New Yorkers have been willing to put up with a lot of character flaws in their mayors. In recent years, the city has mostly tolerated and even embraced bullies (Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani), a plutocrat who regularly flew to Bermuda on weekends (Mike Bloomberg), and a guy with a stubborn attachment to his YMCA workout routine (Bill de Blasio). We reelected all of them.
But what about when the leader of the greatest city in the world is willing to humiliate himself? For the likes of President Donald Trump?
At 3 a.m. last Monday, Mayor Eric Adams hustled into a city-owned car and was chauffeured to Washington, DC. For weeks, the mayor’s camp had been trying to secure him an invitation to Trump’s inaugural. Alas, hope appeared to have been lost: Seven minutes after midnight on January 20, the mayor’s press office e-mailed out a schedule with Adams set to attend two morning events celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, annual staples for any serious citywide elected official.
And then—a miracle! A pre-dawn call from New York real estate developer turned Trump’s Middle East envoy Steven Witkoff! Followed by the mayor’s dash down I-95! All so Adams could… sit in an overflow room with Jake Paul and Conor McGregor.
The next day, at his weekly City Hall press conference, Adams attempted to rationalize this suck-uppery by saying he was acting in the spirit of Dr. King, and that he was solely concerned with working in the city’s interests by offering Trump honey instead of vinegar. “I’ve said it before, I’m not going to be warring with the president. I’m going to be working with the president. And that’s my responsibility as the mayor,” Adams said, growing somewhat testy. “Dr. King’s dream is not in Brooklyn or New York City. He clearly stated we have to put partisan politics to the side to deal with the issues that are facing the country.” So when the mayor, a proud former police officer, was asked about Trump pardoning people convicted of assaulting cops on January 6, he demurred. When asked about potential immigration raids and Trump’s plans to end birthright citizenship, he dodged. Adams said he would offer Trump any criticism in private—if he has any criticism to offer.
That posture might be borderline credible if not for the fact that three days before the inauguration Adams flew to Mar-a-Lago for a sitdown with Trump. And that the mayor faces a federal trial in April on corruption charges. (He has pleaded not guilty.) “He is completely focused on staying out of jail,” says Howard Wolfson, a political strategist for former mayor Bloomberg. “Everything else is subsidiary or downstream from that. The idea of being reelected is not at all what animates his activity.”
Asked for comment, a City Hall spokesman pointed to Adams’s interview this week with Stephen A. Smith, in which the mayor said his Florida lunch with Trump was about recouping city money spent on the migrant crisis, not any potential pardon: “It would be irresponsible for me not to go down and speak with the president.”
Yet Adams has increasingly given the impression that he has abandoned any hope of winning the Democratic primary this June unless Trump makes the mayor’s legal problems go away. Which may well be a rational political calculation. As of the last publicly available filing in early October, Adams had $3.1 million in his campaign account, but his fundraising plunged after he was indicted in September, and in mid-December, New York’s campaign finance board denied him access to another $4 million in matching public money. As of last week, his legal defense fund was $735,000 in debt. The numbers in public polls have been chilling: Adams drew just 6% in one survey, and another purported to show him attracting just 18% of his base, Black voters, if the field includes ex-governor Andrew Cuomo.
As grim as that picture may be, Adams needs to at least keep acting like he’s a viable contender to be mayor again. Trump, as he does not hesitate to proclaim, has no interest in so-called has-beens and losers. “Whether Adams is really running or not, he certainly has to appear to be running to get a pardon,” says Chris Coffey, a Democratic strategist who advised Andrew Yang in the 2021 mayoral primary. “A mayor on his way out the door is much less valuable to the incoming administration. But I still think public safety matters more in a New York primary than pardon politics.”