US President elect Donald Trump was on Wednesday chosen the TIME’s Person of the Year 2016 for his stunning victory in the US polls.
“It’s a great honour. It means a lot. I have grown up reading Time magazine, it’s a very important magazine. It is a tremendous honor, I am lucky to be on the cover of Time in the past,” Trump said.
Time said after campaigning as an anti-establishment, populist candidate, 70-year-old Trump was elected the 45th President of the US — a stunning end to a presidential bid that repeatedly broke with political precedent.
The first runner-up for Person of the Year is Trump’s rival in the presidential elections and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and the second runner-up are online hackers.
Every December, TIME names the person who had the greatest influence, for better or worse, on the events of the year.
Last year German Chancellor Angela Merkel was Time’s ‘Person of the Year’. The Person of the Year is picked by Time editors from among world leaders, artists, corporate czars and organisations who most influenced the news, for better or for worse.
The other contenders were US gymnast Simone Biles, CRISPR Scientists who developed a groundbreaking new technology that can edit DNA, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, the Flint Whistleblowers who along with civil-engineering professor Marc Edwards and local pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha blew the whistle on the lead-poisoned water in Flint, Michigan, singer Beyonce, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
