Donald Trump has been very sore in the past at not winning Time Magazine’s Person Of The Year, which he finally managed in 2016.
The President Elect tweeted every year for the last three years to say he should have won it, attacking the magazine for having “no guts” and saying “I told you they would never pick me despite being the big favourite”.
He seems to have skipped commenting on the 2012 Person Of The Year but did attack the 2011 decision as “so biased”.
In 2015, Trump made the shortlist after becoming the improbable frontrunner for the Republican nomination for President.
But he lost to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom the magazine dubbed “the de facto leader of a continent”. Trump came third behind de facto Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Unimpressed, Trump tweeted that Merkel was “ruining Germany” and said the magazine would “never pick me”.
In 2014, Time picked the doctors fighting the Ebola outbreak in West Africa as their Persons Of The Year.
Trump knew better, retweeting someone called @fackinpeter, who said they “don’t care” what the magazine thinks and that Trump should have won.
But 2013 was the year Trump really went for Time. He said it had showed “no guts” in giving the award to Pope Francis instead of him. Trump was not even shortlisted.
Earlier in the year, he spoke tweeted Time was “not smart enough” to follow one Tweeter’s advice and make Trump Person Of The Year to “silence” him.
He also said Time was “really flimsy” and its “sad end is coming”.
Trump seems to have given 2012 a miss, a rare occasion when he had nothing to say about the then-just re-elected Barack Obama.
But in 2011, he called Time “so biased” for picking “the protestor” after a year of revolution in the Middle East and North Africa and the Occupy movement.
Trump called the win “an honour” but the award is not intended as such. It is only meant to reflect who has done the most to define the last 12 months, for good or ill.
Its write-up of the award was no endorsement of the man, calling him President Of The Divided States.
The magazine wrote: “For reminding America that demagoguery feeds on despair and that truth is only as powerful as the trust in those who speak it, for empowering a hidden electorate by mainstreaming its furies and live-streaming its fears, and for framing tomorrow’s political culture by demolishing yesterday’s, Donald Trump is TIME’s 2016 Person of the Year.”
As his supporters on Twitter celebrated the award...
...Others were reminding everyone that the award previously won by Hitler and Stalin and is not “for the ‘best’ person of the year”.
One person pointed out the cover image of Trump had a seemingly deliberate 1940s aesthetic, a hint at Trump’s authoritarian leanings.
Nigel Farage, who made the shortlist for being “face of the successful campaign for Britain to leave the European Union”, did not make the top six.
Hillary Clinton came second, “the hackers” came third, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan came was fourth, the Russian scientists who developed technology to edit DNA were fifth and Beyonce was sixth.
Trump’s fellow authoritarian Vladimir Putin was shortlisted but also did not make the top six. He won in 2007.