Person of the Year

Trump got Time’s Person of the Year in 2016. He’d been fixated on it for a while—came in third the year before and complained loudly about it, tweeted that Time would never name him, said they’d picked the woman who ruined Germany instead. Then they went ahead and gave it to him. I remember thinking about how the magazine had also put Hitler on their cover in 1938 under the same heading. That’s the kind of historical fact you wish you hadn’t noticed.

He told NBC it was a very, very great honor. What struck me watching it happen was how little it changed anything. He got what he’d wanted and he was still just as angry, still obsessed with status and rankings and whatever validation he was chasing. The whole dynamic was there in one moment—desire finally satisfied and somehow that didn’t satisfy anything at all.

That winter I’d think about what would happen next. Best case: four years of embarrassing tweets and then it ends. Worst case: something worse. Most likely: something nobody could have predicted anyway. I’m not even sure my speculation mattered. The real answer was that you couldn’t know what would happen until you actually lived through it, and that was maybe the only honest thing about the whole situation.