Time's Terrible Person of the Year

When Time Magazine announced that Donald Trump was 2024’s “Person of the Year,” his supporters cheered, and his detractors were furious. I thought, “Wow, they’ve done it again."

When I was a child, I liked helping sort the mail as it came into our Honeysuckle Drive home. Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Forbes, and Architectural Digest went to my father’s nightstand before anyone else could read them. When the next week’s edition of Time came in, we could read his.

I was probably thirteen when I learned that the most famous issue of Time Magazine was the one where they named Adolph Hitler the “Man of the Year.” I learned about it from Time Magazine. They were quite proud of it. To them, it represented good journalism.

The “Of the Year” categories in Time magazine represent the person who had the largest impact, good or bad, in their particular category. Not all the categories were published as a cover every year, but they always had a cover for what went from “Man of the Year” to “Person of the Year.” In 1980, they printed a cover with Ayatullah Khomeini as the “Man of The Year.” The “Of The Year” title means, “This is the person we covered the most.” It’s not a reward for excellent service or any sort of accolade.

Caitlin Clark was named “Athlete of the Year” because there were more sports stories about her than anybody else. She made the biggest difference. It turns out that she was a pretty remarkably decent person, but that’s not why she was put on the cover.

The one thing Donald Trump supporters are sick and tired of is any comparison to Hitler. They hate it because it happens so often, like several times a day, every day. When I saw Trump supporters on social media, even Elon Musk and the Governor of Mississippi, crowing about Trump’s being Time’s “Person of the Year,” I thought to myself, “You’re most likely going to regret this.”

A little historical perspective goes a long way. I was honestly a little disappointed in the Governor. His education is remarkably similar to mine, and yet I somehow knew about the Hitler cover, but he didn’t.

If Time writers were intentionally trying to bait Trump and his supporters, then I can’t support that. This isn’t “The Daily Show” or “Saturday Night Live.” I suspect they were legitimately trying to follow in their own journalistic tradition. They chose Trump for the same reasons why their predecessor chose the Ayatullah and Adolph Hitler.

So far, the last eight years of the first quarter of the twenty-first century haven’t been my favorite. It’s very uncomfortably reminded me of other very unpleasant and uncomfortable periods of human history. I don’t think we can avoid this, though. If nothing else, we have to spend a few years really fucking up every so often to remind us of why we don’t want to do that.