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Social media goes into overdrive with reactions to Donald Trump’s announcement as TIME Person of the Year

TIME has named Donald Trump its Person of the Year, and many readers are gobsmacked, but there have been controversial winners before.

Victoria Craw
less than 2 min read
December 8, 2016 - 5:11AM
President-elect Donald Trump has been named TIME person of the year for his meteoric rise to power in the US election. Picture: Sara D. Davis/Getty Images/AFP
President-elect Donald Trump has been named TIME person of the year for his meteoric rise to power in the US election. Picture: Sara D. Davis/Getty Images/AFP

DONALD Trump’s nomination as TIME person of the year has proved as divisive as his Presidential campaign, with many taking to social media to share their reaction.

On Twitter, some were quick to suggest the President Elect followed in the company of Hitler, Stalin and Putin who had also received the iconic title.

Others lambasted them for overreacting and pointed out the Pope and Angela Merkel had also been named the winner before.

The magazine’s annual award names the person who has had the “greatest influence, for better or worse, on the events of the year”.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, The Ebola Fighters, The Pope, President Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, Former President George W Bush, and Julian Assange have also won the title before.

The Republican President beat Hillary Clinton who came in number two and “the hackers” at number three. Turkish President Erdogan was number four while the CRISPR pioneers, who allowed scientists to alter DNA cheaply and easily beat Beyonce who came in at number 6.

TIME Editor-in-Chief Nancy Gibbs said the President-elect wrote: “For reminding America that demagoguery feeds on despair and that truth is only as powerful as the trust in those who speak it, for empowering a hidden electorate by mainstreaming its furies and live-streaming its fears, and for framing tomorrow’s political culture by demolishing yesterday’s, Donald Trump is TIME’s 2016 Person of the Year.”

TIME’s Washington Bureau Chief Michael Scherer said: “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.”

“Now he has up-ended the leadership of both major political parties and effectively shifted the political direction of the international order. He will soon command history’s most lethal military, along with economic levers that can change the lives of billions. And the people he has to thank are those he calls ‘the forgotten,’ millions of American voters who get paid by the hour in shoes that will never touch these carpets — working folk, regular Janes and Joes, the dots in the distance.”

Read the full story here.

The leadership has come at the cost of dividing the country. Picture: TIME/Nadav Kander
The leadership has come at the cost of dividing the country. Picture: TIME/Nadav Kander

Originally published as Social media goes into overdrive with reactions to Donald Trump’s announcement as TIME Person of the Year

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