In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.

Time magazine will award its Person of the Year soon. And the front-runners, according to Polymarket, are artificial intelligence, Pope Leo XIV, New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, entrepreneur and OpenAI officer Sam Altman, and Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia.

So, basically, three of the five front-runners are either AI itself or someone AI-adjacent, such as Altman and Huang. Pope Leo would be good for selling magazines — new popes in the past have outperformed on that front. And Mamdani would certainly appease Time’s readership, which is profoundly liberal at this point.

But it’s also obvious that President Donald Trump should always be a top consideration every year as long as he’s president, given that the award is about who has had the strongest impact on history or who represented the year most, according to Time’s own criteria. Given how impactful the first year of Trump’s second term has been, it is an easy case to make: He essentially closed the border, is carrying out mass deportations, ignited a tariff war resulting in better trade deals for the United States, and made his tax cuts permanent. Gas prices are at four-year lows, Iran’s nuclear capabilities have been decimated, and the peace deal in Gaza is holding. That’s a strong impact on history.

All of that said, the late Charlie Kirk is the best choice for this award posthumously. His........

© Washington Examiner