Time magazine’s 2016 “Person of the Year” is President-elect Donald Trump.
There wasn’t much surprise behind Trump’s selection, but the magazine listed him as the “President of the Divided States of America,” which he took umbrage to, but said he was honored.
He appeared on the Today show and told Matt Lauer:
It’s a great honor. It means a lot. I’ve been lucky enough to be on the cover many times this year and last year. …
When you say divided states of America, I didn’t divide them. They’re divided now. 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.
Social media was predictably divided on Trump’s win.
Nancy Gibbs, Time‘s editor-in-chief, wrote about the way the choice came together for Donald Trump.
This is the 90th time we have named the person who had the greatest influence, for better or worse, on the events of the year. So which is it this year: Better or worse? The challenge for Donald Trump is how profoundly the country disagrees about the answer.
Trump beat out the short list of nominees made up of Hillary Clinton, who almost broke one of the highest glass ceilings; “The Hackers,” a general term for hackers everywhere who hacked into things for good; Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president who staved off a coup; Beyonce, who Beyonce’d again; and the Crispr Pioneers, who are working on technology to alter and find DNA across species.
