Eric Adams told the truth. “You guys are going to have so much fun over the next four years,” he predicted to a gaggle of political journalists in July 2021, shortly after winning New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary. And they did. This has been a golden age for investigative reporting, City Hall Kremlinology, and political wisecracking — in quantity and quality, at least, if rarely in revenue for local media. Many would love to see Adams remain a staple of city political life, albeit not in any position of power. Could he be the night mayor emeritus? Flag-raising czar? Commissioner and sole officer of the Department of Neologism?
These are but fantasies. Eric Adams’s turn in the spotlight has passed. New York will never have another mayor like him again.
He was only the second Black mayor in the city’s history, and as a man who grew up poor, went to public schools, and worked as a transit cop before being promoted to management, he frequently (and falsely) claimed to be New York’s “first blue-collar mayor.” Adams seemed to work and play at extreme hours, bragging about toiling and partying — which he considered a key part of the job — late into the night and waking early in the morning. He embodied modern hustle culture as fully as he embraced modern diet dogma. And he delighted in rhyme and wordplay, spinning and repeating self-aggrandizing catchphrases: “All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success.” “Stay focused, no distractions, and grind.” “Dyslexic, arrested, rejected — now I’m elected.”
For all his peculiarity, Adams was also a continuity, a return to a primordial style of petty corruption in politics.
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Adams is at once one of a kind and a familiar type. His quirks and contradictions make him relatable to many New Yorkers, who can see in him parts of themselves, their friends, or their families. He is the Christian crystal guy, the MAGA Democrat, a defender of both Louis Farrakhan and Benjamin Netanyahu, a proud patriot convinced the government is out to get him. Fifteen years ago, when Adams was a state senator from central Brooklyn and I was a researcher for the Laborers’ International Union of North America, a coworker of mine tacked to his cubicle wall a large poster for Adams’s Stop the Sag campaign, apparently identifying with Adams’s blend of cultural conservatism and racial uplift. The poster featured a pair of Black men in drooping pants beside an all-caps exhortation: We are better than this! For many New Yorkers, he was an oddball, but he was our oddball.
For all his peculiarity, the Adams mayoralty was also a kind of continuity, a return to a primordial style of petty corruption in city politics. New York historians have noted echoes between Adams’s mayoralty and those of William O’Dwyer and Jimmy Walker, cheerfully crooked leaders who narrowly escaped the long arm of the law. Adams himself cultivated the comparison to Walker: He kept a framed photo of the disgraced Prohibition-era mayor in his office. (When a reporter pointed this out, Adams’s spokespeople claimed that the wall featured an ongoing rotation of past mayors. Months later, however, the photo was still there, seemingly untouched.)
Adams’s public embrace of nepotism likewise recalled the days of the machine politician George W. Plunkitt (coiner of the term “honest graft”) and Tammany Hall (in style, if not in substance). Adams appointed his girlfriends and brother to high-paying jobs of questionable necessity and used his office to promote his son’s budding rap career (he’s big in Albania). While the most serious ethical and legal violations of his tenure involved straw donor schemes to defraud the public campaign finance system, many of his administration’s most blatant grafts were markedly small-bore: Adams and his subordinates were offered discounted flights and television cameos as rewards for fast-tracking fire safety inspections or blocking a proposed bike lane. This was the stuff of classic city corruption, updated for the 21st century. Some of his troublemaking interlocutors, like the Rechnitz and Banks brothers, were in fact figures in the previous mayor’s corruption probes. Even the Mafia made an appearance, allegedly currying favor with high-level administration figures to win city licenses. In the end, twenty-eight people in the mayor’s orbit (including Adams himself) were indicted for various schemes, a scale of corruption that recalls City for Sale–era Ed Koch.
In a city like New York, where vast wealth meets intricate bureaucracy, graft will root itself in the gap between sluggish processes and soaring payoffs. It was no surprise when the first indictment of the mayor’s term — now all but forgotten — was in the Department of Buildings, where real estate developers, landlords, and contractors regularly pay “expeditors” to push their projects through the system and avoid costly delays. Adams’s DOB commissioner, the Republican former City Council member Eric Ulrich, traded favors to builders and business owners in exchange for bespoke suits, a discounted apartment, Mets season tickets, money for gambling, and a painting by an apprentice of Salvador Dalí. The mayor seemed to see it coming. Months before investigators swooped in, Adams warned Ulrich: “Watch your phones.”
