For Good or Ill (Your Choice), Trump is 'Person of the Year'

Time Magazine’s picks have historically recognized impact, not virtue. Trump's been selected twice, along with Richard Nixon. We'll see what the future may hold.

Trump, Nixon, Hitler, Stalin, Khomeini and Khrushchev

Time Magazine has an intro to its “Person of the Year” edition: The choices, according to the magazine’s editors, are based on the person “that had the greatest impact on the news, for good or ill.”

It’s apparently always been the magazine’s intention to recognize impact, not virtue. This year’s pick is Donald Trump. I’ll let you decide whether this selection was for “good or ill.” If the latter, he joins Hitler, Stalin and Khrushchev, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Richard Nixon as persons of the year with less than perfect virtue.

Trump was also picked in 2016, joining Nixon as the only two-timers. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the only person chosen three times. You have to wonder if Trump’s hoping to beat him, and whether he wants Time to change the title back to “Man of the Year,” given his macho image. It was changed to “Person” in 1999, and a number of women have been selected since, including Angela Merkel, the environmental activist Greta Thunberg and Taylor Swift last year.

How’d you like to be at a party with Trump and those three?

In a letter to readers, the magazine’s editor credited Trump with "driving a once-in-a-generation political realignment." Well, that certainly puts him in a “good” light. The “ill” is that his authoritarian tendencies and prioritization of personal and partisan interests will likely deepen divisions within the country and damage both our democratic foundations and global reputation.

Trump’s responses to the magazine’s related interview offered one relative positive, at least in my view, and several real messy negatives.

After telling CNN in an interview that he would pardon every single person convicted in the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, he told Time Magazine he’ll focus only on those convicted of non-violent crimes. Those folks, he said, have been “greatly punished.” We’ll see, I guess.

Nearly 1,200 people either have pleaded guilty or were found guilty at trial for crimes connected to the January 6 attack, according to the Justice Department. More than 645 defendants were ordered to serve some jail time, with 120 convicted of using a deadly or dangerous weapon, or causing serious bodily injury to a law enforcement officer during that assault.

Trump told Time he plans to look at “each individual case” and will begin reviewing possible pardons “in the first hour that I get into office.”

Whoops, somebody on his team got to him between the two interviews, right? And it’s good to know his first hours as president will be spent in this self-serving this way, right?

Okay, now let’s check out some other things he said.

As a former Health & Science journalist I have to admit I’ve been horrified by the prospect of the U.S. Senate actually approving Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known anti-vaxxer, tooth decay champion, and junk science devotee, as head of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, which touches on all of our lives in many different important ways.

Kennedy Jr. isn’t a physician or a scientist, but Trump says in the Time interview that he’s asked this booster of quackery to study the safety of childhood vaccines and the rising levels of autism diagnoses, and suggested he may eliminate some vaccines if he views them as “dangerous.” This is basically putting the fox in charge of guarding the hen house.

I respectfully refer you to a 2021 report on Kennedy Jr.’s frightening history in this area by McGill University’s “Office for Science and Society” in 2012.

Kennedy Jr. has been campaigning against vaccines for more than 20 years, dating back to concerns about thimerosal in vaccines, once upon a time a widely used preservative in vaccines. Although no evidence suggests there are safety concerns with the amount of thimerosal used in vaccines, most manufacturers have stopped using it.

Meanwhile, a 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine concluded there is no link between autism and vaccination, a frequent Kennedy Jr. thrust, after reviewing dozens of studies published in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals, along with unpublished studies and statements from medical experts in both the vaccine field and autism.

The institute, by the way, is a nonprofit whose work is conducted by volunteer committees of scientists who are experts in their fields. The committees are chosen to avoid bias and conflict of interest, and their reports are reviewed by anonymous external experts.

But let’s let Kennedy Jr. “go wild” on this particular issue.

The lone study linking vaccines and autism involved just 12 children who received MMR vaccinations, and it was retracted by the journal that initially ran it after it was proven to involve cherry-picked data that was improperly manipulated. Since then, the doctor who did the research, Andrew Wakefield, has been barred from practicing medicine in the United Kingdom.

When asked if he believes autism is caused by vaccines, Trump said he’s “going to be listening to” Kennedy, who he’s “instructed” to study any links between vaccines and autism. He left the door open to eliminating some vaccinations from the childhood vaccine schedule.

He could, he said, “if I think it’s dangerous, if I think they are not beneficial, but I don’t think it’s going to be very controversial in the end,” Trump said of the possibility of getting rid of some vaccinations. “We will know for sure what’s good and not good,” Trump added.

Legitimate scientists and doctors are already absolutely “sure” after decades of study. However, when the fox takes over the henhouse and there’s chickens missing, do we really want to accept the fox’s smiling response that they must have just wandered off? Think about it.

Okay, now let’s go to Trump’s view of the world order. He said he “vehemently” disagrees with Joe Biden’s decision allowing Ukraine to use US-provided weapons to strike inside Russia.

Okay, just so I understand this. Didn’t Russia invade Ukraine and rain down thousands of missiles on civilians there, and haven’t there been questions about North Korea weapons being used by Russia to achieve this? Does he think Russia really wants to go to war with the U.S., the most powerful military force in the known universe, particularly now when much of Putin’s war machine has been eaten up in Ukraine? Putin’s smarter than that

With a straight face, Trump said he’s concerned about how many deaths there have been on both sides in that war, and apparently he’s concerned that Putin isn’t smart enough to avoid a war with the U.S. He then avoided answering a question about people being killed by the Israelis in the Middle East. For Trump, I guess it depends on who is doing the killing, and what folks are being killed.

Oh right, and Trump sees Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian leadership as a model for what he thinks should happen for him in the US. Trump refused to answer if he had been in touch with Putin, saying it would be inappropriate to answer. Let’s get this straight, Trump, one of the most inappropriate humans on the face of the earth, is suddenly worried about being appropriate?

My guess is he’s already offered his buddy Putin a good chunk of Ukraine, an independent country, as a going-away gift.

Trump also once again called for the elimination of the U.S. Education Department, saying education should be completely overseen by the states, which might be a bit scary for parents in some MAGA-controlled states. I’ve gone over the problems with this idea in my previous column here.

Trump also said he may reject spending bills sent to him from Congress if they don’t match the cuts prescribed by a $2 trillion cost-cutting plan being drafted by billionaire advisers Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. And he discounted potential conflicts of interest for Musk, whose private businesses have received more than $15 billion in federal contracts going back a decade, and who stands to have billions more funneled his way in years to come and who has battled for years with federal regulators.

“I think that Elon puts the country long before his company,” Trump said. “He considers this to be his most important project, and he wanted to do it.”

I bet he did. I reviewed some of Musk’s conflicts in a column earlier this month. They’re significant and, frankly, do you wonder if Trump even understands the meaning of the word “ethics?” His whole business history suggests not.

Finally, during the campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to bring down the price of groceries, which was key to his victory. At a rally in August, he insisted that if people voted for him, “your energy costs and grocery prices will come tumbling down.”

But now, in answering the Time reporter, he says he’d like to bring prices down, but “you know, it’s very hard.”

Right.

Campaigning in 2016, Trump said he would repeal and replace Obamacare, but it remains solidly in place. I guess that’s “very hard” as well? In a previous column, I walked through the many, many campaign promises this man has made, and failed to keep. Now, he says his administration’s central theme will be “promises made, promises kept.”

I suspect that in the encroaching TrumpWorld, the only promises he keeps for sure are the ones he makes to himself. What do you think?