Among this set of New Yorkers, it is customary now to explain one’s position before lavishing praise on him. “I am a teacher, so I will never forgive him, but …” or “I voted for Cynthia Nixon, but …”

I was in Albany just as the crisis was unfolding, and sitting in the governor’s office, when a friend, a TV writer, texted me: “I just hope this thing ends soon so I can go back to hating Andrew Cuomo again.”

Cuomo has been in the city more often than usual. Every time, it is to herald something that would have been impossible even a few weeks ago. A hospital ship arriving in New York harbor. The Javits Center, the place where Hillary Clinton was supposed to crack the highest and hardest glass ceiling on election night 2016, turned into a makeshift field hospital. A group led by Franklin Graham is setting up a tent hospital in Central Park, turning New York’s backyard into something that, if only it were sepia-toned, would look like it was something out of the Civil War.

(Still, some rivalries never change: Cuomo still seems to relish the chance to bigfoot any ideas that that come from his bête noire, Mayor Bill de Blasio, whom the governor has always viewed as an annoyance.)

All of this comes as the native New Yorker in the White House has largely left the city to its own devices. Trump was always something of a third-rate figure here, just another graceless striver for eyeballs in the attention economy. There are great New York real estate families, the Rudins and Dursts and Tishmans, and they go about their business quietly, serve on the board of the Association for a Better New York, and have far more sway over the city’s politics than any politician. Trump was never a part of that group, not even close. He worked in the margins of the law and zoning regulations, projects that would fire up neighborhood activists but were never substantial enough to raise the ire of government, at least not in the quarter-century before he became president. New York’s Republican Party, full of establishment-type political operatives and donor types who rallied around the candidacies of George Pataki and Mike Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani, shunned him just as much as the national party did until he finally steamrolled his way to the nomination.

He was always entertaining, in a dancing-bear kind of way, but if you lived in New York, you never thought anyone could ever really be fooled by the show. This is only adds to New Yorkers’ perplexity, as Trump feints and bobs through his nightly news conferences, far less artfully than our own governor. The American people actually rejected Rudy Giuliani in 2008, back when there was still a halo of 9/11 around his leadership. How could this be the New Yorker they chose?