Many of the scandals of the past four years have centered on real estate, often driven by mid-tier property operatives juicing the political system to rise in the ranks. (The industry’s bigger players — Durst, Extell, Related, and the like — are no angels; they can simply afford to soak mayoral candidates with donations and then reap favorable public policies in a more aboveboard manner.) The most infamous case involved Turkish and Turkish American developers who used the mayor’s fondness for travel deals to secure unwarranted fire-inspection approvals and development application authorizations. Even as these deals were being made, the mayor’s Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), which coordinates the city’s real estate dealings, was signing favorable leases to campaign donors and enriching friendly brokers. Hotel developers were buying deals to convert their rooms into much-needed migrant shelters (and to host one of the mayor’s top aides for months — the same aide who forced a former Adams campaign volunteer to oversee her home renovation for no pay and would later try to bribe a reporter with cash hidden inside a potato chip bag). One of the mayor’s oldest friends from the police force, Timothy Pearson, was given a plum job with the city’s quasi-public Economic Development Corporation, where he tried to extort kickbacks from would-be migrant shelter owners. “Where are my crumbs?” he would demand, to the point that coworkers nicknamed him Crumbs.
Before he was mayor (and before that, Brooklyn borough president), Eric Adams was a state senator representing Crown Heights, East Flatbush, and Brownsville, Brooklyn. He distinguished himself in his first year, 2007, by taking to the floor of the Senate to make an impassioned plea for legislative raises, ending his address with the lines, “Show me the money! That’s what it’s all about.”
At the start of Adams’s second term, thirty-two Democrats and thirty Republicans were elected to the State Senate. It should have been the Democrats’ great return to power, ending decades of stalemate between a majority-Democratic Assembly and majority-Republican Senate. Finally, the state could pursue long-blocked legislative agendas, like repealing laws that allowed the deregulation of rent-stabilized apartments. But instead, two Adams allies — Democratic Senators Hiram Monserrate and Pedro Espada Jr. — led a procedural coup that replaced would-be Democratic Majority Leader Malcolm Smith with a Republican, Dean Skelos. (Donald Trump’s master of dirty tricks, Roger Stone, was also allegedly involved in these shenanigans.) In exchange for appointing his ally John Sampson as Democratic leader, however, the feckless Monserrate switched sides yet again, creating a stalemate in the Senate. There was no lieutenant governor to break the tie in favor of the Democrats, and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo blocked Governor David Paterson from quickly appointing one.1 Ultimately, Senator Adams helped broker a compromise that returned Espada to the Democrats and crowned him the chamber’s powerful majority leader.
In a second Albany coup, however, four nominally Democratic senators — with the silent backing of Cuomo, who was by then governor — formed a new body called the Independent Democratic Conference. The IDC would vote with the Republicans to return Skelos to power as majority leader and stymie most major progressive legislation. Eventually four more Democrats joined the IDC, sensing an opportunity to play kingmaker, with all the attendant legal perks and illegal payoffs. Adams himself never joined the caucus, instead leaving the Senate to become Brooklyn Borough President, but he did back a successor in the State Senate, Jesse Hamilton, who joined upon his arrival in Albany.
During this chaotic decade, a shockingly long list of senators and assemblymembers were caught in brazen corruption scandals. US Attorney Preet Bharara took down a dozen corrupt lawmakers, including Espada (embezzlement), Skelos (siphoned payments), Sampson (obstruction of justice related to embezzlement), and Smith (bribery in pursuit of the Republican mayoral line). Monserrate was pushed out of office after brutally beating his girlfriend (as a senator, Adams voted against his expulsion). In 2018, almost every member of the IDC, including Jesse Hamilton, was successfully primaried by a wave of upstart progressive candidates. During the 2019 legislative session, the newly Democratic-controlled State Senate finally enacted some of the most important left-backed legislation in the body’s history, including landmark rent control and bail reform laws.
Much about the way the city works — and fails to work — may continue under a new and better mayor.
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But just one year later, Eric Adams ran for mayor and won, bringing with him several key players in Albany’s sordid saga. Jesse Hamilton became head of DCAS. Diane Savino, an original member of the IDC, was appointed Adams’s senior adviser and primary Albany liaison. Both Malcolm Smith and John Sampson served as advisers. Adams’s four years in City Hall thus marked the return to power of Albany’s most disgraced.
