• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, January 16, 2017

You only get one guess, and if you don’t get it, then you’re really not very good at guessing.

Yes, president-elect Donald Trump loves the cover of Time featuring president-elect Donald Trump as “Person of the Year,” probably because it has his picture on it.

This unsurprising fact was confirmed by a recent photo of Trump’s desk at his headquarters in Trump Tower, where a stack of the Time magazine issue proclaiming him Person of the Year is given pride of place directly in front of anyone sitting across from The Donald.

Sharp-eyed Trump watchers noticed the stack in a photo of Trump meeting with Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, tweeted by Trumka on Friday.

Trump’s proclivity for displaying stacks of magazines with himself on the cover is well known — and there is a long history. Time first put the real estate tycoon and reality TV star on its cover back in 1989.

Of course, the sensitive mogul generally omits uncomplimentary magazine covers, including the numerous barbs of now-defunct Spy magazine, and more recently, Time covers depicting him in “meltdown” and “total meltdown” — which remarkably failed to prevent his electoral victory.

However, it’s worth noting the actual content of the magazine’s coverage appears to matter less to Trump than the image itself.

For example, the Time Person of the Year cover epitomizes Trump as “President of the Divided States of America,” a somewhat ambiguous identification, and the accompanying profile by Michael Scherer states: “Instead of painting a bright vision for a unified future, he magnified the divisions of the present, inspiring new levels of anger and fear within his country.”

Scherer added: “In the weeks after his victory, hundreds of incidents of harassment, many using his name—against women, Muslims, immigrants and racial minorities—were reported across the country.”

Trump’s love for the cover image and disregard for the chin-pulling musings within encapsulates the media dynamic that helped him win the White House. By piling on obvious criticisms of Trump — and giving him unprecedented free air time — the news media helped get his message to a sympathetic audience.

That's the only thing that mattered in the context of America’s already polarized political landscape, where the chance of persuading opponents is essentially nil.

Some in the media seem to understand this, including Scherer, who quotes Trump’s previous campaign manager, Paul Manafort: “We always felt comfortable that when people were criticizing him for being so outspoken, the American voters were hearing him, too.”

Happily for Trump, he can look forward to appearing on many more magazine covers in the years to come. There will probably be articles, too.