Today, as Donald Trump makes his first visit to the city since becoming president, New Yorkers, both inner borough and out, may wish to take solace in the knowledge that he is so reviled here that he will be forced to forego a night spent in the comfort of his own bed in his beloved Trump Tower.

Surely, Donald had been looking forward to sleeping in his Louis XIV-styled triplex on Fifth Avenue for the first time in more than three months. Instead, he will escape to another of his palatial retreats, one in a friendlier zone on the far side of the Hudson in New Jersey. This change of plans is due in no small part to the sizable demonstrations planned against him. Huge crowds of angry sign-waving people do nothing to help presidential poll numbers.

But as comforting as this small victory may feel, New York—despite casting an overwhelming majority of its votes for his rival—has a massive and unacknowledged collective guilt when it comes to Trump’s creation.

If we now have a petulant, spoiled child as president, much of the blame rests here.

This man, who is so disdainful of the ethos and spirit of democracy, did not crawl out of some backwoods swamp. The president, who now sits in the Oval Office displaying an ignorance of essential American history that would embarrass a fifth grader, is not the product of what Jimmy Breslin used to cruelly taunt as the “low I.Q. states.” No, the current leader of the free world, who openly trifles with people who practice “Sieg Heil!” salutes before the mirror, is one of very our own. He was hatched right here in Gotham, the first native New Yorker since Theodore Roosevelt to be elected to the White House.