Time's 'Person of the Year 2020: who won & why Trump might be upset about it

As the nation has seen over the past month and a bit, Trump normally doesn’t take losing lightly. However a normally hyperactive Twitter user the soon to be former President has been quite silent about his just announced second loss to Biden and Harris for something he covets, being Time’s Person of the Year.

Time has announced the publication’s choice for Person of the Year an annual award to feature and profile a person or persons or thing that has “affected the news or our lives the most, for better or worse,” since 1927. This year goes to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris from a shortlist of four contenders, among them President Trump, "frontline health care workers and Dr. Anthony Fauci" and the "movement for racial justice."

Why did Biden and Harris win Person of the Year?

The pick shouldn’t come as much of a surprise as the magazine has picked every winning presidential candidate in the year that they won the election since 2000 when George W. Bush was on the cover. Every President has graced the cover at some time during their presidency since the magazine started selecting a Person of the Year in 1927.

This year, however, the country faces several challenges which Biden and Harris will have to tackle. None more so than the fracture in society, the division that has been stoked by Trump and his presidency. The other two contenders besides Trump fold into the greater challenge that the President-elect Biden and Vice-President-elect Harris will face when they are sworn into office in January.

That said Trump has a special need to be on the cover of Time, even going so far as to hang a false copy of himself on the cover in at least five of his golf courses.

What has Trump said in the past about Time’s Person of the Year?

In recent years Trump has been quite vocal about Time’s choices for the Person of the Year taking to his favorite medium to criticize the publication when it isn’t him on the cover. In 2011 Trump said that Time had “lost all credibility” for not naming him to its Top 100 and continued his criticism of the magazine calling the list “a joke" adding "a stunt of a magazine” saying that it would “soon be dead.” When Chancellor Angela Merkel was chosen in 2015 for her opening her country to a wave of immigrants and saving the European Union’s common currency Trump complained saying that he had been “the big favorite.”

His tune about the magazine changed in 2016 when he finally graced the cover as the “Person of the Year” having won the election that year. He tweeted out "Thank you to Time Magazine and Financial Times for naming me 'Person of the Year' - a great honor!" However he felt that he should have been on the cover every subsequent year.

In 2017 he got ahead of Time itself and tweeted “Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named “Man (Person) of the Year,” like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot. I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!” to which Alan Murray tweeted back “Amazing. Not a speck of truth here”

In 2018 Trump was shortlisted but lost to "The Guardians, journalists who face persecution.” When asked by a reporter about the award he said "I can’t imagine anybody else other than Trump, can you imagine anybody else other than Trump?” Then in 2019, again shortlisted but again lost, this time to Greta Thunberg a teenage climate activist so he took to twitter to mock her.

So although he has been quiet so far, the public can expect that Trump will have something to say about this year’s choice.