Let’s Go Knicks & F*ck Donald Trump.

This team, this story, this moment is much bigger than he will ever be. And he knows it.

Donald Trump thinks he’s going to move on New York City like a bitch tonight.

But just like he said in the infamous tape that should’ve been the end of it all, he’s not going to get there.

He’s never been able to get there.

He’s never going to get there.

Not now.

Not ever.

And Lord knows that deck-stained, stupid, slack-jawed sexual predator son of a bitch is trying.

Because thanks to that malignant, megalomaniacal, gold-plated emotional black hole and his insatiable addiction to ruining everything truly fucking good, the FREE watch party outside MSG tonight was cancelled.

The jubilant, jackhammer-loud, joy-drunk gathering where the real fans, the ones who have been priced out of an arena where tickets now cost somewhere between a kidney and a beachfront property on Cape Cod, were supposed to come together and celebrate one of the biggest nights in New York sports in more than a decade.

Gone.

Because Donald Trump, a broken fucking toddler in perpetual need of a cookie, and his asshole friend who unfortunately owns Madison Square Garden decided the biggest night in New York sports in more than a decade needed a little extra Donald Trump.

Of course they did.

Because God forbid an entire city spend one night celebrating something that has absolutely nothing to do with him.

God forbid thousands of people gather beneath the neon glow and within the concrete canyons of Midtown, wrapped in jerseys and playoff superstition, swept up in the cacophony of combustible chaos that is New York sports fandom, that borough-spanning collision of hope, panic, prophecy, swagger, pot smoke, cardiac distress and civic delirium that takes hold whenever this city starts believing something extraordinary might actually happen.

Instead, they built a fucking wall around the Garden.

A wall.

Around the Garden.

I grew up less than an hour from New York City. I spent countless nights at the Garden with my dad and my sister, way up in the blue seats watching Rangers games where the players looked about the size of Flintstones vitamins from our vantage point. Every Christmas list started at Gerry Cosby’s. Messier. Richter. Leetch. If it had a Rangers logo on it and it came from Gerry Cosby’s, I wanted it.

A few decades later I found myself climbing those same escalators with my own kids. Last year I got lucky enough to score tickets for my son and me to a playoff game. We sat in the literal top row, above the Bridge, so high we were practically in low-Earth orbit. The crowd was feral. The building shook. We still have the cups.

The Garden is just part of my DNA.

If you grew up around New York or New Jersey, you know exactly what I mean.

Which is why I never thought in all my life I’d see a wall built around it.

I certainly never thought I’d see a wall built around it to keep New Yorkers away from it.

Especially not for someone like Donald fucking Trump.

Because if you’re from here, you know we’ve had his number for a long fucking time.

But I digress.

Because there it sits.

A big giant black fence standing between the fans and the Garden.

Fences.

Checkpoints.

Security perimeters.

Street closures.

An entire security apparatus dropped into the middle of Manhattan at a cost that probably rivals the GDP of a small island nation because an adjudicated rapist, business fraud, convicted felon and destroyer of all things joyful caught sight of one of the few genuinely beautiful things happening in America right now and decided, once again, to force himself upon it.

Because Donald Trump has wanted little more in all his life than to bend the sprawling, unruly organism that is New York City to his will.

And once upon a time, based on his businesses and buildings, he could have made the claim that he had, in fact, conquered it.

But he never captured her heart.

Not then.

Not now.

Not ever.

Because New York doesn’t work that way. It certainly doesn’t surrender itself because some insufferably polyurethane-orange asshole spent a few decades slapping his name on buildings and demanding applause.

New Yorkers never trusted him. They saw the bullshit. They saw the bravado. They saw the act for exactly what it was.

He thought being a big shot meant peacocking all over the city and pissing his name on everything that didn’t move. He mistook attention for affection, recognition for reverence, saturation for stature. He genuinely believed that if he wrapped enough buildings in giant brass letters and inserted himself into enough headlines, New York would eventually embrace him.

