No offense to Greta Thunberg, but who truly warrants Person ’19 honors more than Donald Trump’s Russian master?

Time magazine annually anoints the individual who “for better or worse…has done the most to influence events of the year.” Come on. Who rates higher than Vladimir Putin, influencing for the worse, for the last three years?

This guy’s 11 time-zone economy is punier than Italy’s, but you gotta admire his moxie. He’s out there destabilizing the west on a daily basis, yanking the strings of an American sap who rants about windmills and toilets but dares not tweet about Russia’s globe-trotting assassins. Not bad for a former KGB agent whose Soviet regime literally ceased to exist. I dare you to name another Person of the Year who could successfully pump lies into a president’s thick skull. Give it a try. Knock yourself out.

There’s not nearly enough room on Putin’s Person plaque to list all his impressive accomplishments. Just look at the big picture:

His military intelligence wing launched a “sweeping and systematic” invasion of the 2016 election, and Trump welcomed Putin’s help because the campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” (I’m quoting the Mueller report.) Heck, the report even points out that two pro-Trump rallies in swing-state Pennsylvania were organized by the Russians. Then Russia’s White House beneficiary spent the next two years covering up Putin’s crime, and was duly cited by Mueller for 10 obstructions of justice.

And let’s not forget the triumph Putin pulled off at the ’18 summit in Helsinki. It’s not every day that an American “president,” asked to choose between the consensus of his own intelligence agencies (Russia invaded our election), and the lies of our adversary (Russia did nuthin’), stands up in public and sides with the adversary as its leader looks on approvingly. Top that, Greta Thunberg!

Plus, we’ve got the Ukraine scandal. Somehow, Trump got it into his head that Ukraine – not Russia – was responsible for the ’16 election invasion, despite zero evidence. Trump believed it so badly that he sought to coerce Ukraine into investigating that fantasy. Our intelligence agencies knew it was a fantasy. So who fed Trump that lie in the first place?

“Putin told me.”

Ah. Of course. Former senior White House officials have confirmed that Trump has uttered those very words. Indeed, Trump has now been impeached for indulging Putin’s lie about Ukraine – thus imperiling the security of a fledgling democratic ally in the service of Russian interests, and, best of all for Putin, further weakening America on the world stage. And Trump’s captive Republicans on Capitol Hill, everyone from Devin Nunes to Ted Cruz, are duly parroting Putin’s lie – quite the switcheroo for a party that once prided itself on keeping the Russian bear at bay.

A weak American leader, a suckered GOP… the old Soviet leaders are spinning in their tombs, wondering “Why couldn’t we pull that off?”

Putin even gets to be a pundit. At a spinfest in Moscow the other day, he opined on the American impeachment story. He predicted that the Republican Senate would let Trump off the hook – because all the charges against him are “dreamt up” and “far-fetched.”

And Putin keeps racking up the wins. To paraphrase the poet Sir Walter Scott, what a tangled web he weaves. Rudy Giuliani, at Trump’s behest, is still digging for (fake) Biden dirt in Ukraine – with the financial help of a Putin-connected oligarch named Dmytro Firtash. That news broke in federal court earlier this month. If Putin was a normal leader, he might be tempted to confess that his fingerprints are everywhere – but, as Joseph Goebbels once said, “Truth (is) unimportant, and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.”

So put your hands together for the most worthy Person of the Year, on this most festive week. As he would say, “S rozhdyestvom Hristovym!”

Hey, he earned the award. He can say “Merry Christmas!” any way he wants.