Time magazine cover for the Nov. 10, 2025 issue. President Donald Trump complained about it on Truth Social, saying the "picture may be the Worst of All Time."

Will President Donald Trump make Time Magazine's Person of the Year for the second year running? It would be his third, after being named in 2016 and 2024.

Trump is certainly in the running. Time's Person of the Year is not a popularity contest, and the Time annual cover is traditionally someone who dominated the year or caused the most cultural, scientific or geopolitical change for good or bad.

However, other front runners could include Pope Leo XIV, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, among many others.

This could also be the third time in the nearly 100 years Time has named a person of the year that isn't a person.

Time's Person of the Year odds

Polymarket, an online betting site that allows people to bet on practically everything, gives artificial intelligence a 47% chance of gracing Time's annual cover, as of the morning of Dec. 9. Huang is next, with 18%. Trump is running 5th with 3%. Here are the top contenders, so far.

  1. Artificial intelligence: 47%
  2. Jensen Huang: 18%
  3. Sam Altman: 13%
  4. Pope Leo XIV: 7%
  5. Donald Trump: 3%
  6. Benjamin Netanyahu: 3%
  7. Charlie Kirk: 2%
  8. Zohran Mmdani: 2%
  9. Xi Jinping: 1%
  10. Jerome Powell: 1%
  11. Elon Musk: 1%

This is all speculation, as Time does not release the identity before the issue comes out sometime in December.

Has Time's Person of the Year ever gone to a non-person?

Yes. In 1982, Time chose the computer ("Machine of the Year") to herald the dawn of the Information Age. Time also named the Endangered Earth in 1988.

Over the years, many classes of people have been named, including The American Fighting-Man, U.S. Scientists, the Baby Boom generation, the Apollo 8 astronauts, the Middle Americans (conservative small-town residents), American women, the whistleblowers who helped expose the corruption in WorldCom and Enron, the American soldier, the Good Samaritans (organizers behind the 2005 Live 8 concerts), protestors around the world in 2011, Ebola fighters, women who spoke up during the MeToo movement, journalists who faced persecution, and the Spirit of Ukraine.

You could be Time's Person of the Year

If you were alive and online in 2006, the Person of the Year was you. The collective you.

That year, Time acknowledged the work of all the people who were collaborating on creating communities and adding information and entertainment to the internet. So, congratulations.

What is Time Magazine's Person of the Year?

Since 1927, Time Magazine has chosen one person, group, concept or object that "for better or for worse ...has done the most to influence the events of the year."

Nearly every U.S. president since then has been named, many world leaders, three popes, and Taylor Swift (twice, counting her presence on the MeToo "Silence Breakers" issue).

The people chosen are often controversial, as influential doesn't mean good and the designation is not meant to be an honor, just an acknowledgement of the person's influence. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Ayatollah Khomeini were all named in previous years.

Has anyone ever been named Time's Person of the Year three times?

Yes, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was named as president-elect in 1932 and twice as president in 1934 and 1941.

Trump's feud with Time

Trump recently spoke out against Time magazine's coverage of him. Not for the article about him, which was overwhelmingly positive over his attempts to end hostilities in Israel and Gaza, but for the cover.

"Time Magazine wrote a relatively good story about me, but the picture may be the Worst of All Time," he said in a post to Truth Social, the social media site he owns. "They 'disappeared' my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one."

"Really weird! I never liked taking pictures from underneath angles, but this is a super bad picture, and deserves to be called out. What are they doing, and why?"

Trump has graced the cover of Time multiple times over the years. In February, the cover showed an illustration of Trump sweeping everything off the Resolute desk in the Oval Office with the headline, "He's Back." In May, Time's story was on Trump's first 100 days in office. The cover showed a closeup of Trump looking into the camera, with the words "Dealing with it."

"Since he began running for president in 2015, perhaps no single individual has played a larger role in changing the course of politics and history than Trump," editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs said when Time chose Trump for 2024.

Contributing: Kinsey Crowley, Mary Walrath-Holdridge, USA TODAY

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Will Trump be named Time Person of the Year again? Here are the odds

Reporting by C. A. Bridges, USA TODAY NETWORK - Florida / Palm Beach Post

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