The skunk at the Madison Square Garden party

My train to New York last Friday was supposed to arrive in the early evening, but thanks to a delay, I walked out into a Penn Station full of absolutely deranged Knicks fans. Game 2 of the NBA finals was underway, and the blue-and-orange-clad crowd was so big and hyped it took me a while to fully grasp that the Knicks and Spurs were playing not upstairs but nearly 2000 miles away. I finally found a working exit and dragged my suitcase and two wide-eyed children out into the streets of fans, clustered three deep around the window of every bar to watch the TVs inside. “I saw eighteen police cars!” one of the children shouted. There were actually more like hundreds, but the cops, too, were standing on the sidewalk craning their necks to see the next play. (Admittedly, this video of the NYPD gearing up for Game 4 has a slightly less jocular feel.) The impression overall was one of a giant street party, no ticket required.

By Game 3 on Monday night I was no longer in the city, but it was depressing to learn that all those bustling blocks around Madison Square Garden were closed. Donald Trump had decided to attend the game. It seemed up till the last minute like he might change his mind, but there he was in the end, being forcefully booed every time the cameras cut to him, and ultimately succumbing to sleep, as he so commonly does in his public appearances these days. How confident do you have to be to pick a televised napping spot in a room where everybody hates you? 

What was striking about the reception of Trump at the game was that he, the president and a New Yorker, had made himself truly unwelcome in New York. This is not easy to do. People talk a lot of trash about the city, and certainly living there can be difficult and expensive, but socially it has always felt to me like an embrace. Everything is normal there: crying on the train, wildly eccentric fashion, genuine celebrities, people down on their luck, visitors from all over the world. Also, despite what the Magnetic Fields propose in the song “’12 You Can Never Go Back to New York,” you really can. When I moved back to Brooklyn in 2017 after a hiatus of a few years, I sat at the bar of a beloved local restaurant that first night and confided in the bartender that I’d just returned, and he immediately poured me a glass of wine, his compliments. That’s how New York typically treats its prodigal children, even ones who are not president.

These days, Trump and his various acolytes seem to specialize in going places where they are not wanted. Why did Nick Bilton, the tech columnist sent by “heterodox” oligarch lackey Bari Weiss to run CBS’s “60 Minutes” despite his lack of TV news or management experience, take the job “knowing that [he] will never be welcome here”? Why are Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner targeting an ecologically sensitive area in Albania for a massive tourist development project, sparking days of protests? Why has the calm city of DC been flooded with unnecessary National Guard members, wandering around sweating in their camouflage and waving to children? I suppose there’s nothing surprising in someone who has faced so many credible accusations of rape and sexual assault conducting his whole presidency as a hostile takeover. But if you have any acquaintance with norms or manners—or even just politicians’ usual desire to be liked—it’s hard not to feel disoriented.

Meanwhile, we are extending a cordial welcome to all the wrong people. The country now essentially has a whites-only refugee policy, limited to white South Africans who claim they are fleeing anti-white racism. Even as we try to host the World Cup, the United States has blocked the entry of Somalia’s Omar Abdulkadir Artan, who was last year named referee of the year in Africa, after grilling him for hours about a militant group in Somalia to which he says he has no connection. And Artan is not alone. “Fans from more than a quarter of the countries taking part in the World Cup are facing travel bans, tighter restrictions or high visa rejection rates,” the BBC World Service reported after analyzing the data.

What connects all these incidents is the way the Trump administration and its fellow travelers have put themselves in charge of who’s in and who’s out. If they want to enter your space, they enter. If they want to bar the door to you, they bar it.

On one hand, there is something ironic about a man who has spent much of his life in the “hospitality industry” being so profoundly uninterested in hospitality. On the other, it’s always worth remembering that Trump did not first make the news by owning hotels or golf clubs. His first mention came when the Department of Justice charged him with illegally barring Black renters from his and his father’s properties, in a New York Times story headlined “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City.” Today, Trump has survived that reproof to make a lapdog of the Department of Justice. But the city of New York—and a growing majority of the country—is booing his racist gatekeeping, and giving him only such a welcome as he deserves.

Up until three-quarters of the way through Game 4 last night, it seemed as though Trump might somehow have hexed the Knicks for good. But whether because of Wu-Tang at halftime or Taylor Swift courtside or the fans burning sage, the Knicks turned the fourth quarter into one of the craziest comebacks I’ve ever seen. If it could happen for them, why not for America?  

Two updates on U.S. detention camps:

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