The New York Knicks basketball crowd likes to consider itself as the cognoscenti of the game and has been merciless in the hostility directed at visiting stars such as Michael Jordan and Reggie Miller down the decades. But few guests have been booed with thunderous energy which greeted city son and president Donald Trump when he attended game three of the NBA finals between the Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs on Monday night. The jumbotron displayed Trump, accompanied by granddaughter Kai and Knicks owner James Dolan, when the first bars of the anthem were played. The boos in the arena were deafening – in notable contrast to Trump’s last Garden appearance, for an election campaign mega-rally in October of 2024. Meanwhile, Trump, vice-president JD Vance and former Doge supremo Elon Musk all took aim at the validity of the ongoing vote count in the first count of the Los Angeles mayoral race after a startling twist in results.Over the course of Monday, the narrow lead held by Spencer Pratt, the reality star turned anti-establishment candidate, disappeared and he was overtaken by Democratic councilwoman Nithya Raman, who was declared the official runner-up by major networks on Monday evening. Trump had sensed the shift earlier in the day and before he departed for Manhattan, he took to social media to declare that it is “not possible” for Pratt to have lost the run-offs.“3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections! Now they’ll be working on great guy Steve Hilton. Won’t have results for possibly TWO WEEKS, according to officials.”Hilton, the British-born conservative commentator who worked as a strategy adviser to former Tory prime minister David Cameron, is the Republican candidate in the California governor race and is locked in a tight battle with Democrat Tom Steyer for the runner-up spot behind Xavier Becerra, also a Democrat. The top two vote-getters in the primary will then campaign for the November election.But the premature celebrations of the Pratt campaign, which believed it had secured the Los Angeles mayoral second spot behind incumbent Karen Bass, was the focus of White House-led claims of voter fraud in the heavily Democratic city.“Somehow we find ourselves in a situation where they are still receiving ballots, not just counting ballots, and number two, the way they are coming in just so happens to work out such that a Republican is getting kicked out of the final two so it’s a Democrat-versus-Democrat run-off,” said vice-president Vance on a Fox News interview.Democratic councilwoman Nithya Raman was declared the official runner-up in the LA mayoral primary by networks on Monday evening. Photograph: Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times