Our Bad

A year after his victory, New York still doesn’t like Trump, but we made him.

- Mark Harris

WE DIDN’T VOTE FOR HIM. We can show you the numbers if you want. We keep explaining to foreigners—meaning anyone who doesn’t live in our city—that we loathe him, that we reject him, that we never liked him, that we were the first to know him and the first to understand who he was.

We know, though, when we’re alone with our thoughts, how unconvincing that sounds. We know that, on some level, he is ours.

We can’t shake it. This is the quiet mortification of being a New Yorker one year after the election—the confession we don’t make, the guilty dread that shrouds us. The thing that all of America now has to endure came out of our clay. This gold-speckled golem who was slammed and slapped and shoved together out of the mud and sweat and smell of other people’s underpaid labor, this human vanity plate, this miasma of bombast and rudeness and noise and threat? He grew right out of the arrogant, peacocking slogans we deploy to sell this city to the world—the city that never sleeps; if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere; we tell it like it is, and if you don’t like it, get lost. He is our smug exceptionalism without our redemptive irony. We look at him and cringe, because he is New York, but the wrong New York. A caricature of our city at its worst.

We pretend he’s not a real New Yorker. He’d never eat a street hot dog because, my God, the dirty water and the rat parts and the germs. He’d never take in a Mets game because, my God, the crowds and the beer smell and have you seen the bathrooms? He’d never go to Coney Island or Orchard Beach because, my God, that’s for people who can’t afford to do anything else, and do you know how long the trip back to the city is?