This history helps explain not only the giddy culture of corruption inside the administration but also the Adams camp’s specific disdain for two entities: federal prosecutors and progressive legislators. Hating federal prosecutors is a natural outcome of having recently been hounded by those offices, or — more common in the Adams Administration — of being close to those the prosecutors brought down. So, when the law came for Adams and an alarming number of his top deputies, his circle was already primed to push back. The motive behind Adams’s vocal contempt for the left might seem less obvious, but the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America’s electoral victory in the state legislature in 2018 was part of the same push that wiped out the IDC, and many members of New York City’s DSA chapter backed and volunteered for “No IDC” challengers. Future WFP and DSA challengers would also take on, and in many cases take out, Democrats with ties to Adams and his allies.
Adams singled out DSA for aspersion time and again, characterizing members like Zohran Mamdani as dangerous interlopers. Later in his term, his warnings about the red menace at our gates reached an almost apocalyptic pitch. At a 2023 Memorial Day commemoration on the Hudson River–docked USS Intrepid, Adams riffed on Thomas Jefferson and Joe McCarthy, telling the audience, “You water the tree of freedom with your blood. We sit under the shade of that tree of freedom protected from the hot rays of socialism and communism and destruction that’s playing out across the globe.”
None of it worked. New Yorkers were more worried about ascendant fascism than the specter of communism. As Adams’s polling numbers sank into the single digits, Mamdani and the DSA’s stock rose, resulting in one of the most impressive electoral victories for the left in US history.
For all his personal flaws and professional failings, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Eric Adams mayoralty is that, for better and for worse, the status remained quo. Things mostly endured, however erratically. Despite chaos at the top and understaffing at the bottom, city workers strove to maintain services, driving buses, staffing hospitals, administering departments. Here was a case study in what the political scientist Charles Lindblom called “the science of ‘muddling through’”: a slog of incremental and uneven change rather than systematic reform.
If a New Yorker was not closely following local politics, they may not have noticed much change over the past four years. Certainly they would have registered the radical readjustments and inanities of the Covid recovery period, from the shift to hybrid work and school to the declining standards of civil and civic discourse. But while most New Yorkers heard about the mayoral scandals, few if any could clock them all, creating a fog of official disorder rather than a piercing public indictment. Some residents got mad at migrants, the police, the protesters, the homeless, or the billionaires, and perhaps also at the mayor — or Biden, or Trump. They might have noticed Adams’s slashing cuts to schools, libraries, and child-care centers, which he was later pushed to mostly but not entirely restore; or they might have noticed the slow decline of simple public goods, like public benches, and the rise of useless ones, like the NYPD’s fleet of rotund, human-size subway surveillance robots. If they were among the more than one million people living in rent-stabilized apartments, and had lived there for a while, they knew their rent rose much faster under Adams than it did under de Blasio (though not quite as fast as it had under Bloomberg).
Such perceptions solidify the sense that this is just what happens in the city: Good and bad policies, programs, and budgets get introduced, only to later get reined in. In 2002, the geographers Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell characterized neoliberal governance as a dual process of “roll-back” and “roll-out,” undoing Keynesian economic programs while advancing new market-oriented policies. The experience of the Adams Administration suggests something more haphazard. Funding levels and policy initiatives of all stripes have been rolled out and rolled back again, leaving most New Yorkers confused about what their government is and is not doing at any given moment.
Part of this confusion is by design. An open secret of mayoral politics is that administrations constantly claim credit for outcomes their predecessors initiated, as well as for initiatives that will not be completed until the next mayor is in office — only for that mayor to also claim credit and reap praise. Take a megaproject like Hudson Yards, the massive mixed-use private development atop the rail yards of Manhattan’s formerly industrial Far West Side. The complex has been in the works in one form or another for decades, but its current iteration was begun under Bloomberg, opened under de Blasio, and expanded under Adams. All three mayors can claim some credit for Hudson Yards’ successes (engineering feats, fiscal benefits) and blame the others for its failures (banal design, soaring rents). For New Yorkers walking amid the project’s nondescript glass towers and pristine plazas, its magisterial mediocrity reads less as the achievement of any one mayor than as the enduring accretion of, to borrow a phrase from Amiri Baraka, the “changing same” of city politics.
The city’s own official scorecard for mayoral achievement, the Mayor’s Management Report, compiles a confounding range of metrics on city life. The MMRs show in minute detail that almost every mayor has made simultaneous progress and regress on the issues New Yorkers take seriously. From Giuliani to Adams, the typical annual report quintupled in length; so many data points are tallied each year that an ally or enemy of any mayor could find evidence of that administration’s effectiveness or of its incompetence — and they wouldn’t be lying.
