This image provided by Time magazine, shows the cover of the magazine's Person of the Year edition with President-elect Donald Trump in New York. Time editor Nancy Gibbs said the publication’s choice was a “straightforward” choice of the person who has had the greatest influence on events "for better or worse." (Nadav Kander for Time Magazine via AP)
This image provided by Time magazine, shows the cover of the magazine's Person of the Year edition with President-elect Donald Trump in New York. Time editor Nancy Gibbs said the publication’s choice was a “straightforward” choice of the person who has had the greatest influence on events "for better or worse." (Nadav Kander for Time Magazine via AP) Credit: ap photograph

Donald Trump has been named Time’s “Person of the Year.”

“It’s a great honor,” the president-elect said on NBC’s Today show on Wednesday morning. “It means a lot, especially me growing up reading Time magazine. And it’s a very important magazine, and I’ve been lucky enough to be on the cover many times this year — and last year. But I consider this a very, very great honor.”

Trump has long been obsessed with having his face on the cover of magazines, something that happened more and more often as he won early polls, then Republican primaries, then the nomination, then the presidency. Trump keeps stacks of these magazines in his office and jokes that he doesn’t have time to read all of them because there are so many. He has said that he’s like a “supermodel, except, like, times 10.”

With this mindset, Time’s “Person of the Year” became Trump’s holy grail.

Although the magazine featured Trump — or a melting version of his face — several times on its cover, the magazine passed on naming him “Person of the Year” in 2015. Instead, it selected German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom the magazine credited with opening her nation’s border to hundreds of thousands of refugees and managing Europe’s debt crisis.