Eric Adams, the mayor of America’s largest and richest city, is one of the stranger politicians who has ever lived. He is less an ideological creature and more a carnival barker desperate for attention, not unlike Donald Trump. In fact, the best way to understand Adams, who is finishing his first term as mayor of New York and appears unlikely to win another one, is through the lens of Trump. Both Trump and Adams are from Queens and found a degree of fame in the 1980s and 1990s. Unlike Trump, Adams is a product of the city’s black working class, and became a police captain before entering politics. He seized headlines then as both a reformer and rabble-rouser, and someone eager to remain in the public eye.
Also like Trump, Adams has led a politically peripatetic life. Trump has donated to both Democrats and Republicans, and was once much cosier with America’s Democratic elites. Bill and Hillary Clinton attended his wedding to Melania, the future first lady, after all. Before running for president as a Republican, Trump flirted with a third-party bid, and once espoused much more liberal positions on abortion rights and even universal healthcare.
Adams has been both a Rudy Giuliani Republican – he registered into the party in the 1990s and backed the tough-on-crime then mayor – and aligned with Louis Farrakhan, the incendiary black nationalist leader of the Nation of Islam. He later backed Bernie Sanders for president. Meanwhile, once he began running for mayor in 2021, Adams swerved rightward, bashing the progressive left for allegedly being lenient on criminals and insufficiently supportive of real estate and corporate elites. At a Memorial Day event in 2023, Adams denounced “the hot rays of socialism and communism and destruction that’s playing out across the globe”.
As mayor, Adams’ most distinguishing feature beyond his alleged corruption – federal prosecutors indicted him in September on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, bribery and soliciting contributions from foreign nationals; he has pleaded not guilty – might be his penchant for absurd, Trumpian public utterances. He has said healing crystals give New York a “special energy”. He has, perplexingly, invoked 9/11 as a reason to love New York, proclaiming that “every day you wake up you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center through [to] a person who’s celebrating a new business that’s about to open”. In 2021, shortly before he took office, he told Vanity Fair his favourite concert he ever attended was in 1990 when Curtis Mayfield was paralysed when lighting equipment fell on him. “He died a few years ago, but it was an amazing concert before that happened. Just so unfortunate.”
Adams, who seems to mostly enjoy carousing at nightclubs and cutting ribbons, has notched a few policy accomplishments, such as citywide re-zoning in order potentially to build more affordable housing. Overall crime has fallen on his watch, too. But he remains historically unpopular and is going to struggle to win the Democratic primary this June. For New York mayors, this is rare: an incumbent hasn’t lost a re-election bid in more than 30 years. Adams is being challenged by a bevy of candidates, and one rumoured opponent is Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor who resigned in disgrace following sexual harassment and assault allegations in 2021. Cuomo believes Adams’ various management failures might offer him an opening. In April Adams’ trial for the federal corruption charges will begin, coinciding with his campaign for re-election.
The mayor does hold one trump card, pun entirely intended, though. On the eve of his inauguration, Trump is meeting with Adams today at his Mar-a-Lago resort – and he just might offer him a pardon. Over the past year, Adams has notably avoided criticising Trump and spent most of his time attacking the Biden administration for allowing too many migrants into New York City. Adams even appeared with the soon-to-be-president at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event in New York in November. Adams hasn’t even ruled out heading back to the Republican Party.
A pardon would be a kind of political symbiosis. Adams will likely never get elected to anything in New York again, but he could go work for Trump in a federal capacity. Trump revels in ex-Democratic attack dogs: he’s in the process of trying to get two of them – Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F Kennedy Jr – confirmed in his cabinet. Recruiting Adams, for Trump, would be a coup. The black Democratic mayor of a liberal city being called upon to lacerate Democrats is the stuff popular Fox News segments and podcasts are made of. If Adams does join Trump’s orbit, it would be a fitting denouement to one of the more peculiar political careers in modern American history.
[See also: Donald Trump’s empire of ego]
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