No one wanted him there, least of all Knicks fans, but Donald Trump wormed up, in full, red-tie glory and proved that some people are just incompatible with sporting rush

Donald Trump with his granddaughter Kai Trump at the Madison Square Garden. Screen shot: chaznba/YouTube

It’s a triumph for American history. The national archive will be very busy in the coming week. Madison Square Garden (MSG) finally achieved its true, ultimate purpose last night: providing a stage for a sitting U.S. president, the first to ever grace the NBA Finals with his unwanted presence. One can only imagine the sheer, breathless magnitude of the moment as the legislative and executive branches converged to witness a ball being bounced back and forth for two hours before being tossed into open-ended baskets. Surely, this was the pivotal event that future generations will reference when defining the pinnacle of the American democratic experience. But, as it turned out, the Donald’s grand return to MSG was less a triumphant homecoming and more a high-decibel, communal exercise of what the media called “thunderous boos”. The Garden finally offered Donald Trump exactly what his ego demands: a captive audience. But what his presence truly tends to generate is a unified, sweet roar of aversion. It was probably contempt of the court, too.

Mr Trump looked rather dour this evening, but he forced himself to smile throughout the jeer. He held his right hand in a limp, half-hearted salute of what NS men who not even recognise as hormat ke hadapan. He boasts that he has “built the strongest military in the world”, but he could not raise his little hand for a firm gesture of respect. He desired the optics, but without the discipline of form, just like how he loves the military, but was never ever part of it. It is a testament to the versatility of the human imagination that Mr Trump’s brief stint at the New York Military Academy—a private boarding school, not an official branch of the U.S. Armed Forces—is treated by his supporters as the functional equivalent of a career in the trenches. The “love” of the military, however, has always been aesthetic, not experiential. As with his presidency, the appearance of authority is treated as equivalent to the accrual of it. His presence at the MSG was a symbol of his ability to conquer his self-declared “home state”, a concerted effort to plant a flag in enemy territory and dare New Yorkers to notice it.

Initially, it was not certain that Mr Trump would appear on the Jumbotron, but he did, and he was immediately booed. Screen shot: yahoo news/Instagram

When a leader has to vanquish the very territory that birthed his identity, it signals that the brand has become unyoked from its origins. A conqueror does not make the mistake of dressing like the throng he intends to subjugate. It is a fundamental rule of empire: if you want to crush a spirit, you must at least have the decency to do it in a tailored silhouette that suggests you aren’t planning on doing any of the actual lifting yourself. Mr Trump was in his usual lumpy navy suit and the red, flaccid exclamation mark of a tie. This time, he wore a new accessory, his granddaughter Kai Trump, the replacement teenaged Ivanka Trump, who is now too busy developing accidentally-discovered islands to be by daddy’s side. Sure, sports executives wear suits to games, but they don’t look like it’s another sleepy day in the oval office. The MSG arena vibrated with sure kinetic force, all sweat-wicking polymers and raw velocity, yet there the sullen president stood—so aggressively vacuum-sealed into sartorial sameness that he might have been a display model in a bankrupt 5th Avenue store. He didn’t come to watch a game; he came to stage one. The suit was his armor, his refusal to sweat with the crowd.

Spectacle in and from New York is nothing new to Americans. But watching the performance from outside the U.S., it is hard not to see the absurdity of it all. Mr Trump was the guest of James Dolan, the owner of the Knicks and head of Madison Square Garden and, most notably, a donor to Mr Trump’s political campaigns. The president did not have to pay for the astronomically priced tickets even when he could easily afford the monumental amounts charged. For someone with a free pass, the whole city had to bend around him. Downtown closures, motorcades, barricades, cancelled outdoor watch parties, and the kind of security footprint you’d expect for the G7 Summit. And this was only one head-of-state watching a basketball game. Even before the Knicks played, the real performance was the lockdown of New York itself. Instead of a historic night of basketball celebration, the evening was thoroughly overshadowed by James Dolan’s political guest list and severe logistical failures. The home team eventually lost (Spurs 115, Knicks 111), so did the city—its streets barricaded, its rhythm broken, its spectacle hijacked. It is no surprise that people are calling it a “Trump curse”. Folklore logic it may be, but in a city where Donald Trump insists he’s beloved, the irony is sharp. His presence didn’t bless the Garden. Rather, it hexed it.