In Good Company

In 1938, Time named Adolf Hitler its Person of the Year. The magazine’s criteria has always been influence rather than virtue—whoever shaped the year most decisively, for better or catastrophically for worse. Still, it’s a list you’d rather not appear on in certain company.

Donald Trump is Time’s Person of the Year for 2016. Hillary Clinton came second. Hackers, as a collective, placed third—which says something about the year that I don’t have the energy to fully unpack.

The thing I keep returning to is the timeline of Trump’s relationship with this particular honor. In 2015 he placed third, behind Angela Merkel and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and he was openly furious about it. I told you Time magazine will never pick me as person of the year despite being the big favorite, he tweeted, with characteristic grace. He also described Merkel, who won that year, as the politician who is ruining Germany.

Now that he’s won, he’s calling it a very, very great honor.

What I keep trying to work out is the range of possible futures from here. Best case: four years of stupid tweets and incoherent press conferences, then he goes away—a clown who made a lot of noise but couldn’t figure out how to actually govern. Worst case: I don’t want to write it out. The word "nuclear" is somewhere in that sentence.

Nobody knows, and that’s the part that’s hardest to sit with. Time gave the cover to someone whose next four years are genuinely unforeseeable—not in the usual way every presidency is uncertain, but in the way that has serious people using the word "unprecedented" without irony. Person of the Year. In good company indeed.