Adams has always been given to grandiose claims, some of them flat-out false; but plenty hold up to scrutiny. From 2024 to 2025, traffic fatalities fell 24 percent; the number of single people moving out of homeless shelters rose 6 percent; English and math scores rose by 4 and 3 percent, respectively; and childhood lead exposure fell 5 percent. At the same time, installations of new bus and bike lanes plunged by 17 and 65 percent, respectively, while the number of people held in city jails rose 10 percent. Adams touts falling crime rates, with murder down by 6 percent and felony assault by 9 percent, but the same report shows that incidents of rape are up 20 percent.
Year-to-year fluctuations aside, most metrics remained remarkably stable. Glancing across key government functions at the end of the previous four mayors’ first terms, we see affordable housing production growing steadily, classroom attendance staying flat, park maintenance improving rapidly under Bloomberg and then remaining high, and murders (the hardest crime statistic to falsify) oscillating around one per day, with a spike under Bloomberg.
New York City Mayors’ Performance in Office
| Metric by final year of first term | Giuliani (1997) | Bloomberg (2005) | De Blasio (2017) | Adams (2025) |
| Total affordable housing starts | 10,099 | 18,252 | 24,293 | 28,281 |
| Average daily school attendance | 87.1% | 88.6% | 91.7% | 89.9% |
| Parks overall condition rating | 64% | 87% | 86% | 87% |
| Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter | 374 | 537 | 300 | 339 |
| Mayor’s Management Report page count | 111 | 258 | 472 | 544 |
The figures suggest that over the past thirty years, the city has figured out how to address many key issues — if not satisfactorily, then at least consistently. Another metric, however, shows the opposite. Looking at the month of July — the start of the city’s fiscal year — we witness a damning escalation since 1997 in the number of people sleeping in the city’s homeless shelter system.
There are some problems to which the city is ready and willing to respond, and there are others, like mounting homelessness, at which each administration fails more spectacularly than the last. This too speaks to a kind of continuity, despite changing administrations, parties, and mayoral styles.
Monthly Homeless Shelter Census
at the End of Each Term
| July 1997 | 21,718 |
| July 2005 | 32,816 |
| July 2017 | 60,856 |
| July 2025 | 89,610 |
Still, if recent New York City governments tend to fail in the same ways, they do so for different reasons. The Adams Administration was hobbled by persistent understaffing. De Blasio had stretched the size of city government to historic levels, not just seeking to bring new layers of oversight and expanded services to public operations, but also recognizing that, in the face of a hostile first Trump Administration, expanding the municipal workforce was one of the few ways to combat unemployment and offer New Yorkers stable, unionized jobs. In 2021, however, workers across sectors, including government, began to leave their jobs as part of the “great resignation.” In the lean fiscal years that followed, with tax revenue down and short-term federal funding filling the gap, Adams oversaw austerity measures across most government agencies.
When he came into office, Adams instituted a Program to Eliminate the Gap, which called on city agencies to shrink spending by 3 percent immediately and by 4.75 percent by the following year. In 2023 the administration imposed a full-on hiring freeze, later softened into a (still awful) “2-for-1” policy, in which agencies could hire only one new staffer for every two vacancies. Public services predictably deteriorated — slower Fire Department responses, fewer autopsies, less frequent water quality inspections — as city workers struggled to do their jobs and to coordinate with other similarly short-staffed agencies. By the end of Adams’s term, even with public employment slowly recovering, city agencies still faced 17,000 empty full-time positions.
Diminished staffing also dampened recruitment, as potential city employees opted not to apply for jobs in seemingly dysfunctional agencies. The mayor’s sordid record of scandal and political betrayal didn’t help either, with many talented people shying from administration positions for fear that association with Adams would taint their careers. In the days after Adams’s Faustian bargain with federal prosecutors to drop the corruption charges against him, several of the administration’s most respected officers resigned in disgust.
Even as Adams cracked down on city agencies and workers, police and correctional officers operated with virtual impunity. Dozens of inmates died in custody on Rikers Island, while the total number of deaths in police custody doubled from 2023 to 2025. Police top brass accused of cronyism and illegal retaliation were protected from consequences, while Civilian Complaint Review Board investigations into lower-level cops were routinely stymied. Police misconduct reports surged to their highest level in a decade. Cops and agents from the Department of Homeless Services frequently forced homeless people off the streets and subways and destroyed what meager property they had, while doing little to get them rehoused or even move them into shelters. The administration tried to embed ICE in city jails, and the mayor himself stoked xenophobic sentiment by painting mass migration into the city — whose population had been shrinking for more than a decade — as an existential threat.
