Former President and current President-elect of the United States Donald Trump has been named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2024. The New York City, New York-based magazine continued its tradition of awarding the title to the winner of the US presidential election since 2000.
Accordingly, this is the second time President Trump has received the award after 2016, making him one of the 15 individuals to be named Person of the Year at least twice. US Presidents Franklin D Roosevelt (who is the only one to have won three times), Harry Truman, Dwight D Eisenhower, Lyndon B Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama, US Secretary of State and Army Chief of Staff George C Marshall, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Paramount Leader of China Deng Xiaoping, Communist Party of the Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, and, controversially, Premier of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin are the 14 other people to have received the award more than once. Time has been giving out its annual honour since 1927.
Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election with 312 electoral votes, while receiving 77.3 million votes and also winning the popular vote by 1.5 points. He became the second President in US history to be elected for a non-consecutive term after Grover Cleveland in 1892; and at age 78, he is also retaking the distinction of the oldest President in US history.
In a video uploaded to Time Magazine’s YouTube channel, national political correspondent Eric Cortellessa, who was covering the Trump campaign all year, has claimed that Donald Trump was ‘quite obviously the only choice’ for the magazine’s Person of the Year. ‘Donald Trump has singularly reshaped American politics and has transformed this country through his force of will, his ability surmount obstacles nobody thought he could,’ he explained, referring to the legal challenges unprecedented for a presidential candidate. Namely, these were criminal indictments in four cases for a total of 91 felony counts, a criminal conviction in one of those cases for 34 counts, and numerous other civil cases against him.
At the end of the video, however, Cortellessa claims that ‘this is the closest presidential election by popular vote margins since the 19th century,’ referring to the 2024 election, which is not true. The 1960 (John F Kennedy won by 0.17 points), the 1968 (Richard Nixon won by 0.7 points), and the 2000 election (Al Gore won by 0.5 points, but lost the electoral vote) were all closer in the popular vote than the 2024 election.
As a celebration of his second Time Person of the Year award, President Trump also rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, 12 December, with his wife Melania.
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