Donald Trump is the 2024 TIME Person of the Year

In the history of the magazine, Time has nearly always named the person who wins the presidential election Person of the Year, but in this case, it was quite obviously the only choice. I am Eric Cordelessa. I'm a national political correspondent at Time Magazine, and I spent the last year covering Donald Trump has singularly reshaped American politics and has transformed this country through his force of will, his ability to surmount obstacles that nobody thought he could, and for what he has revealed about the desires of the American electorate. I traveled to Mar-a-Lago and spent some time with President Trump, and one thing you really can feel sitting in the room with Trump is a sense of vindication. Donald Trump started this year with unprecedented legal challenges facing indictments in four separate venues on charges ranging from falsifying business records to willingly mishandling classified information and refusing to give it back to the government and conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. A president has to have immunity, and the other thing is I did nothing wrong. We did nothing wrong. He wants to restore the imperial presidency, as Arthur Schlesinger once called it. This means he wants to have as much executive power as he can to implement his agenda. So first, Donald Trump steamrolls the primary. Donald Trump wrapped up the contested primary faster than any other candidate in American presidential history. Well, thank you very much. They call it Super Tuesday for a reason. This is a big one. One of the big bets that the Trump campaign made, as well as the Biden campaign, was to do a midsummer debate. Biden thought that because he was down in the polls, he could gain momentum and change the conversation by debating Donald Trump in June. Usually these debates are not held until the fall. That debate was obviously calamitous for Joe Biden. That then led to a panic among Democrats who tried to get him off the ballot. And as this is happening, Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt. I was at the rally that day, and I think like most people, I thought it was fireworks until all of a sudden Trump fell to the ground. And Secret Service agents jumped on top of him and you began hearing people scream, get down, get down, get down. And you heard some more shots fired off until Donald Trump got up off the stage and defiantly pumped his fists in the air and said, fight, fight, fight. That became one of the most iconic moments in American presidential history and certainly turbocharged his campaign to a point where he seemed at that moment to hold history in his hands. But everything changed just a few days later when Joe Biden dropped out of the race and roughly 20 minutes later endorsed Kamala Harris, who quickly consolidated Democratic support. What the Trump campaign did not want to let happen was for Kamala Harris to become the And so they embarked on a very coordinated and strategic effort to tie her as much as they could to Joe Biden, that she was Joe Biden's vice president, that she was responsible for his policies. They thought that she could inherit many of the same vulnerabilities that Joe Biden had, except for his old age. It is now official. CNN projects that Donald Trump has been elected president. Donald Trump will be the 47th president. Donald Trump has won the presidency. I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president. I think that one consistent theme throughout our conversations this year is that Donald Trump intends to go into the White House in January and concentrate the powers of government as much as he can inside the office of the presidency. A very interesting thing happened ahead of the photo shoot. The photographer noticed that his right hand was raw and had some scarring on it. And he asked him, what was that from? And he said, it's from shaking so many hands. So that was a very illuminating moment that showed how Donald Trump has really been all over the country this year in an effort to win an election that nobody thought he could win. And, you know, he's calmer than you would have expected. He has a level of equilibrium, almost walking around cavorting with members of the club and other incoming cabinet officials, those who are jockeying for his for jobs in the administration. It's very much like a scene from King Arthur's Court at Mar-a-Lago. As historians have noted, this was a historically close election. In fact, this is the closest presidential election by popular vote margins since the 19th century. So the country remains very divided. And I think there is going to be a titanic battle in the coming months and years over the nature and scale of the mandate that Donald Trump believes the American people have handed to him.