Mayors matter, but the personnel below the top last a long time. The Adams years have shown that madness at City Hall and Gracie Mansion does not stop the larger apparatus of city government from operating and delivering entirely, even if it does slow progress on many fronts and unleash the worst impulses of some branches of government. Much about the way the city works — and fails to work — may continue under a new and better mayor, however quickly Zohran Mamdani hopes to turn the ship of state. The army of city workers who enact mayoral policy tend to view each successive mayor as just another boss to endure. When a new boss arrives promising total change, some will feel invigorated while others will glance at the clock. This is no knock on our civil servants, but more to say: City workers — they’re just like us!
Most New York mayors are remembered for getting one or two big things right. Bill de Blasio’s chief accomplishment was universal pre-kindergarten. The first major expansion of municipal services in a long time, universal pre-K and subsidized “3-K,” for 3-year-olds, saved parents thousands of dollars and made New York more livable for families who might otherwise have been driven out of the city by child-care costs. For rent-stabilized tenants, de Blasio’s periodic rent freezes were an accomplishment of almost equal magnitude, for their economic impact as well as simply for showing that such a goal was achievable.
For Bloomberg, depending on whom you ask, that accomplishment was either his expansive street redesigns, with new pedestrian and bike safety features and public plazas created in many parts of the city, or the indoor smoking ban (and the less consequential but more controversial ban on smoking in city parks). The first changed the flow and feel of the city’s streets, at least in commercial centers and gentrifying neighborhoods, while the second literally transformed the city’s smell and taste and improved public health, particularly for workers in formerly smoke-filled venues.
What achievements, if any, will define Adams’s legacy? Though it may feel to many New Yorkers as if little was accomplished at all, there are two strong contenders: garbage containerization and zoning reform.
Adams will be remembered for his petty corruption, his self-mythologizing, and his ignominious dealmaking with the Trump White House; but he should also be remembered as the mayor who got New Yorkers to stop tossing giant bags of trash onto city sidewalks as if there were no alternative. He required building owners to use garbage bins; installed large public trash bins on city streets as part of a pilot program in Morningside Heights, Fort Greene, and Clinton Hill; and extended municipal food scrap collection citywide.
You can laugh at a New York mayor who walks into a press conference wheeling out a trash can, beaming as if he invented the contraption, while “Empire State of Mind” blares triumphantly in the background. But truly, Adams’s proclaimed “trash revolution” represented a tremendous advance over abysmal past practice. For years, friends visiting from far poorer countries would pass the mountains of fetid trash bags crowding the sidewalk, rumbling with rats, and ask me, “How do you live like this?” Even one of the mayor’s most dogged critics, Councilman Lincoln Restler, called containerization “one of the few things the Adams Administration has gotten right.” Unlike many more targeted programs, it has begun to change a basic fact of urban life for every single New Yorker.
The Adams Administration’s series of zoning reforms — sunnily branded as City of Yes — is likewise aimed to affect all New Yorkers, albeit more slowly. Adams continued the previous two mayors’ focus on changing the rules for what could be built where, but with a key difference. Rather than proceeding piecemeal, promoting growth or ensuring stasis on specific blocks or lots, Adams’s city planners rewrote the rules for the entire city.
Many of these were minor tweaks that only wonks would notice, such as rewritten rules about solar panels or updated language about “commercial overlays,” but others were more substantial. The city would encourage multifamily buildings to be built in more parts of the city, and would allow homeowners to add “accessory dwelling units” — that is, apartments either inside their home (in a basement, cellar, or attic) or beside it (in a converted garage or a new structure). Rules requiring developers to include a minimum number of parking spots in their projects would be scrapped. The administration pitched the approach as “a little more housing in every neighborhood,” a simultaneously minimalist and maximalist promise.
While time might deliver a stronger verdict on these citywide initiatives, either in praise or condemnation, for now they have not made the strong impression that Adams may have wished. Why not?
For starters, both policies were limited by design. Administration spokespeople promoted the programs in sensational terms: With containerization, the city was not merely combating infestation, it was waging a “war on rats,” to the ends of the Earth, led by a “rat czar.” The City of Yes, Adams declared, represented “the most pro-housing proposal in New York City’s history.” The programs’ actual outcomes could hardly live up to the hype.
Containerization is being phased in over several years, meaning its full effects will not be felt until two terms — and potentially two mayors — from now. Some composting programs were funded, defunded, and funded again, with enforcement of the new rules ramped up only to be tamped down, leaving many residents confused about whether curbside composting remains in effect at all. (It does, for now.) This policy disarray contrasts starkly with the approach of a Bloomberg-era official like Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who exerted significant political force to make immediate and lasting changes to city streets that would be hard to reverse — though, granted, it builds confidence if your boss is one of the richest people in the world.
