Donald Trump may be obnoxious, but he is not obnoxious in the New York style. Photograph by Andrew Hetherington / Redux

Those of us who live not just in but, in a way, for New York City—who are, from time to time, accused of being professional New Yorkers, who see the point of John Updike’s dictum that anyone who is not living in New York is, in some sense, kidding, who even accept a friend’s melancholy rule that “After the trip ends, you discover that there was never really a good reason to leave New York”—all of us of that dubious kind are disconcerted by Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s recent criticism of Donald Trump, his rival both for the Republican Presidential nomination and in repellent behavior, for embodying “New York values.”

It threw us for a loop not because New Yorkers are not obnoxious, but because Donald Trump’s kind of obnoxiousness has always seemed to be atypical of New York values, and even, to put it bluntly, a kind of tourist trap for people from Texas who think his is anything like the real New York obnoxiousness. (It goes without saying, or should, that the New Yorkers issuing these judgments are invariably not-very-long-ago émigrés from elsewhere, whose roots are still in a small town in Jersey or a luncheonette in Kansas City or a farm in Ontario. This is one of the things that makes us obnoxious.)

Trump has, from the beginning, had a very doubtful relationship with New York values. When he was first emerging—or pushing his way—into the spotlight, more than thirty years ago, a cover story in GQ had him referring to Sixth Avenue as the Avenue of the Americas. No New Yorker calls Sixth Avenue the Avenue of the Americas. Only real-estate developers call Sixth Avenue the Avenue of the Americas. Actually, only real-estate developers from Queens call Sixth Avenue the Avenue of the Americas. (Anti-Queens snobbery is, of course, part of New York values, though this is changing, rapidly, just as Brooklyn has changed from where your parents came from to where you dream of escaping from your parents.)

What, though, did Senator Cruz mean, or intend to mean, by the dig? He meant, presumably, that Trump was shifty in a way that New Yorkers are supposedly shifty, slick in a way that New Yorkers are supposedly slick, dissembling as New Yorkers supposedly dissemble, and likely to be an unreliable partner to small-town types. Trump has a bridge to the past to sell—but that bridge really takes you right back into Wall Street, where he and his ilk wait to fleece you once again.

Some of that may, in its way, be true. But Trump’s style of obnoxious is not New York’s style. The essence of New York-obnoxious values is insularity and aggressiveness. Obnoxious New Yorkers do not take private jets to Atlantic City or Vegas; they take their Jaguars and BMWs out on the Montauk Highway on weekends, and then try to race down the emergency lane. The premise of New York’s obnoxious values is not boastfulness but a sense of entitlement so pervasive that it doesn’t feel the need to boast—that ruler-of-the-universe kind of certitude. Guys who boast all the time are guys from the outer boroughs. Donald Trump, an interloper whose spiritual home is someplace in midair, aboard that private jet—accompanied by his Slovenian-model wife, an honest-to-God actual billionaire, and four yes-men—and whose Trump Tower, into whose shopping mall no actual New Yorker has ever wandered, is a kind of independent Vatican City of vulgarity in the middle of Manhattan, taking Bonwit Teller’s old location in vain, may be obnoxious, but he is not obnoxious in the New York style.

And then, if New York values are so anti-Republican, it’s hard to figure why so many New Yorkers are subsidizing right-wing Republicans like Ted Cruz. David J. Koch, after all, is an echt New Yorker, even sticking his name in to replace that of New York on the New York (State) theatre at Lincoln Center. New York has always been distinguished for right-wing opportunists of the Cruz kind—Rudy Giuliani, for instance, who was truly typical of a certain set of New York values, including the value of rising to his best self in a crisis, and then trying to use the crisis for his own political advantage. Until very recently New York raised and gave to the world as many obnoxious right-wingers as it did obnoxious progressives. Richard Nixon won the state in ’72 by almost eighteen per cent (!) There were Al D’Amato and George Pataki; people now forget that it was not so long ago that New York state voted for Ronald Reagan. For that matter, Heidi Cruz works for Goldman Sachs, albeit in the Texas office, but if Goldman Sachs is not New York in exile, nothing is.

One thing that is striking is what Cruz did not mean. For decades, centuries, the accusation of being “very New York” or “too New York” or “having New York values” meant, simply and frankly, too Jewish. Even “Seinfeld,” more than twenty years ago, was thought a dubious commercial proposition, with one NBC executive, having at least the courage of candor, saying flat-out that the show was “too New York, too Jewish,” leading to the endlessly hilarious outcome that the most Jewish character ever presented on American television, Phil Silver’s Sergeant Bilko aside, was given a fig-leaf Italian name, George Costanza.

Jewish New Yorkers may feel a bit hurt, a bit abandoned by Cruz not calling us out. Nixon, the patron saint of all charmless right-wing opportunists, once said, “What it is, is it’s the insecurity … It’s the latent insecurity. Most Jewish people are insecure. And that’s why they have to prove things.” God knows Nixon was a man who knew from insecurity.

But, here it is: a ruthless opportunist is attacking New York without even throwing any shade at all at the Jews. For the first time in modern history, a right-wing opportunist has attacked New York values without being even subliminally anti-Semitic.

Indeed, one wonders if the attack doesn’t have a little bit of longing buried in it, as attacks so often do. It now turns out that, after pretending to have financed his Senate campaign all by their lonesome, Texas style, Cruz and his wife actually got a loan from Goldman Sachs, where they had a brokerage account, to do it. (A loan that they then somehow failed to report on all the appropriate campaign filings.) Like Nixon, who came racing back to New York as soon as he could, the weird thing is that Ted Cruz seems actually to be the bearer of a good many New York cultural markers for someone who doesn’t actually live here. The Ivy League snobbery, the shamelessness, the Goldman Sachs connection—as with California’s Nixon, one has a strong suspicion that when the hurly-burly’s done, the Cruzes will be headed here to practice corporate law and make corporate speeches. He’d be right at home. It wouldn’t be a bit surprising to find him living at Trump Tower.