For some time now, people have drawn rhetorical comparisons between Eric Adams and Donald Trump. Both men have a certain bombast and a reflexive tendency towards heavy-handed counterpunches. All critics misunderstand them, all oversight is an effort to drag them down, and so on. For the most part, this has been a similarity of style, as the two New Yorkers have been politically at odds, with Adams once being a prominent Biden surrogate.
Fast forward to now, and Adams has publicly accused the Biden White House of orchestrating his federal indictment while also meeting at City Hall with Trump “border czar” Tom Homan. And Trump has said that both men have been similarly “persecuted” and floated the possibility of issuing a federal pardon for the mayor. This sudden closeness has been bewildering for a lot of Democrats (and Republicans) who are wondering how it will manifest in terms of Adams’ running of the city.
To state the obvious, being the sole person capable of waving away someone’s significant legal woes and signaling that you’d be willing to do so gives you enormous leverage over them, potentially more leverage than any other entity, including the NYC electorate itself. Bluntly, Adams’ reelection is not looking good. He was denied public matching funds this week as a result of what the Campaign Finance Board said was earlier misconduct in a reference to the charges against him — which involved misuse of the program during his 2021 mayoral campaign — and failure to provide necessary information and documents.
In conversations with other political analysts and insiders, the consensus seems to be that Adams is at the very least starting from behind, not enjoying the easy electoral glide that you might expect an incumbent in a very-low-turnout election. That’s with the current state of affairs, without the wild-card eventualities of additional charges against either him or his staff and acolytes, or a trial going poorly or producing politically damaging moments, or additional candidates jumping in. On the latter front, the heaviest hitter by far is Andrew Cuomo. Longtime readers will know I am far from Cuomo’s #1 fan, but the man undeniably has immense name recognition, significant political connections and fundraising muscle, and remains popular in New York.
Adams is far from doomed, but this is a disorienting situation for a politician who reportedly began plotting his path to City Hall in the ‘90s and has said his authority derives from God. Plenty of NYC mayors have set their sights on higher office — just in the past two decades, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill de Blasio have all mounted doomed and disastrous runs for the White House — but most are at least coy about these aspirations until they leave City Hall. Adams has already joked that if he’d gotten dyslexia screenings as a child, he’d be “Mr. President” by now, and was said to have been considering a 2024 run if Biden had dropped out earlier.
I don’t know if Adams still sees a path to the White House as realistic, but he certainly has political aspirations running beyond his time at the helm of NYC. With the window narrowing on the potential for a second term, I have to imagine he’s beginning to look at the realm of possibilities beyond, the political allies he could cultivate for these visions, and the persona that he hopes will carry him through. So far, this looks a lot like the Common-Sense Democrat™ who stands against the left and finds common cause with political opponents.
That’s nothing new; a version of this has been Adams’ brand forever, and it was the crux of his message in 2021 as well. Still, we shouldn’t forget that 2021 was a different moment politically; Trump was a fresh electoral loser and, in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, even some of his staunchest allies were rattled and had solemnly declared they’d broken with the demagogue. His handpicked MAGA legislative candidates mostly got blown out of the water. The stranglehold he had on the party apparatus really seemed to have suddenly loosened, and the Trump mythos writ large appeared poised to collapse on itself.
Yes, this wasn’t exactly a full overnight 180. Parts of the MAGA political class began casting about for a new champion, briefly alighting on Ron DeSantis. But some of the remaining anti-Trump forces in the Republican Party dreamed of a post-Trump feature, a return to what they viewed as the real tenets of the party — free market reverence (which included a pro immigration bent), a light government touch, pro-security apparatus and law enforcement, and so on.
We know now that this wasn’t to be. Trump is if anything more firmly in control of the party than he was at any point during his first term, and his political movement is fully masked off. The rhetoric is openly fascistic, and many of the remaining guardrails have been removed. This extreme rightward lurch — along with a more cautious rightward crawl of the Democratic Party from what now seems like a progressive high point during Trump’s first term — means that whatever midpoint Adams is shooting for has also moved sharply rightward. On immigration, public health, LGBT+ rights, and other issues that political actors have successfully shoved into the near-bottomless bucket of “culture wars,” consensus looks different than it would have just a few years ago.
To seize on just one example, five years ago it would have been difficult to imagine a New York City mayor meeting with Tom Homan — a man described as an architect of family separation, who in 2018 withdrew his candidacy for permanent ICE director due to the likelihood he’d be voted down — and saying the two had “the same goal.” The extent to which this manifests in concrete policy like functionally expanding the extent of NYC’s data-sharing or cooperation with federal immigration authorities will have to be seen, but Adams is certainly talking about it, including the prospect of reopening an ICE field office on Rikers Island.
Adams would just describe this as bipartisanship and responsibility, but that just means something different in an era when indiscriminate deportation, anti-vaccine sentiment, and political prosecution have become core tenets of the party in power. An Eric Adams that sees himself as unmoored from the demands of New York City voters and looking ahead to some political future he desperately wants might be much more inclined to play ball on these issues in a concrete fashion. That alone might mark a big distinction between Trump terms 1 and 2 for New Yorkers who were somewhat insulated the first time around.
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