Here's this by Heather Delaney Reese:
Earlier tonight, as the Star-Spangled Banner was being sung on the court inside Madison Square Garden before Game 3 of the NBA Finals, Donald Trump stood high above, his hand raised in salute, with his granddaughter just behind him. And as the anthem played, the broadcast cameras moved from player to player before eventually finding Trump. Within seconds, a wave of boos began rolling through the crowd, growing louder and louder until it seemed to overwhelm everything else. Thousands of people packed into one of the most famous arenas in the country made their feelings known all at once.
And as it was happening, Donald Trump stood there smiling as the noise washed over him, either unable to accept the sheer volume of boos being directed at him, or simply pretending they weren’t happening at all. But his granddaughter knew exactly what was happening. As the booing grew louder, the smile left her face, replaced instead by awkward blinking and a look of deep discomfort.
That contrast is the whole night in a single frame. He could not register what the room was telling him as he stood with his granddaughter, who read it instantly. She understood the noise. He did not, or would not. And the thousands of people making that noise understood the exact message they were sending.
They wanted him to know that he was not welcome and certainly not “loved” like Trump likes to say he is. Trump came tonight as the first sitting president to ever attend an NBA Finals game, the guest of Knicks owner James Dolan, and his attendance forced a security lockdown across midtown Manhattan, a perimeter of closed streets and shuttered blocks built around one man. And the thing that got sacrificed for it was the free watch party that was supposed to take place right outside the arena. The Plaza33 gathering, the one where thousands of fans who could not afford a ticket still come down, stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers, and watch the game together on a giant screen. That was the part that belonged to everyone. That was the part that cost nothing and meant the most. And it was canceled, in coordination with the Secret Service, because he wanted to be there. The official line is that this was a permitting decision and had nothing to do with the president. Nobody believes that, because everybody understands that the lockdown existed for one reason only.
This is why other presidents have largely stayed away from moments like this. Not because they do not like basketball, but because they understand that their arrival turns a celebration into a security operation, that it takes a night that belongs to a city and makes it about them. It is also extremely costly for everyone involved. Much of that cost being paid by taxpayers, the same ones he was inconveniencing. Trump does not understand that, or he does not care, which amounts to the same thing. And at one point, he even fell asleep. That’s the guest of honor at a celebration he had ruined, asleep through the thing thousands of people had been locked out of their own streets to make possible.
And then, before the game was even over, he left. After shutting down streets, rerouting traffic, surrounding the arena with security, and turning what should have been a celebration of New York basketball into a presidential spectacle, he walked out early. The Knicks eventually lost, snapping their thirteen-game winning streak, and plenty of fans were quick to blame Trump. A lot of New Yorkers would have preferred he had stayed home.
And it was, by every available measure, one more bad night at the end of a long run of them. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll completed today put his approval at thirty-five percent, dragged down by the war he launched on Iran and the gas prices people feel every time they fill their tanks. The numbers show that he is underwater across the board. On the economy, only 29 percent approve. On Iran, only 29 percent. Only 22 percent approve of the cost of living, and just 21 percent approve of inflation or rising prices. He is deeply unpopular, no matter what he says or how hard he tries to make us believe otherwise.
And watching this latest spectacle, I found myself feeling something I don’t particularly like admitting. Numb. Because it felt so predictable. Like just another day in Trump’s America. Another outrage. Another embarrassing moment. Another thing that would have been absolutely shocking before Trump, that barely surprises us anymore.
And I don’t like that feeling. Because we shouldn’t be used to any of this. We shouldn’t be rolling our eyes and moving on to the next story. We shouldn’t be treating any of it as normal. But that’s what happens when the chaos never stops. After a while, even the outrageous starts to feel routine. And that’s dangerous. Because with Trump, nothing is ever just a joke, a distraction, or a bad moment. There is always something bigger underneath it. A purpose. A goal. A movement pushing forward. Maybe not one Donald Trump personally planned out himself, but one being carried in his name.
So when we see him being reckless or when we see the country turn on him, neither are the hard part anymore. They are, in a strange way, the easy parts now. The hard part, the part I have been growing more concerned about, is that even the people who see it clearly, even the people who care, are getting tired of looking. I feel it in the comments. I feel it in myself. There is a particular exhaustion that comes from witnessing something terrible every single day and being asked to keep witnessing it, to keep your eyes open, to not let it become background noise. I am learning just how much a human body can absorb before it begins to turn away. And I am not talking about the people who never cared. I am talking about the ones who did, the ones who do, the ones who are simply worn down to the bone.
