【2004 Archives】

When Timemagazine announced President-elect Donald Trump as its choice for its 2016 "Person of the Year004 Archives" 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).

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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 Timethe year they were elected to office, before their inauguration.

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In fact, since Timemagazine 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.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt: 1932 (elected to office), 1934, 1941

• Harry Truman: 1945 (took over after FDR's death), 1948

• Dwight D. Eisenhower: 1944 (pre-presidency), 1959

• John F. Kennedy: 1961

• Lyndon B. Johnson: 1964, 1967

• Richard Nixon: 1971, 1972

• Jimmy Carter: 1976 (elected to office)

• Ronald Reagan: 1980 (elected to office), 1983 (co-honoree with Yuri Andropov, then-General Secretary of the Communist Party)

• George H.W. Bush: 1990

• Bill Clinton: 1992, 1998 (co-honoree with Ken Starr)

• George W. Bush: 2000, 2004

• Barack Obama: 2008, 2012

• Donald Trump: 2016

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.

Timehas 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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