Frontpage Magazine’s Man of the Year: Donald J. Trump

That MAGA counterrevolution has already begun and Trump hasn’t even settled back into the Oval Office yet.

By Mark Tapson, Frontpage Magazine

Each year for nearly a century, TIME Magazine has been identifying the man or woman who has, for better or worse, done the most to shape the world and the headlines over the previous twelve months.

As its Person of the Year for 2024, the TIME editors chose the once and future President Donald J. Trump, whom they rightly note has played a larger role in changing the course of politics and history than anyone else over the last decade.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that TIME’s “Person of the Year” is usually but not necessarily intended to celebrate the honoree; hence, past selections have included such notorious figures as Hitler and Stalin.

The magazine’s commentary on Trump makes it clear that its editors see him in the same light as those evil icons.

They describe him as a grievance-mongering, vengeful, raging authoritarian and convicted criminal who intends to smash “the norms of liberal democracy” which TIME believes are upheld by the Democrat Party.

They voted for Trump as Person of the Year because they cannot deny his influence and impact, but they obviously deeply resent that this “strongman” who threatens not only to derail the Left’s freight train toward one-party hegemony, but to remake the entire entrenched political order, simply will not go away no matter what obstacle they throw in his path: relentless lawfare, a coordinated media campaign to demonize him as Hitler 2.0, even assassination attempts.

Speaking of the latter: it’s difficult not to see divine intervention, or the hand of destiny if you prefer, at work in Trump’s miraculous survival of the shooting at a Butler, Pennsylvania rally earlier this year, where a slight turn of his head at the sound of a sniper’s first shot resulted in the second bullet merely nicking his ear rather than lethally shattering his skull.

In a moment that will live in history despite the media’s attempt to send it down the memory hole, Trump then rose up with a pumping fist amid his Secret Service cover, exhorting the crowd to “Fight!”

It was this moment that singularly demonstrated his fearless pugnacity, galvanized his supporters like never before, and arguably sealed his election victory.

Each year FrontPage Magazine too reviews the past twelve months and selects a Man or Woman of the Year, and like TIME, for 2024 we too have chosen Trump.

But unlike TIME, our award is meant to unreservedly celebrate the honoree. Past recipients of the title, for example, include freedom fighters Geert Wilders (2008), Stephan K. Bannon (2016), and – last year – a collective choice, the Israeli Defense Forces soldier.

Unlike TIME and the rest of the mainstream Left-wing news media, we at the Freedom Center see Donald Trump as a patriot and a man of the people.

Kamala Harris’ running mate Tim Walz, who tried to sell himself to voters as a relatable, Midwestern, regular guy, struggled to understand after the election how he and Kamala could have lost to a New York City billionaire.

Part of the answer is that Americans found Walz and Harris to be inauthentic, out-of-touch radicals representing a Party that put ideology over country, whereas they believed Trump truly loves this country and his fellow Americans, truly believes in American exceptionalism (you may recall that former President Barack Obama dismissed American exceptionalism as, well, unexceptional), and has a vision for propelling America out of its Democrat-driven decline back to preeminent superpower status. Voters wanted a leader to Make America Great Again.

And so Trump, spuriously denied a reelection victory in 2020, crushed Harris, in the electoral college and popular vote, to make a jaw-dropping comeback against all odds and claim a mandate from the American people for hope and change.

Not the sort that Obama had peddled – a “fundamental transformation” of the United States – but the sort that patriotic Americans have been craving ever since Obama began implementing his globalist, post-American agenda.

The stunning red landslide in November left his Democrat and Never-Trump haters demoralized, shell-shocked and exhausted. They knew they were in trouble pitting the epically incompetent, media-inept Harris against the comeback kid Trump, but deep down they could not process the unfathomable possibility that their nemesis could ever actually re-occupy the White House. They are still trying to process it.

Democrats and establishment Republicans alike both fear and hate Trump because he is not a lifelong careerist politician but a political outsider who ran (and won) on taking a wrecking ball to the Deep State and the status quo.

But in his first term, Trump struggled to find his footing and to surround himself with the right people; he barely managed to get the draining of the D.C. swamp underway.

This time around, his thinking-outside-the-box picks for his forthcoming administration – e.g. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, and more – show not only savvier instincts but also a bold determination to upend politics-as-usual.

That MAGA counterrevolution has already begun and Trump hasn’t even settled back into the Oval Office yet.

Domestically, Trump – who has vowed to make border security, including the mass deportation of illegals, a Day One focus – has already initiated back-channel discussions with the governments of Mexico and El Salvador to coordinate the deportations.

The Left’s racist DEI programs, which Trump has condemned, that were corroding every institution from the military to corporate America to higher education, are already being rolled back.

Employees of bloated bureaucratic agencies, in the crosshairs of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency commission, are already preparing to jump ship.

Internationally, even CNN acknowledges that “Trump’s victory is forcing a massive geopolitical reassessment. From Europe to Taiwan and Iran to Russia, foreign leaders are gaming out how to deal with the unpredictability of Trump’s return.”

Trump has put the brakes, for example, on our hurtling toward World War III by putting Putin and Zelensky on notice that he will end the war in Ukraine.

Israel, at war on several fronts against the existential enemies of the West, is reassured that it once again has no better ally in the White House, while our enemy China knows it no longer has an American President in its pocket.

Globalist institutions like the World Health Organization, which Trump vows to exit, are panicking that a nationalist is in the White House and they can no longer count on U.S. funding.

These are just a few of the ways in which a new Trump era is poised to radically reset national and world affairs in ways that, as Victor Davis Hanson put it, will herald a return to sanity.

For demonstrating resolute courage in the pursuit of resurrecting American exceptionalism, for loosening the stranglehold the Left has on political and cultural power in this country, for galvanizing and empowering the movement to Make America Great Again – Donald J. Trump is FrontPage Magazine’s Man of the Year for 2024.

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