I think about that a great deal, because forgetting and exhaustion are not really two different things. Forgetting is just exhaustion with a longer name. A country does not lose its memory all at once. It loses it one tired person at a time, one turned-away face at a time, until the thing that everyone once saw clearly becomes a thing nobody can quite remember the shape of.
And that frightens me more than almost anything, is the added layer that we are about to start losing more of the people who remember it best. There is a generation among us, in their 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and beyond, who did not learn about fascism from a book or a documentary or a post like this one. They learned it in their soul. They learned it from a parent who came home from the war changed, or who did not come home at all. They learned it from the silence at the dinner table, from the relatives whose names were spoken carefully or not spoken at all. From grandparents who told stories for future generations to keep telling. And within the next few decades, maybe sooner, the last of them will be gone, and the warning they carried will stop being memory and become history. And history is so much easier to wave away than a scar.
I think about my own grandparents, and I think about all the questions I never asked. I think about the answers I long to have today. Like what it was like to live through the Great Depression, through WW2, through so many pivotal moments in not just the history of the United States, but the world. I wish I had asked them a hundred things while they were still here to answer. But I was younger, and I did not yet know the questions I would someday wish I’d asked.
I think about how we will look back on these times, the ridiculous ones like what he did tonight, and the ones far more meaningful, where lives were lost and our collective futures forever changed. And I think about what we can do, right now in this moment, to stop it. Even when so many of us are tired?
And the answer always comes back to the same thing. We have to figure out how to stay in the fight without burning to the ground. And maybe the most important thing we can do is be there for each other. To build community around the people who still care about this country and the world. The people who still care enough to show up. To support each other and take turns. We do not ask any one person to carry the whole weight of this alone, because that is exactly how the weight wins.
And we document. We share what is true. We refuse to let the daily horror calcify into background noise. And we recognize that the way memory travels has changed, whether we like it or not. Our kids are not getting their history at the dinner table the way some of us did. They are getting it on a screen, often from less-than-ideal teachers. The folklore that used to pass between generations in a living room now passes through the internet.
And that is exactly why it matters so much when an older person, someone who remembers, shares what they have seen and lived through. Especially online. Because that is the torch being passed in the only room where so many of our kids are actually standing. That is memory finding a new place to live.
And it’s not just those in their golden years. This is something all of us can do. We can share what we know. We can share what we have lived through. We can leave something behind for future generations to find and learn from years from now. I can’t imagine the joy I would feel, or the lessons I would learn, if I somehow discovered lost diaries from my long-gone family members. But we can do that now for the people who come after us.
And this fight is not just being fought by us. It’s also continuing to be fought in the courts as his agenda keeps coming apart. The boos at the Garden were just the icing on an already spoiled cake. These fights are not necessarily being won in the Supreme Court, which has shown us repeatedly whose side it is on. But with the lower courts, the district judges, the individual men and women in robes who keep looking at what this administration is doing and keep naming it correctly as outside the law. Because this weekend, a federal judge struck down the administration’s assault on wind and solar, vacating an IRS rule that had quietly rewritten the definition of when a clean energy project “begins construction,” a technical-sounding change designed to strip those projects of the tax credits that make them possible. The judge called it arbitrary and capricious, which is the law’s way of saying it was never about anything but spite. And today, in Boston, another federal judge threw out his $100,000 fee on H-1B visas, ruling that it was never a fee at all but an unlawful tax, and that a president has no power to invent a tax that Congress never passed. These are people, exhausted in their own way, under enormous pressure, choosing to hold the line anyway. What is standing between us and total collapse right now is not the system functioning on its own. It is individual people refusing to look away. It is recognition, institutionalized in a courtroom.
And we are going to need them. We are going to need every one of them, because the fight that is coming is not really about wind energy or visa fees. It is about the vote. We already know what he is willing to do to an election he does not like. We have watched him try to overturn one. And the midterms are barreling toward us, and somewhere between now and then, whether it is before the votes are cast, or during the counting, or after the results come in, he is going to test those courts again, harder than he has tested anything yet. The fact that they are holding tonight, on the small things, is how we know they may hold on to the big things too.
So if you are tired tonight, I understand. I am too. But the booing in that arena was not the sound of a country giving up. It was the sound of thousands of people who still recognized exactly what they were looking at and refused to pretend otherwise. That is the torch, still lit. And as long as we keep handing it to one another, one tired hand to the next, it does not go out. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
