Donald Trump Named Time Magazine's Person of the Year, Ruins the Surprise

President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday was named Time magazine's Person of the Year.

“It’s a great honor. It means a lot,” Trump told NBC's "Today" show. He added: "To be on the cover of Time magazine as the person of the year is a tremendous honor."

But Trump, on Twitter, jumped ahead of the formal announcement on the "Today" show by teasing a last-minute interview on the show scheduled for the same time viewers were told to tune in for Time magazine's unveiling of this year's pick.

Each year, the magazine names one person or group of people that “for better or for worse ... has done the most to influence the events of the year,” Time editor Nancy Gibbs wrote.

This year, she asked the question, "So which is it this year: Better or worse? The challenge for Donald Trump is how profoundly the country disagrees about the answer."

Gibbs continued: "It’s hard to measure the scale of his disruption. This real estate baron and casino owner turned reality-TV star and provocateur—never a day spent in public office, never a debt owed to any interest besides his own—now surveys the smoking ruin of a vast political edifice that once housed parties, pundits, donors, pollsters, all those who did not see him coming or take him seriously. Out of this reckoning, Trump is poised to preside, for better or worse."

Since the beginning of the award in 1927, every president has received the award sometime during their time in the Oval Office.

In recent decades, the president-elect or the president received the title in election years. President Obama was named the Person of the Year after both of his 2008 and 2012 elections. George W. Bush took it in 2000 and 2004. Bill Clinton earned the honor in 1992, but split it in 1998 with lawyer Ken Starr, the president's nemesis whose investigations helped lead to Clinton's impeachment.

Hillary Clinton was second on Time's 2016 list, while "The Hackers" came in third.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr Commons