Meanwhile, zoning reform is inherently dull. It excites the passions of those who feel directly threatened by development or displacement but remains abstract to the rest. Its effects are always delayed. Rezoning doesn’t by itself produce any housing or other buildings but changes the rules about what can be built where, sometime in the future. Even if a new “as of right” project begins the day after reforms are passed, the permitting and construction process will still take years to come to fruition, by which point neighbors are less likely to see the resulting structure as part of the mayor’s program than as the work of a particular developer. It is hard to reap praise for something that has not yet been built.
As proposed, City of Yes did not go as far as many supply-siders would have wanted. Unlike other leaders in other US cities who have ended single-family zoning completely, Adams pushed a more incremental approach in the city’s quasi-suburban quarters. Though not the administration’s fault, the City Council’s revisions to the proposal further diminished those effects by carving several low-density districts out of these changes altogether. (Non–New Yorkers may be surprised to learn that even in America’s densest major city, 15 percent of residential land, mostly in Queens and Staten Island, is zoned exclu-sively for detached single-family homes.) After the revised City of Yes passed, the mayor promptly and very publicly contradicted his own message by halting two locally controversial affordable housing developments: one on the site of the Elizabeth Street Garden in downtown Manhattan, and another in a vacant building on a Bronx hospital campus. (The first, which had been opposed for years by a well-funded network of celeb-rities and preservationists, would have housed low-income seniors; the second would have provided housing and medical care for former Rikers inmates facing homelessness. Call it City of Meh.)
In the end, Adams’s own core political coalition made it tricky if not impossible to fully capitalize on either garbage or zoning reform. New York’s powerful real estate lobby had showered Adams with cash in expectation of developer-friendly policy; meanwhile, many of his most reliable voters were homeowners in less dense districts, who were also some of the biggest opponents of both his key efforts. They bristled at buying city-approved garbage bins and setting them out at later times, and many were apoplectic at the prospect of even modestly more housing being allowed in their neighborhoods. Crucially, both programs would have reduced parking spots, with containerization eventually installing thousands of on-street garbage depositories and zoning reforms allowing more housing to be built without on-site parking. (Contra our reputation for car-free lifestyles, in New York as everywhere else in the US, car ownership has long exerted perverse, outsize influence on city planning.) At one point Adams went on a tear against his own backers, calling the zoning rules they defended racist relics of pre–civil rights reaction, but it was hard to take these criticisms seriously when the mayor was clearly closer to members of the City Council’s conservative Common Sense Caucus, which resisted both City of Yes and containerization, than to its Progressive Caucus, which largely supported both.
No less than his political base, Adams’s own political style stymied any effort to advance substantive programs or to reap their rewards, not only on trash and zoning but on seemingly everything. He was constantly getting in his own way with bizarre statements and blatant falsehoods — often petty, but cumulatively corrosive.
Adams whipped up fears about crime on the subways, only to complain that crime on the subways was being overhyped. He could never resolve the nagging question of where he really lived, and specifically how much time he spent with his current and ex-girlfriends in a New Jersey co-op.2 He vocally credited his health to a “plant-based lifestyle,” only to order fish and chicken at restaurants. He gave hair-raising answers to banal questions: When asked about his favorite concert, he recalled one where, before his set even began, a stage light fell on the singer Curtis Mayfield, leaving him permanently paralyzed. Another time, asked to describe the year 2023 in one word, he replied, “New York,” and went on to muse that on any given day, 9/11 could happen again. Alone, none of these oddities would matter much, but together they formed a pattern of doublespeak that bred distraction and derision.
Adams’s penchant for lying in office is extensive enough to merit a greatest-hits collection. But these lies were not all of the same kind, and they were often mobilized toward specific ends.
Some were simply self-preservation, as when federal prosecutors seized his several cell phones and the mayor claimed he could not remember any of the passwords needed to unlock them. (In an incredible — which is to say, not credible — defense, Adams claimed he had recently made the passwords more complex in order to prevent eager staffers from tapping into the phones and deleting messages in order to protect their beloved boss.) Others were aimed at buying time: Adams insisted until the very last moment that he would be running for reelection in the Democratic primary, only to announce that he would instead be running exclusively in the general election, on the self-styled EndAntisemitism and Safe&Affordable ballot lines. Then he vociferously maintained he would not bow to pressure from Trump and others to drop out of the mayoral race; he dropped out a few weeks later.
