In huge news for MAGA Republicans and those generally interested in tracking President-elect Donald Trump’s importance in the American and world political scene, TIME magazine has named the president-elect “Person of the Year” for the second time in under a decade, as he also won the coveted TIME title in 2016.
According to The Guardian, the UK news outlet, which reported on the TIME decision to name Trump “Person of the Year” again, Trump beat out “Vice-President Kamala Harris; Catherine, Princess of Wales; the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum; the billionaire Elon Musk and the podcast sensation Joe Rogan” to win the award.
While every American president since Franklin Roosevelt other than Gerald Ford has won the title at least once, TIME’s selection of Trump to hold the title twice puts him in a much smaller crowd. Amongst American presidents, only FDR, who won the title three times over his four presidential terms, has won the title more than twice.
Speaking to TIME in the interview accompanying the award of the title, the president-elect said that he would do what many of his supporters have long asked and pardon the January 6 prisoners within the first hour of his second term. He said, on that point, “It’s going to start in the first hour. Maybe the first nine minutes.”
And, commenting in the interview about the Russo-Ukraine War, the president-elect said that the war is relatively intractable and crazy, telling TIME, “The Middle East is an easier problem to handle than what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine. The numbers of dead young soldiers lying on fields all over the place are staggering. It’s crazy what’s taking place.”
He also slammed the idea of the Biden Administration reportedly allowing the Ukrainians to fire NATO-supplied missiles at targets inside Russia, characterizing the move as making the war all the worse. He said, “I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia. Why are we doing that? We’re just escalating this war and making it worse.”
Further commenting on the same general matter of the Russo-Ukraine War, Trump indicated that he wouldn’t immediately ditch the Ukrainians but would be willing to use American support as a negotiation chip to reach a war-ending agreement. He said, “I want to reach an agreement, and the only way you’re going to reach an agreement is not to abandon.”
And, commenting on a domestic issue that seriously damaged the Biden-Harris Administration for most of its time in power, the president-elect told TIME that he was planning on working to push down the price of groceries. But, commenting of the difficulty of that, he said, “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard.”
TIME also said, describing the interview and what the president-elect spoke about, noted that he said, speaking of the final two and a half months of his presidency and what Americans were thinking about during that period that allowed his campaign to strike a chord with them, saying, “I called it 72 Days of Fury. We hit the nerve of the country. The country was angry.”
Watch Trump’s recent spat with NBC’s Kristen Welker here:
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