In a stunning display of bipartisanship, the crowd at the NBA Finals booed the 45th President of the United States with the same vigour usually reserved for referees, traffic wardens, and anyone who dares suggest the Knicks might one day win a title. Donald Trump, a man whose relationship with popular opinion is roughly akin to a moth’s relationship with a flame, turned up at Madison Square Garden expecting a hero’s welcome. Instead, he got the kind of reception usually reserved for a man who’s just nicked your cab in the rain.
Let’s be honest, this is hardly a surprise. The man has spent the better part of four years using the presidency like a reality TV show, a platform for grievance and self-congratulation. He has insulted war heroes, mocked the disabled, and separated children from their parents at the border. And yet, when he walks into a basketball game, he looks genuinely shocked that the natives aren’t throwing palm fronds at his feet. This is a man who could walk into a hospital and complain about the service, a man who could attend a funeral and ask why the eulogy isn’t about him. His entire life is a desperate, furious scramble for the love he never gets, a love that slips away like sand through fat, orange fingers.
The booing reached a crescendo when the camera panned to his face, a face that looked like a startled hamster who has just been told that the wheel has been confiscated. The crowd, a mix of New Yorkers and basketball fans, seemed to speak with one voice: a long, rolling, cathartic ‘Booooo’. It was a sound that echoed through the arena, a sound that will probably be replayed on loop in the White House, a sound that will join the other haunting noises reverberating around his gilded mind.
Of course, the Trump team will spin this. They will say the crowd was paid by George Soros. They will say the boos were actually chants of ‘U-S-A’. They will say anything to avoid the terrible truth that the man is as popular as a sausage roll at a bar mitzvah. But the truth is plain. The truth is that in the city that never sleeps, they have finally woken up to the fact that the emperor has no clothes. He has no grace, no dignity, and apparently no basketball IQ, because the Knicks weren’t even playing.
This is the state of modern politics. A man who has never been booed in his life is suddenly confronted with the sound of democracy. It is the sound of people who remember when America was great, not because of who was in charge, but because of who we were. It is the sound of a nation waking up from a nightmare, blinking, and realising that the monster under the bed is actually the man in the White House.
So let the booing continue. Let it rain down on him at every public appearance. Let it be the soundtrack to his final days in office. And let it remind him that in America, the people are the boss, and they have just fired the most incompetent, divisive, and frankly embarrassing employee in the history of the country. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need a gin. A large one.
