Here's how you could have predicted Trump as 'Person of the Year'

A presidential 'honor,' like clockwork.
 By 
Marcus Gilmer
 on 
Original image replaced with Mashable logo
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

When Time magazine announced President-elect Donald Trump as its choice for its 2016 "Person of the Year," many expressed outrage, despite the fact that his selection was perhaps one of the few predictable things about the surreal, fever dream that is 2016.

Twitter critics of Trump quickly linked Trump's selection to terrible past selections like Adolf Hitler (1938) and Josef Stalin (1939, 1942).

But another context would be the White House's previous occupants: since 1932, every president has won the award, some more than once. And six of the last seven presidents have been given the honor by Time the year they were elected to office, before their inauguration.

In fact, since Time magazine introduced its "Man of the Year" honor in 1927 (it was changed to the gender-neutral "Person of the Year" in 1999), only two presidents didn't get the honor: Calvin Coolidge, who left office in 1929, and Herbert Hoover, who served from 1929 until 1933.

(You could argue that Hoover, who many blame for The Great Depression, and Coolidge, whose wife had a pet raccoon, each had their reasons to be honored.)

Here's the list of presidential honors from Time.

This isn't to minimize Trump's awful rhetoric that helped him win the election, or the dangerous policies he's proposed, not at all. Rather, it's putting the selection in to a bit of a historical context.

Time has shown that, traditionally, it puts the president on the cover. With Trump, it has now put six of the last seven election winners on its cover. Had Hillary Clinton won, no doubt she would have been given the honor.

But the honor is Trump's now and only time (not Time) will tell where he fits in among his predecessors.

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Marcus Gilmer

Marcus Gilmer is Mashable's Assistant Real-Times News Editor on the West Coast, reporting on breaking news from his location in San Francisco. An Alabama native, Marcus earned his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Marcus has previously worked for Chicagoist, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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