The president-elect called the recognition "a great honor."
Donald Trump is TIME's Person of the Year for 2016.
The U.S. president-elect, who beat all odds to first trounce fellow Republicans then shock the world with a general election win over Hillary Clinton last month, succeeds the 2015 honoree, German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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"It’s a great honor," Trump told the Today show's Matt Lauer on Wednesday.
TIME writer Nancy Gibbs explained that the magazine chose Trump, in part, based on the "scale of his disruption."
"This real estate baron and casino owner turned reality-TV star and provocateur — never a day spent in public office, never a debt owed to any interest besides his own — now surveys the smoking ruin of a vast political edifice that once housed parties, pundits, donors, pollsters, all those who did not see him coming or take him seriously. Out of this reckoning, Trump is poised to preside, for better or worse," Gibbs wrote.
First runner-up to Trump was his vanquished general election foe, Clinton. "Clinton represents both the tantalizing possibility that a woman can be President and the obstacles that a woman candidate must overcome," TIME's Charlotte Alter wrote.
Behind Clinton, TIME listed "The Hackers" who swayed politics, infuriated businesses and put the privacy of millions of Americans in jeopardy with countless security breaches that made headlines in 2016.
"True bombshell revelations were few and far between. But that wasn’t the point. In this style of conflict, the objectives are to provide distracting grist, however innocuous, for the media mill and, more important, to sow doubt about the integrity of the electoral system," TIME wrote.
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TIME reveals their decision each December and has named a Person of the Year since 1928.
Former honorees include Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, Pope Francis and Adolf Hitler.
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