FT Person of the Year: Donald Trump

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

85% : Trump was greeted warmly by Europe's notables, including Britain's Prince William.
82% : This year Trump is again the FT's pick because of the remarkable nature of his return to power.
66% : At his first inauguration in 2017, Trump spoke of the "American carnage" caused by globalisation and China.
62% : The Financial Times made Trump its "Person of the Year" in 2016.
62% : "In early December, Trump travelled to Paris to attend the reopening of Notre-Dame, France's grand cathedral.
61% : "Trump is a classic Gemini," says Anthony Scaramucci, a New York financier who first befriended Trump in the 1990s and who was briefly Trump's White House communications director.
60% : Abroad, Trump also vows a new iconoclasm.
59% : That came three days after Trump had launched his 2024 campaign at a sparsely attended event in Mar-a-Lago.
58% : At home, Trump 2.0 promises a new era of sweeping deregulation and tax cuts.
54% : Trump has also taken far more detailed interest in the staffing of his administration.
54% : His agenda includes creating the so-called Department of Government Efficiency run by Elon Musk, the world's richest man, and Vivek Ramaswamy, another billionaire and former Republican candidate.
51% : Their primary goal is to deconstruct the administrative state.
50% : The flurry of cases against Trump only propelled his public ratings.
49% : But there is a large contingent of Washington observers who think (perhaps wishfully) that Trump, who turns 79 in June, will take to the golf course even more than before.
48% : "We are living in the age of Trump," says Roger Stone, a longtime Trump political and business collaborator, who has known him since the late 1970s.
47% : Only once before, with Grover Cleveland in 1892, has a US president been returned to office for non-consecutive terms.
46% : Trump sees the world as a jungle in which the US has been taken for a ride by freeloading allies.
41% : "Trump has prepared a flurry of "day one" moves that would put any previous incoming presidency into the shade.
40% : His son-in-law Jared Kushner has been telling people that he has never seen Trump as happy as he has been since November 5.
39% : Trump's round-the-clock auditioning at Mar-a-Lago has no parallel to earlier transitions, including Trump 1.0.
39% : Two days later Trump released an advertisement for his branded men's perfume "Fight, fight, fight" against a photo of him and Jill Biden making friendly chit chat.
38% : Pete Hegseth, his pick for secretary of defence, has built a Fox TV persona on calling out political correctness and alleged un-American sentiments at the Pentagon.
38% : He was also hugged by Macron in spite of Trump having just appointed Charles Kushner, a convicted felon and father-in-law to his daughter Ivanka, as US ambassador to France.
37% : To parts of blue-collar America, Trump was a victim of the same forces they despise -- overzealous prosecutors and self-righteous liberals.
37% : "Why do you think Trump got so many young male African-American and Hispanic votes?" asks Bannon.
37% : Lacking a plan after the election, Trump appointed a team of so-called adults to run his administration.
36% : "This time Europe laid out the red carpet for Trump," says Stone.
33% : To some minorities, including a remarkably large share of young men of all races, Trump was their cudgel against what they consider to be a distinctly gendered new form of political correctness.
32% : "Those who are worried that Trump is coming for them should be worried," says Bannon.
31% : Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, had just called Trump a "despicable human being".
31% : "In March 2023, Trump ignited the base when he vowed that "I will be your retribution".
31% : Instead of Trumpism without Trump, we are seeing Trump with fleshed-out Trumpism.
30% : With Germany in limbo pending its February election, and Emmanuel Macron's French presidency in the balance, Trump will have open season to sow further division in the EU -- a body he has always disdained.
30% : The only link between the two scenarios is that it is Trump who will decide, not his team.
29% : "There are strong grounds to believe that Trump will pursue revenge against his domestic adversaries.
29% : In the 24 hours after Trump was found guilty in New York over his misuse of hush money payments to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, he raised a record in small donations.
27% : On January 20 2021, Donald Trump boarded Air Force One for what most people assumed was the last time.
27% : It is no longer possible to dismiss Trump as a blip.
27% : Neither did Trump.
27% : "It is impossible to predict what a man without a foreign policy philosophy will do -- Trump is purely transactional," says John Bolton, who was Trump's national security adviser for 18 months in his first term.
27% : Approaching his ninth decade, Trump is at an unconventional age to be presiding over a change in the global order and a realignment in US politics.
25% : It is conceivable that China, which is America's third-largest trading partner but which has by far the largest trade surplus, will strike a deal with Trump.
25% : He looks set to start with a cabinet of billionaires."Never forget that Trump wrote The Art of the Deal," says another Trump acolyte.
23% : Everybody else was writing Trump off.
22% : "Others forecast that Trump 2.0 will spell chaos, not a new order.
21% : Trump and Musk might talk of steep cuts to US federal spending.
19% : "Trump believes he can fix every problem by himself by talking to his counterparts," says Bolton.
18% : Trump has also vowed a purge of generals at the Pentagon and investigations into those who investigated him.
15% : Maga folklore says that Trump was provoked into another run by the Biden administration's "lawfare" against him.
14% : After returning home empty-handed, he was mocked by Trump as the governor of the "great state of Canada" -- a reference to the joke about it being America's 51st state.
11% : A handful of loyalists, notably Steve Bannon, Kash Patel, Richard Grenell, Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro and Boris Epshteyn stuck with Trump over the following months.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.