The president-elect took to the stage in New York on Thursday, one of his few public appearances since winning the election.
President-elect Donald Trump accepted the Patriot of the Year award on Thursday at an event organized by Fox Nation.
The event—hosted by Fox News host Sean Hannity in Long Island, New York—also honored several others, including actor and evangelist Kirk Cameron; General Dick Cody, who used his own helicopter to deliver supplies to people after Hurricane Helene; and Jonathan Diller, the New York police officer who was killed during a traffic stop in Queens. Stephanie Diller, the officer’s widow, received a standing ovation and thanked Trump for his support.
Fox News personalities—including Jesse Watters, Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro—also appeared as guests or speakers.
Trump took the stage to accept the award, marking one of his few public appearances since winning the election against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Following a live performance of Lee Greenwood’s „God Bless the USA“, the president-elect’s signature entrance song, Trump reflected on his recent bid for the White House in a 10-minute speech, arguing that the country was already seeing the fruits of his victory.
Trump also proposed plans to change how elections work, which included abolishing mail-in ballots in favor of one-day voting and voter ID laws. He referenced the conversations he had with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, which followed his proposal to impose a 25 percent tariff on all imported goods from two of the U.S.’s top trading partners unless they did more to tackle illegal border crossings and drug trafficking.
For most of the speech, the president-elect discussed his plans to tackle illegal immigration, claiming once again that his first term in office saw the lowest numbers of illegal immigration in U.S. history. While the number of Border Patrol migrant encounters between ports of entry at the southern border reached a low of 11,127 during Trump’s presidency, in April 2017, it was not a historic low.
Below is a transcript of Trump’s speech.
„Well, I want to thank everyone. This is quite a group. I have so many friends sitting around here. There’s one—he was calling me early on. He was saying: ‚Why are you going through this process? You know he’s gonna win.‘ He’s big. He’s strong. I will never fight you. I’m gonna tell you that. But right from the beginning, right? Right from the beginning. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Great guy.
„So how about Sean? Is Sean just great, you know? And he said every single thing that I was going to say. And what the hell, I can’t say it again. But he’s a special guy. He’s been my friend for a long time. I probably shouldn’t say a ‚friend‘, but he is really a friend. He’s a friend to the country, and I just wanna thank Sean Hannity. He’s a great guy, and his ratings are very good, too, which is very important—which is very, very important. And you really do. You have incredible people at Fox. You have incredible people at every level of Fox really—a couple I don’t like, but that’s all right. I shouldn’t name them, should I? I don’t think so. I shouldn’t.
„But you know, we had an incredible—we had just a spectacular election. They were thinking it was going to be close, and it wasn’t close. We won the popular vote by millions and millions of votes. We won all seven swing states. And we won the most votes ever gotten—by millions—by a Republican candidate. And I think I can say also a Democrat candidate, but I won’t bother getting into that. We had tremendous—it just was a tremendous day, a tremendous night, a tremendous period of time. Seventy-two days. It really started 72 days before. No day off, no play, no golf, no nothing.
