After graduating from New York military academy in 1964, Donald Trump had dreams of attending film school in California.

“I was attracted to the glamour of the movies,” he wrote in The Art of the Deal. “But in the end I decided real estate was a much better business.”

Two years at the Wharton School in Philadelphia aside, that brief flirtation with Hollywood is the closest Trump ever came to leaving New York – until he became the 45th president of the United States and moved to Washington DC in January.

Since taking office, he has surprised many by staying away from the city that made him, while his wife, Melania, and young son Barron have remained in Trump Tower in Manhattan.

But on Thursday, Trump will return to his home city for the first time since becoming president.

He might not like what he finds. Despite having spent almost 70 years of his life in the Big Apple, stepping out on the town, cultivating and manipulating tabloid newspapers, and slapping his name on anything that didn’t move, he is widely unpopular in New York City.

Trump will be appearing with the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, aboard the USS Intrepid, an aircraft-carrier-turned-museum, in an event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Coral Sea – a naval battle waged by the US and Australia against Japan during the second world war.

But blocks away, thousands of people will be staging a mass protest against the president and his government.

“We want him to know, and we want the world to know, that Trump’s values are not New York values,” said Joe Dinkin, a director with the progressive Working Families party and one of the organizers of the demonstration.

“Trump has spent his first 100 days demonizing immigrants and Muslims and pushing a plan that would take healthcare away from millions of people,” Dinkin said. “We don’t want him to use a military setting, with New York City as a backdrop, as a kind of congratulatory press conference. We want the story to be about his real record.”

The president may well be expecting a hostile hometown reception.

Trump’s election sparked weeks of protests outside Trump Tower, where the president-elect was very publicly vetting people for his cabinet. The tower, with the president’s name displayed in large gold lettering, had become a focal point for those fearful of what his reign would bring.

The day after Trump’s inauguration, more than 400,000 people marched up Fifth Avenue towards the president’s home, while just this Saturday, hundreds of people held a “100 days of failure” rally outside the 58-story skyscraper.

That Manhattan has been the center of the anti-Trump movement is likely to be particularly galling for a man who has made the borough one of the obsessions of his life.

In The Art of the Deal, his insatiable desire to be a somebody in Manhattan is one of the few consistent themes. Trump grew up in a mansion in Queens but would sneak across the river on weekends.

“I believed, perhaps to an irrational degree, that Manhattan was always going to be the best place to live – the center of the world,” Trump wrote. He was desperate to expand his father’s huge but exclusively outer-borough real estate business into the hub of the city.

“I gotta go into Manhattan. I gotta build those big buildings. I gotta do it, Dad. I’ve gotta do it,” Trump recalled telling his father, Fred Trump.

Photograph: Mapbox, OpenStreetMap

He was also keen to engage in New York’s high society – and in The Art of the Deal wrote about his numerous attempts to become a member of Le Club, a prestigious spot frequented by socialites, actors and sports stars. In the 1980s, he began planting stories about himself in New York tabloids – sometimes calling up reporters pretending to be his own publicist to brag about actors and celebrities who wanted to date him. He wanted to get his name out, to be famous, to make it in the city that never sleeps.

During his primary campaign, Trump boasted about his popularity using a New York metaphor. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump told a crowd in Iowa in January 2016.

That may have been true in some parts of the country. But in December, just a month after his election, a Quinnipiac poll showed the president’s favorability was just 23% in his home city, with nearly 70% of New Yorkers having an unfavorable view of him.

The polling mirrored Trump’s performance in the election, when he won just 18% of the vote in New York City, with 79% voting for Hillary Clinton.

According to the New York City board of elections, there are 1,210 election districts in Manhattan. Donald Trump won one – Times Square, where a total of 14 people voted. Trump got seven votes, Hillary Clinton got six votes, and one person voted for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson.

Overall, Trump won 9.87% of the vote in Manhattan, compared with Clinton’s 86.36%. The city he loved the most had shunned him.

The daily protests at Trump Tower in the days following the election were not the only indicators of the president-elect’s unpopularity. A week after Trump’s victory, his name was removed from a series of buildings in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, after residents launched a petition against Trump’s “appalling treatment of women, his history of racism, his attacks on immigrants, his mockery of the disabled, his tax avoidance [and] his outright lying”.

Then, in January, there was an uproar after it emerged that protecting Trump and his family between election day and the inauguration had cost the New York police department $24m.

Although the heavy police presence has probably lessened the chance of Trump’s proposed shooting spree, the public’s anger intensified further when Melania Trump announced she and the president’s 11-year-old son, Barron, would stay in the city until the end of his school year.

Donald Trump looks down from his personal helicopter in 1987 on Manhattan, where he had always dreamed of expanding his property empire. Photograph: Joe McNally/Getty Images

The youngest of Trump’s children is enrolled at Columbia grammar and preparatory school in Manhattan, where alumni include the Nobel prize winner Murray Gell-Mann; Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick; and Sarah Michelle Gellar from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The ill feeling toward Melania and Barron’s extended stay has lingered – in no small part because it costs the NYPD between $127,000 and $146,000 a day to protect them and their home. The New York fire department expects the cost of protecting Trump’s wife and son to be an additional $4.5m a year. About 550,000 people have signed a petition demanding that “Melania Trump stay in the White House or pay for the expenses herself”.

When Trump himself visits the city, the NYPD says, it will cost $308,000 to keep him safe, and a visit to Trump Tower illustrates where the money is being spent.

Metal barriers line two blocks of Fifth Avenue – one of Manhattan’s most famous thoroughfares – outside Trump Tower. Large concrete blocks, branded with blue NYPD lettering, line the sidewalk, aimed at preventing cars from accessing the building. A coach-size NYPD “command post” vehicle is parked indiscreetly on a side street, while black Chevrolet Suburbans line the south side of the tower.

At the entrance is a team of officers clad in black helmets and armed with high-powered rifles, while secret service agents scan visitors’ bags.

Inside, in the gold and marble lobby of Trump Tower, however, it’s almost business as usual. The gift shop sells Donald Trump magnets, koozies, caps and onesies bearing the legend “When I grow up I want to be just like Trump”.

But just as they are outside, police officers and security agents are everywhere – including in the bathrooms.

Trump has seen flickers of support in New York. In March, there were two pro-Trump rallies in Manhattan. But neither was well attended, and both were overshadowed by anti-Trump demonstrations. Supporters held a third rally, outside Trump Tower, on Saturday, but were largely obscured by the “100 days of failure” crowd.

Assunta Dell’Elce, a Trump supporter from Long Island, was one of the organizers, but even she was downbeat. “They were, like, five times the size of our rally,” Dell’Elce said. “We didn’t have a big crowd.”

Dell’Elce and up to 100 Trump stalwarts are planning to show their support for the president again on Thursday, but will probably be outnumbered and drowned out by the naysayers. For a president who marked his 100th day in office with historically low approval ratings, the presence of this small band of supporters is unlikely to bring much joy.

Trump’s return to New York City looks almost certain to be an unhappy homecoming.