Donald Trump is Time's Person of the Year for 2024

Donald Trump is Time's Person of the Year for 2024. 'His political renaissance has no parallel in American history,' the magazine writes in announcing the choice. This is the second time the president-elect has become Person of the Year. The first was in 2016 after he defeated Hillary Clinton in the election for the White House.

Trump on Time beat out rival Kamala Harris and his big supporter Elon Musk (the latter Person of the Year 2021), whom the magazine had shortlisted as one of ten finalists.

"For leading a comeback of historic proportions, causing a generational political realignment, changing the shape of the presidency and altering America's role in the world, Trump is Person of the Year 2024," the magazine writes. "Time has chosen the Person of the Year for 97 years: the individual who, for better or worse, has done the most to shape the world in the past 12 months. For many years the choice has been difficult. Not this time," wrote the magazine's editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs, according to whom "since he began his run as president in 2015, no other single individual has played a greater role in changing the course of politics and history."

Trump "shocked many by winning in 2016, then led the United States through a chaotic mandate that included the first year of a pandemic and a period of protests across the country and ended in electoral defeat by seven million votes and provoking the violent attack on Capitol Hill on 6 January 2021. The bet then was that we saw the end of it,' Time writes further, noting that 'if that moment marked Trump's nadir, today we see his apotheosis'. Time concludes that, on the eve of his second presidency, 'everyone in America - from his most fanatical supporters to his most staunch critics - is living in the Age of Trump'.