The Knicks’ win was a Trump exorcism

Whatever the opposite of doomscrolling is, that’s how I spent last Saturday night — toggled between Bluesky and Instagram and TikTok to gorge myself on the sight and sound of New York City’s elation after the Knicks became NBA champions for the first time since 1973.

Videos shot from high above Manhattan captured the moment when the city held its breath and, after that, the moment it exploded in ecstatic cheers; cheers that spanned the boroughs, cheers that could be heard across the Hudson River in New Jersey. There were shrieks of relief and whoops of disbelief; tears and fireworks and renditions of “Empire State of Mind” and “New York, New York.” People celebrated on roofs, on fire escapes, at watch parties in parks and bars, at Radio City Music Hall, atop buses, on the balconies of Times Square hotels, on airplanes and in subway cars. A brass band performed in Brooklyn’s Park Slope. Drummers embellished the rhythm of partygoers chanting “Knicks in 5.” The Brooklyn street performer/stuntman Leh-Boy rode through throngs of revelers with a trash can balanced on his head. People cheered dogs in Knicks jerseys. People cheered babies just because.

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“I knew it was going to happen tonight! I could feel it! That’s why I’m here, baby,” exulted actor Giancarlo Esposito from the floor of Frost Bank Center, one of the New York celebrity fans — including Ben Stiller, Timothée Chalamet, Tracy Morgan, John Turturro and, of course, Spike Lee — who traveled to San Antonio to witness the impossible. (Lee promptly flew back home to deliver on his promise of a celebratory block party in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood.) The Tribeca Film Festival’s closing-night party, which followed the premiere of the Alicia Keys documentary “Girl From Hell’s Kitchen,” became an impromptu double celebration.

“I’ve never followed sports but boy this Brooklyn girl had to watch this game and what a joy to see the Knicks win the finals!!! WOW!! Happy Days are here again,” Barbra Streisand posted on Bluesky. Journalist Ahmed Baba, sharing a photo of the baby he and his wife welcomed during the game, joked, “Was tempted to name him Jalen Karl-Anthony OG Baba, but we kept our original choice.” Mayor Zohran Mamdani kept his remarks on social media brief: “Parade. Thursday. Manhattan,” but paired his suit with a Knicks jersey for an early-Sunday appearance on MS NOW.

In January, Mamdani was inaugurated as one of New York City’s youngest-ever mayors and its first Muslim to hold the office. Thursday’s ticker-tape parade is deservedly about the Knicks and their fans, but it’s also about possibility. After decades spent in thrall to Wall Street hedge funders and luxury-housing speculators, what other dreams can a city rich in underdog momentum make real? The Manhattan elites who spent the summer of 2025 catastrophizing about a Mamdani victory have gotten quiet since his victory. Billionaires who pledged to leave New York if Mamdani won (and who rallied equally flush friends across the country to fund his opponents) didn’t follow through, and media outlets that predicted a mass exodus of New Yorkers and a resulting economic devastation moved quickly on to ginning up other panics.

Whatever New York is becoming, 2026 has made one thing clear: It will never again be Donald Trump’s city. Knicks fans felt the vibe souring as soon as Trump announced that he would be attending Game 3 of the finals, and social-media platforms lit up with a determined boo-this-man energy that was in full force the night of the game. Trump got the dog-and-pony show he thrives on  — the barricades that shut down watch parties around Madison Square Garden, the beefed-up entry process that inconvenienced both attendees and MSG staff, the demonstrators holding oversized orange letters that spelled out GO KNICKS F*CK TRUMP. But however powerful he felt as boos rained down and drowned out the National Anthem, the strongman bravado fell apart when Trump was seated and became, as Jimmy Kimmel put it, “the first sitting president to shut down a major United States city so he could take a nap in front of a sold-out crowd.”

No one was surprised that the Knicks lost Game 3. And by the time people gathered for Game 5 watch parties, no one appeared to be wasting a single moment thinking about the president. But watching the game’s jubilant aftermath, it was hard to ignore that nearly everything happening in, above and below the streets was something that the president seemingly hates to see: people uniting in joy. Nearly everything about the celebrations — from the multiethnic throngs of revelers to the folks who projected the game onto buildings so everyone could watch to the Baklava Guy, who spent his own money to set up a watch party in Dimes Square complete with free baklava  — rebuked the dismal picture of America that Trump has painted and repainted since his infamous “American Carnage” speech.

(Jeremy Weine/Getty Images) New Yorkers watch Game 5 of the NBA finals at a watch party held at The Fox Harlem

In the first 18 months of the second Trump administration, the president has been repeatedly confounded by U.S. residents who ignore his regular excretions of racist xenophobia and instead stand up for their nonwhite neighbors. Department of Homeland Security’s rebranding as a cross-country goon squad led to very public rejections by several cities — but things changed when ICE officers were given a green light to assassinate civilians in Chicago and Minneapolis. Amid immigration crackdowns, Trump’s tirades against entire ethnic communities and his erasures of civil rights and Black history have become more and more disjointed. But shambolic recent months of waging unsanctioned wars abroad suggest that maybe pitting Americans against each other no longer pays off like it once did.

Joy is an act of resistance, as poet Toi Derricotte has asserted. But maybe it can also be an exorcism: Tracy Morgan wasn’t the only spectator who likened the unadulterated glee lighting up the city to the final scene in “Ghostbusters.” Trump changed his official state of residence from New York to Florida during his first term, and most of his children eventually joined him. But his presence has haunted New York like a rancid smell, from his 2025 executive order rolling back the state’s environmental protections and halting of the clean-energy project Empire Wind to his never-ending court battles and tariff squabbles.

(Adam Gray/Getty Images) A person dressed as Spiderman dances as New York Knicks fans celebrate their win against San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 of the NBA Finals

Obviously, this is just one way to look at a Saturday night that needed no ornamentation to become NYC history. Not everything that happens in this breathtakingly stupid, needlessly destructive timeline has to double as a statement, and there’s a compelling argument to be made that we shouldn’t let it: Sometimes, we get to have nice things and it’s as simple and as crucial as that.

But I can’t stop wondering if the Knicks’ win has been so resonant because it’s something that a city experienced together — despite every barrier, real and metaphorical, that the Trump name has built in New York. For years, things we witnessed with our own eyes and ears, from January 6 at the Capitol to the murder of Minneapolis protestors, have been minimized, denied and memory-holed by Trump and his administration. The fact that New York watched the Knicks win together, celebrated together and captured moments of it together shouldn’t feel monumental. But the undeniability of the moment makes it precious. Its irrefutability even makes it possible to feel for the Fox News anchors and Trump officials who had to insist that an entire arena booing Trump was really a fiction of our own lying eyes. 

Knicks In 5 was a moment everyone lucky enough to watch it will remember forever, down to where they were and what they were thinking as the final buzzer sounded. Moments like these are the enemy of an authoritarian government, and we need as many of them as possible. Well before he was elected president, Donald Trump sought to turn New Yorkers against each other; sadly, he often succeeded. The people of New York vanquished him with none of the spite he has spent decades sowing, but with grace, love, and pride in their city.