By Corky Siemaszko - NBC News
The president-elect, Joe Biden, and the vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris have been chosen by Time magazine as 2020 characters. Both were chosen ahead of the outgoing president, Donald Trump, who they already defeated in November in one of the presidential elections. toughest in American history.
The selection was announced Thursday by Lester Holt of NBC News, Telemundo's sister network.
Trump, who continues to make unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and
continues to challenge an election that has already been certified by all 50 states
, was part of the short list of candidates shortlisted by Time.
The other contenders were Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government's top epidemiologist, who survived the White House attempt to discredit him, and health, postal and sanitation workers who risked their lives during the COVID-19 crisis.
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Also on the shortlist were
racial justice movements,
which staged demonstrations across the country after George Floyd's death at the hands of the police, and which Trump repeatedly disparaged and called "thugs" and "anarchists." ".
But in the end, Time's editors decided that Biden, who was former President Barack Obama's vice president, and Harris, the first woman, the first black woman, and the first of South Asian descent to reach that position, were the most influential people. they had in the world for a year in which the presidential race became for many Americans a referendum on Trump's much-criticized performance during the pandemic.
The United States is the country with the highest number of infections and deaths from coronavirus, with 15.4 million more than 290,000 respectively, according to the latest data from NBC News and Johns Hopkins University.
Last year, Time chose teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg as its Person of the Year, much to Trump's dismay.
"So ridiculous. Greta must work on her anger management problem," the Republican president tweeted then, adding that he should "go see a good old movie with a friend! Calm down Greta, calm down."
The magazine has picked a Person of the Year - originally named Man of the Year - annually since 1927. It generally picks an individual but sometimes honors a group of people who made a big impact on the world.
In keeping with the magazine's tradition, Trump was president-elect when he was named Person of the Year in 2016. His predecessors
Barack Obama and George W. Bush
were also named as such twice after winning the election.
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The editors of the magazine chose in 2017 to a group nicknamed
The Breaker Silenci
or
who launched a nationwide trial on sexual harassment allegations against presenting powerful men as the executive dishonored Hollywood movie Harvey Weinstein.
Trump claimed the magazine called him to say he would "probably" be elected for the second year in a row, but he said he "missed the opportunity."
The Time said the conversation never happened.
In 2018, the magazine's editors selected
The Guardians
, four journalists whose work landed them in jail or cost them their lives - Jamal Khashoggi, Maria Ressa, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo - and the Annapolis Capital Gazette, Maryland, where a mass shooting occurred.
Trump, who came in second, wasn't happy with that choice either.
"I can't imagine anyone but Trump" as elected, Trump said.
"Can you imagine anyone other than Trump?" He questioned.