Instead, New York spent decades rolling its eyes. It laughed at him. Mocked him. Doubted him. Treated him less like a titan and more like an overgrown attention addict forever trying to convince the room he mattered as much as he desperately needed to believe he did.

And eventually they chased his ass all the way to Florida.

He may have been born and raised in New York, but he was never a New Yorker, something any true New Yorker would happily confirm.

The living mosaic of steel and glass that is New York City can’t really be conquered by anyone because New York isn’t a possession. It’s a force. A collision of ambition and heartbreak and reinvention, millions of lives hurtling alongside one another through triumph and disappointment and everything in between.

Donald Trump is incapable of understanding any of that.

Especially not from atop a gilded, unimaginative, charmless tower.

He’s always resented the fact that New York refused to yield to his advances. He did to the city what he boasts about doing to women. He tried to force it to accept his dominance one uninspired skyscraper at a time.

“When you’re a star, you can do anything.”

Grab ’em by the city block.

New York was never going to be his, so what he decided instead was to do whatever he could to make everyone think it was. And because his mind very much operates like a child’s, a cartoonishly over-the-top, gold-plated gaudy spectacle dripping in faux opulence was the end result.

The Trump brand.

Tacky ostentatiousness cosplaying as elegance.

But it wasn’t just the stuff he needed.

For the born-into-riches son of an emotionally distant, work-obsessed real estate tycoon who was intensely critical of his children, it’s always been about creating and maintaining the illusion. None of it was accidental. None of it inadvertent.

He has been crafting this fiction for as long as we’ve known his name.

And New York never bought it.

Not for a second.

New York has carried a lot over the years. They’ve carried the smoke and grief of September 11th. The floodwaters of Hurricane Sandy. Refrigerated trucks filled with the bodies of their fellow citizens during COVID. They’ve carried losing seasons and near misses and all the other small heartbreaks sports fans willingly sign themselves up for because hope, even when it hurts, is still hope.

And now this city has this team.

A team that has given an exhausted city permission to believe again.

Permission to hope.

That is what makes this moment bigger than basketball. It spills out of bars and apartment windows and office buildings and bodegas. It pours through every borough and every neighborhood. It cuts clean across income brackets and religions and politics and all the other little boxes people spend so much time trying to sort themselves into, the very fault lines Donald Trump has spent the last decade prying apart, inflaming, exploiting and widening for personal and political gain.

He’s spent his entire life trying to soothe whatever emptiness drives him by finding every fracture, every raw nerve and every vulnerability in everybody else and jamming his thumbs into it. Taking every crack in the foundation and hammering it wider. Convincing millions of people that the stranger across the street, the family down the block, the person praying differently, voting differently, loving differently, was the source of their unhappiness while he stood back collecting power from the wreckage.

And then along comes this Knicks team.

This stubborn, joyful band of lunatics playing their asses off for each other and for a city that has fallen head over heels for them, pulling millions of people into the same emotional current, giving strangers something to cheer for together, something to rally around together, something to celebrate together.

A team that got underestimated, discounted, dismissed, overlooked, counted out, misread before they were ever properly seen.

And what people have fallen in love with isn’t just the winning.

It’s the way they’ve done it.

Especially right now.

This team keeps reminding people of something that a lot of very powerful people seem determined to make us forget.

That nobody does anything worthwhile alone.

That every meaningful thing human beings have ever built, every family, every friendship, every neighborhood, every community, every city, every movement, every championship, has always depended on people showing up for one another.

And that’s what makes this so profound.

Because sitting on one side of this story is a megalomaniac who has spent his entire life insisting that everything revolves around him, a man who turns every conversation into a monologue, every institution into a vehicle for self-promotion and every accomplishment into a monument to himself.

And sitting on the other side is this team.

A collection of human beings whose entire success depends on the exact opposite idea.

When one guy can’t go, somebody else steps up.

When one guy falls behind, somebody else carries the load.

When one guy has a bad night, somebody else finds a way.

Over and over and over again.

Not because any one of them is bigger than the team.

