Time Magazine: Trump is the Man of the Year

Donald Trump, the US President-elect who bitterly divided his nation, has been named TIME magazine's Person of the Year.
In fact, the cover of the magazine called him the "President of the Divided States of America."

Time editor Nancy Gibbs explained: “For all of Trump’s public life, tastemakers and intellectuals have dismissed him as a vulgarian and carnival barker, a showman with big flash and little substance. “But what those critics never understood was that their disdain gave him strength.”

Trump was described by the magazine as having “upended the leadership of both major political parties and effectively shifted the political direction of the international order."

"To be on the cover of Time as Person of the Year is a tremendous honor," Trump told Matt Lauer in an interview after the reveal.

The President-elect did however take issue with the magazine's choice to refer to him as "President of the Divided States of America." "When you say 'divided states of America,' I didn’t divide them," Trump said. "They’re divided now, there’s a lot of division. And we’re going to put it back together."

The other finalists included such names as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Beyonce, Russian president Vladimir Putin, the whistleblowers of Flint, Michigan, and US gymnast Simone Biles.

He follows past winners including German Chancellor Angela Merkel (2015), the ebola fighters (2014) and Pope Francis (2013). This will be Trump’s 10th time on the magazine’s cover, and all but one have been since August 2015. His first appearance on TIME was in 1989.