Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and four years in office contained so much daily weirdness, wackiness, and horror that the human brain couldn’t comprehend it all. As Trump gets close to the White House again, “That Happened” brings you the surreal moments you may have forgotten — or blocked from your memory.
Donald Trump has told a lot of big lies in his day, many of them quite consequential. But sometimes, it’s the small yet brazen mistruths that really drive home his core instinct for duplicity. Such is the case with Trump’s repeated claim that he won the “Michigan Man of the Year” award, an honor he invented in the mid-2010s.
According to CNN, Trump began bragging about the fake award during a campaign speech in Sterling Heights, Michigan, on November 6, 2016:
“During my speech, all I talked about is what Mexico and these other countries are doing to us. And especially what they’re doing to Michigan,” he said. “That’s all I talked about. And I was criticized. They said, ‘Donald, speak about something else.’ I said, ‘No. What’s happening is horrible.”
Perhaps it was Trump’s shocking win in the state two days later that boosted this anecdote into heavy rotation. By 2019, he had told it at least seven times, with slight variations and flourishes along the way. For instance, at a New Hampshire rally that year, he seemed incredulous that he’d earned the made-up honor, per CNN:
“In fact, five or six years before I even thought about running, for whatever reason they named me Man of the Year in Michigan. I said, how come? I didn’t even understand it myself, but I was named Man of the Year,” Trump said Thursday.
The outlet reported that Trump continued to tell this tale on the campaign trail in Michigan in 2020, and, per Business Insider he was back at in 2022, once again in the Great Lake State:
“I was named a long time ago, I was named — did you know this? — a long time. I don’t know, your chamber of commerce, somebody, who the hell knows what it is? They named me the Man of the Year in Michigan,” Trump said during his remarks.
Unlike some of Trump’s minor falsehoods, like his enduring strong-men-with-tears-in-their-eyes series, this one was easily disproved: No such award existed, even though Trump had received plenty of others over the years. Nevertheless, news outlets made valiant but unsuccessful efforts over the years to get to the bottom of what the hell Trump might have been talking about.
That changed in 2019, when multiple articles on the subject inspired someone with a plausible theory to break his silence. As the Detroit News reported:
Former U.S. Rep. Dave Trott on Friday offered a possible back story to the origin of the claim that dates to 2013 when Trott organized the Oakland County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day dinner in Novi and invited Trump to speak.
Trump came and addressed the crowd of 2,300 to 2,400, speaking for about an hour. Detroit News coverage of the dinner did not mention any awards bestowed upon Trump. Years later, Trott introduced himself again to Trump in March 2017 during a roundtable with automotive CEOs held at the Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti Township. At that point, Trump indicated he remembered Trott and, referring to the Lincoln Day dinner, told those gathered about receiving the “Man of the Year” award in Michigan.
Trott elaborated that “I was the organizer and chair of that, and we weren’t handing out Man of the Year awards and never have. That’s not part of the club’s mission.” Nevertheless, he recalled, he wasn’t about to rock the boat:
When Trump mentioned the Man of the Year award at the 2017 roundtable, Trott just nodded, he recalled. “Because I sure wasn’t comfortable correcting him in front of a group of automotive CEOs. It may be would’ve been embarrassing to him. Maybe not. I don’t know. It would have been to me,” Trott said. “I just nodded and said it was a great speech and pivoted to that. Which it was. The speech was very well-received.”
Trott declined to seek re-election in 2018, and later became a public critic of Trump, calling him “psychologically, morally, intellectually, and emotionally unfit for office” in 2019.” The Detroit News story that reveals his connection portrays him as a man unburdened by the need to play nice with his party’s leader. And yet, further down in that story, he muses — in a lighthearted tone, but still — that the sensible way to avoid any future confusion on this issue is simply to make Trump’s lie into a reality:
He’s not 100 percent sure where Trump’s claim originated but suggested “the easiest solution is for the governor to just give him the award.”
“Wouldn’t that once and for all resolve the controversy?” said Trott, chuckling.
But the Republican Party’s seemingly undying loyalty to Trump is no joke. Four years later, as Trump was digging himself out of the political wilderness, the Oakland County, Michigan GOP — that’s the county Dave Trott once represented, and which Trump has lost both to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden — decided to finally make things right. At a Lincoln Day Dinner in June 2023, the group bestowed Trump with a notably grandiose title: “Man of the Decade.” The prize may be a pathetic sop to Trump’s ego, and it may only be a regional honor, but it is, at least, one that actually exists.
In conclusion, Trump still hasn’t won Michigan’s “Man of the Year” award.
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