Because none of them are.

And there is something beautiful about watching an entire city fall head over heels for that at a moment when so many people seem determined to sell us the opposite.

And New York understands that. New York has always understood that. People aren’t just watching a team. They’re watching a reflection. They’re watching a group of stubborn, imperfect, determined human beings refuse to quit on one another, and somewhere in that fight they recognize their families, their friendships, their neighborhoods, their coworkers, the people who carried them through the hardest days of their own lives.

And for a few precious hours, the noise falls away. The arguments. The outrage. The exhaustion. The feeling that everything is broken.

People gather in bars and living rooms and crowded apartments and packed trains and street corners and they all lean toward the same dream at the same time. Not because they agree on everything. Because they agree on this. Because they see themselves in this.

Because this team earned that faith.

They earned it through sacrifice.

Through perseverance.

By refusing to let each other fall.

Together.

Which is why Donald Trump can build all the fences he wants. He can close streets. He can drag a security perimeter through Midtown. He can spend the rest of his life trying to parasite his way into moments that were never about him.

And don’t get me wrong.

I hope they boo this malevolent melted circus peanut so loudly I can feel it fifty miles away through the soles of my feet.

I want Ruby’s ears to perk up.

I want every dog in the neighborhood to start howling.

I want dolphins off Long Island suddenly breaching the surface because they think the planet just shifted a few inches to the left.

I want the word “boo” to petition Merriam-Webster for a revised definition that consists entirely of a photograph of Donald Trump’s face.

I want the hospital where he was born to quietly amend his birth certificate so that under Cause of Existence it simply reads: “Boooooooooooooooo.”

I want it so loud, so sustained and so inescapable that it leaves a residue.

A film.

An audible stain.

I want it rattling around in his skull while they change his diaper.

I want it echoing through Mar-a-Lago at three o’clock in the morning like the ghost of every New Yorker who ever rolled their eyes at his bullshit.

I want it clinging to him for the rest of his days so that every time he opens his mouth, somewhere beneath the words, beneath the whining and the bragging and the bullshit, you can still hear the faint hum of that boo reverberating off his sagging flesh.

But even that won’t be the story.

He’s an irrelevant footnote at most.

This light is too bright.

This thing is too alive.

This moment is too beautiful.

He cannot diminish it.

He cannot taint it.

He cannot make it his.

Because years from now nobody is going to remember the fence.

They’re going to remember the fight.

They’re going to remember the comeback.

They’re going to remember the way this team refused to quit on one another.

They’re going to remember how it felt when an entire city leaned toward the same dream at the same time.

The feeling was hope.

The feeling was unity.

The feeling was triumph.

The feeling was New York believing again.

So fuck Donald Trump.

And let’s fucking go New York.

And with that, today’s song:

I love you guys!

Stay strong, stay safe, and let’s go KNICKS!!

💙 Jo

Also, I just wanted to once again extend my gratitude to this amazing community.

A few years ago I couldn’t afford to buy Abbie a single donut. Yesterday, I took the kids to a day game at Yankee Stadium (we won).

That’s because of all of you. I don’t say it enough, but I’m grateful for that and for you, every single day.

If you know me, you know that I’m a single mom and this little Substack of mine is how I take care of my kids and pay my bills.

My writing will always be free. If you’re a free subscriber and you’ve ever thought about upgrading to paid, I’d really appreciate it. It’s what makes all of this possible. 🙏🏻

Also, I use Ground News every day because I’ve stopped taking headlines at face value. It shows how the same story can be framed in completely different ways depending on who’s reporting it, who funds them, and what they want you to take away. You can compare coverage, spot bias, and see what each side conveniently leaves out.

I rely on it for my own research because I want the full picture — not the version filtered through billionaire interests. And as a woman, I genuinely appreciate that it’s women‑founded, which matters in a media world still dominated by the same powerful voices.

If you want that kind of transparency too, you can get 40% off the Vantage plan I use here: 👇
https://groundnews.com/jojo