir Putin have all graced the cover in the past, since they had also inarguable conquered the news cycles of their respective years.
Donald Trump's selection also lines up with Time Magazine's tendency to feature U.S. Presidents in the year that they were elected. The magazine has selected every U.S. President as its "Person of the Year" since it began the issue in 1927, with Calvin Coolidge as the sole exception to that rule.
But although the feature is meant to be arbitrary, the issue's subtitle brings up the heated controversy surrounding Donald Trump's election by calling him "President of the Divided States of America." In an interview with TODAY after the cover was unveiled, Trump said that he is not a fan of that title.
I think putting 'divided' is snarky. I'm not president yet, so I didn't do anything to divide. I mean there's a lot of division. And we're going to put it back together and we're going to have a country that's very well healed.
Interestingly enough, Donald Trump actually tied for second in the public poll that Time sets up for its readers before each "Person of the Year" issue. Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, actually won that poll in a landslide with 19 percent of reader votes. Trump came in with only 7 percent, which tied him with Julian Assange and Barack Obama. But Trump was the only of these top performers to be featured in the new issue of Time. The "Person of the Year" issue also features several runners-up, which this year include Trump's opponent in the presidential election Hillary Clinton, computer hackers in general, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdo, the scientists that developed CRISPR, and finally, Beyoncé.
You can check out Donald Trump's full "Person of the Year" cover story here.
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