GREENVALE, N.Y. — President-elect Donald Trump, largely ensconced at Mar-a-Lago in recent weeks, will make a rare appearance outside his Florida resort to accept the “Patriot of the Year” award at Fox Nation’s Patriot Awards on Thursday night.
Trump, who has been announcing job picks as he builds out his administration, will travel to New York’s Long Island for the annual awards ceremony from the Fox News streaming platform. The event is being hosted by Fox host Sean Hannity, a friend of Trump’s who stepped in after the president-elect nominated Pete Hegseth, the original host, as defense secretary.
The annual awards “honor and recognize America’s finest patriots, including military veterans, first responders and other inspirational everyday heroes,” according to Fox.
They are meant to honor “unsung heroes” who never get the credit they deserve, Hannity said as he kicked off the ceremony, with categories including the “Fox Nation Award for Service to Veterans” and the “Fox Nation Culture Warrior Award.”
Trump wrote on his Truth Social site earlier this week that he looked “greatly forward” to receiving the Patriot of the Year award, an honor he called “so nice!”
Among those recognized last year were bestselling author James Patterson, five Nashville police officers who responded to the Covenant School shooting in 2023, and Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, the founders of the conservative parental rights group Moms for Liberty, which emerged in 2021 and drew attention for its efforts to strip mentions of LGBTQ+ identity and structural racism from classrooms.
Trump’s award marks the culmination of Fox’s reembrace of the president-elect, who has had an up-and-down relationship with the network in recent years.
The network paid $787 million in 2023 to settle a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems over false claims by Fox personalities who echoed Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him through mass voter fraud. For more than six months ending in spring 2023, Fox had what many considered a “soft ban” on Trump appearances, its leaders looking to move on. But when it became clear that voters did not want to, Fox and its personalities were quick to embrace Trump again.
Individual personalities have undergone their own journeys: Former Fox host Megyn Kelly drew Trump’s ire in a 2015 debate for her sharp question about his treatment of women; now she’s a popular podcast host and Trump supporter. The Dominion lawsuit uncovered emails in which former Fox host Tucker Carlson spoke disparagingly of Trump, including saying he “truly can’t wait” for Trump to become an ex-president. They’ve since made amends.
Through it all, Trump has been quick to take to social media to criticize Fox for content he deems insufficiently loyal.
Trump has begun to emerge more in public since spending most of his transition so far behind closed doors at his club in Palm Beach, Florida. This week, he made an unannounced appearance at a memorial service for three Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office deputies who were killed in a car crash last month.
And this weekend, he will travel to Paris to join other world leaders and dignitaries for a ceremony to celebrate the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral, which was devastated by a fire five years ago.
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AP Media Writer David Bauder contributed to this report.