At other times, the mayor simply made up facts and figures, to manufacture consent and stoke discontent. At the height of the border crisis, Adams claimed that half the city’s hotel rooms were being used to shelter migrants, to make it seem as if President Biden and Texas Governor Greg Abbott were flooding the city with indigent immigrants who were killing the city’s hospitality industry. In fact, at the time less than 3 percent of the city’s hotel space was being used for migrant housing. Nevertheless, Adams’s much more alarming, fabricated number stuck in the minds of many New Yorkers.
Some tall tales served to burnish the mayor’s image and tarnish that of his critics. Early in his term, two police officers were shot and killed in the hallway of a Harlem apartment building. Adams said the killings recalled the 1987 death of his friend and coworker on the transit police, Robert Venable, whose photo Adams claimed to still carry in his wallet, thirty-five years later. Asked for verification, Adams posed for a photo in the New York Times of himself and the prized picture — only, it turned out, no such wallet-size picture existed. His staff had been ordered to google Venable’s name, print a small headshot in grayscale, tear its edges, and spill coffee on it to simulate decades of wear and tear.
Other personal mythologies, often told at public events, seemed to arise at strange moments and change over time, leaving even close listeners confused as to which elements were real and which were invented on the fly. The most generous reading of these inconstancies might be as expressions of what Werner Herzog once called an “ecstatic truth,” which “is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”
Stories of Adams’s youth and early years as a cop have proved impossible to verify, but they paint a picture of a young man eking out a life in the gray economy, then suffering the consequences for bravely exposing police cruelty and corruption. His own origin story of arrest and abuse at age 15 evolved somewhat, with new details added about a side hustle selling fugazi jewelry in Chinatown. He also claimed to have been a skateboard trickster and one of the “squeegee men” loathed by Giuliani. In a mayoral debate, he recounted an episode during his time on the police force when, after he interceded to prevent an anti-Asian hate crime, racist NYPD officers attempted a drive-by shooting against him, which he narrowly escaped. There is no evidence for any of these stories, leading skeptics to question their veracity. Maybe he didn’t experience all of them personally, but almost all of the situations in Adams’s embellished autobiography have happened to some New Yorkers at some point — an everyman in the fullest sense.
Adams has likewise inflated his own mayoral achievements to levels that strain credulity.3 Looking back at his record earlier this year, he declared that his administration will have built “more housing [in one term] than the twelve years of Bloomberg [and] the eight years of de Blasio combined.” Adams’s spokespeople later produced an accounting for this claim that included more than one hundred thousand apartments that developers could build because of zoning changes — units that, if ever produced, will also be claimed by whatever mayor is in power at that time.
When pressed on his tall tales, Adams often defaulted to a Christian-inspired idiom — “I am perfectly imperfect” — before moving right along to the next talking point. At times it seemed as if his aversion to accuracy might be a tactic to distract from his more serious shortcomings: Every news story about a fib or fabrication was an inch of column space not devoted to his administration’s corruption or disappointments. But they also distracted from his administration’s accomplishments and primed New Yorkers to question every claim.
In the long run, Eric Adams will be remembered less for his colorful character and underwhelming performance than for his fealty to Donald Trump. The man who ran for mayor in 2021 as “the Biden of Brooklyn” ended his mayoralty as a de facto spokesperson for the Trump Administration.
Adams’s allegiance to Biden seemed to end as soon as migration to the city surged. Texas and Florida Republican Governors Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis were busing migrants and asylum seekers to New York City and other cities with Democratic (and often Black) mayors. While Adams voiced his resentment toward these two villains, he appeared to aim his primary ire at the Biden Administration, whom he blamed for failing to stop border crossings or mount a centralized federal response that would have paid for a greater share of immigrants’ care and dispersed newcomers more evenly across the country.
By then, the federal Justice Department had already been investigating Adams since his time as Borough President for shady dealings with Turkish government emissaries and businesspeople. Once these allegations surfaced — amid FBI raids on the homes of close Adams associates and leaks to the press promising a widening dragnet — Adams began to paint himself as a martyr.
From there Adams apparently had no direction to turn but right. Although he said he voted for Kamala Harris, he had every incentive to hope for Trump to win and either offer him a presidential pardon or kill the investigation altogether. Photos surfaced of Trump and Adams together at a mixed martial arts competition at Madison Square Garden shortly after the election, and Adams was offered a ticket to Trump’s inauguration. In February, Trump’s Justice Department duly dropped all charges against Adams, prompting several senior prosecutors to quit and trapping Adams forever in Trump’s protection racket. He would be shielded from prosecution as long as he kissed the ring.
