Trump is set to receive the ‘Patriot of the Year’ award at the Fox Nation event

NEW YORK (AP) — President-elect Donald Trumpwho has been largely entrenched in Mar-a-Lago in recent weeks, will make a rare appearance outside his Florida resort to accept the “Patriot of the Year” award on Fox Nation’s Patriot Awards Thursday evening.

Trump, who has been announces job selection as he builds out his administration, he will travel to New York’s Long Island for the Fox News streaming platform’s annual awards ceremony. The event is hosted by Fox host Sean Hannity, a friend of Trump who stepped in after the president-elect was nominated Pete Hegseththe original host, as Secretary of Defense.

The annual awards “honor and recognize America’s finest patriots, including military veterans, first responders and other inspiring everyday heroes,” according to Fox. They are meant to honor “unsung heroes and real patriots” who “never get any recognition,” Hannity told Fox News Digitalwith categories including the “Fox Nation Award for Service to Veterans” and the “Fox Nation Culture Warrior Award.”

Trump wrote on his Truth Social website earlier this week that he was “very much looking forward” to receiving the Patriot of the Year award, an honor he called “so nice!”

Among those recognized last year was bestselling author James Patterson, five Nashville police officers responded to 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 to its efforts to remove mentions of LGBTQ+ identity and structural racism from classrooms.

Trump’s award marks the culmination of Fox’s embrace 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 suit by Dominion Voting Systems over false claims made by Fox personalities that resonated Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him through mass voter fraud. For more than six months ending in the spring of 2023, Fox had what many considered a “soft ban” on Trump appearances, and its executives sought to move on. But when it became clear that voters would not, Fox and its personalities were quick to re-embrace Trump.

Individual personalities have gone through their own journeys: Former Fox host Megyn Kelly drew Trump’s ire in a 2015 debate for her sharp questions about his treatment of women; now she is a popular podcast host and Trump supporter. The Dominion case revealed emails in which former Fox host Tucker Carlson spoke disparagingly of Trump, including saying he “really can’t wait” for Trump to become ex-president. They have since fixed it.

Through it all, Trump has been quick to take to social media to criticize Fox for content he deems insufficiently loyal.

Trump has started to appear more in the public eye since he spent 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 killed in a car crash last month.

And this weekend he will travel to Paris to join other world leaders and dignitaries in a ceremony to celebrate reopening of Notre Dame Cathedralwhich was destroyed by fire five years ago.

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AP Media Writer David Bauder contributed to this report.