President-elect Donald Trump, the real estate businessman and political novice whose election campaign made the entire world take notice, has been selected as TIME’s 2016 Person of the Year.
The magazine revealed its choice Wednesday on TODAY.
"To be on the cover of Time as Person of the Year is a tremendous honor," Trump told Matt Lauer in an interview after the reveal.
The president-elect did however take issue with the magazine's choice to refer to him as "President of the Divided States of America."
RELATED: Donald Trump: Mitt Romney is still in the running for secretary of state
"When you say 'divided states of America,' I didn’t divide them," Trump said. "They’re divided now, there’s a lot of division. And we’re going to put it back together."
Every year, TIME editors select the person — or idea — who has most influenced the news and the world in the past year, for good or ill.
"So which is it this year: Better or worse? The challenge for Donald Trump is how profoundly the country disagrees about the answer," TIME managing editor Nancy Gibbs wrote in a magazine essay.
Trump beat out 10 other finalists, including his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. TIME declared Clinton their runner-up, and she was also the top pick among TODAY viewers.
This will be Trump’s 10th time on the magazine’s cover, and all but one have been since August 2015. His first appearance on TIME was in 1989.
"For reminding America that demagoguery feeds on despair and that truth is only as powerful as the trust in those who speak it, for empowering a hidden electorate by mainstreaming its furies and live-streaming its fears, and for framing tomorrow’s political culture by demolishing yesterday’s, Donald Trump is TIME’s 2016 Person of the Year," Gibbs wrote.
Last year’s recipient was German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Trump was a runner-up. The year before that, 2014, the Person of the Year were the Ebola fighters.
The magazine has made the designation every year since 1927, when aviator Charles Lindbergh was chosen as the first Man of the Year. The title was amended to Person of the Year in 1999.
MORE: TIME's Person of the Year 2015 is German Chancellor Angela Merkel
Over its history, TIME has bestowed the title to many presidents, political leaders and industry trailblazers who often view the designation as an honor. However, the magazine also has selected notorious recipients in the past, including Adolf Hitler in 1938, Joseph Stalin in 1939 and 1942, and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, because of the impact they had on the world at the time.