Adams and Trump come from radically different New York City backgrounds, but their political journeys have taken them down similarly crooked paths.
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In the twilight of his political career, Adams went full MAGA. More than once, the mayor endorsed FBI director Kash Patel’s conspiracy-laden book Government Gangsters. He appeared on Fox and Friends with Tom Homan, laughing as the “border czar” joked about being “up [Adams’s] butt” if the mayor didn’t do as Homan wished. Adams and his NYPD allies stepped up their right-wing media appearances, spreading Trumpian talking points on Newsmax and Tucker Carlson Tonight. The mayor hosted the antisemitic streamer Sneako and the right-wing influencer Amber Rose for cigars on the porch of Gracie Mansion. He said nary a word about the secret immigration police rounding up New Yorkers, even as other local elected officials were engaging in civil disobedience in federal courts. Adams even broke with his own Department of Education policies on trans children and school facilities. When he finally dropped out of the mayoral race, the announcement came a few weeks after a secret meeting with Trump in Florida.
Adams and Trump come from radically different New York City backgrounds, but their political journeys have taken them down similarly crooked paths. Both have at various times identified as Democrat or Republican, and have flipped on seemingly core values, such as abortion rights for Trump and immigration rights for Adams. They are fiercely loyal to their friends in politics up to the moment when it becomes a matter of career survival to cut them loose, at which point they unceremoniously break ties and forge new bonds.
Like Trump, Adams claims to help the very people he harms. He insists that he protects trans New Yorkers even as he endangers them; he surrounds himself with notorious antisemites while claiming to stand for Jewish safety and attacking critics of Israel as Jew-haters; he proclaims himself the defender of immigrants even as he abets their deportation. They each present as authentic in a way few politicians can, yet their self-conception is a synthesis of opposites. Trump alone can fix the system because he gamed it for years. Adams alone can curb both crime and police abuse because he has been both an aggressive cop and a police reformer. Trump positions himself as a more rightful emissary of various groups than their elected leaders; he has purported to represent “the Jews” while calling Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer “a proud member of Hamas.” Adams has perfected this shtick, donning a dizzying array of ethno-religious garb — Bukharan chapans, kurtas, Diwali garlands — to present himself as somehow believably Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and more.
In his embrace of what David Dinkins, New York’s only previous Black mayor, called the “gorgeous mosaic” of New York, Adams stands as one of the Democrats’ most enthusiastic expounders of liberal multiculturalism. He promotes a vision of pan-ethnic symbolic inclusion that sidesteps both the redistributive premise of the Civil Rights movement and the bigoted denialism of today’s antiwoke backlash. Yet Adams mobilized even multiculturalism toward Trumpist ends. He appointed a historically diverse cabinet only to push them out when they crossed him, or to watch them resign in protest over his turn toward Trump, Homan, and ICE. He implicitly argued that New York, in all its diversity, could not sustain a surge of immigration, driving a wedge between the city’s long-established minority groups and its more recent arrivals. Diversity is our strength, Adams seemed to suggest — and we will wield that strength against immigrants, student protesters, homeless people, and anyone else who stands against us.
What does it mean when Adams declares that New York City is “the Mexico City of America,” “the Port-au-Prince of America,” “the Seoul of America”? For four years Adams repeated this phrase in countless variations at flag raisings and public ceremonies, appealing to the diaspora of virtually every nation on earth. (He never got around to raising the flag for Palestine, though he said, implausibly, that he was “open to it.”) He continued to do so even as he moved closer to an administration that was pursuing mass deportation of immigrants from all those places and levying steep tariffs against their countries’ imports.
Like JD Vance and other MAGA leaders, Adams could deploy class as an infinitely malleable identity category. Running for mayor in 2021, he proclaimed that as a small-time landlord, “I am real estate.” Four years later, seeking to distinguish himself from Mamdani and Cuomo, he sounded like a cross between Karl Marx and Kendrick Lamar: “I’m a working-class New Yorker. They are not like us.”
In the 2024 presidential election, Trump’s share of the New York City vote rose alarmingly from his previous races in 2016 and 2020. Much of this boost was due to declining Democratic turnout, partly in protest against the party leadership’s continued support for Israel, partly due to dislike for Harris (either on personal or identity grounds, or both), and all justified by the confidence that under the winner-take-all electoral college, such protest nonvotes would not swing New York to Trump. Never- theless, Trump did pick up plenty of new voters, including some working-class immigrants and people (mostly men) of color.
Ironically, even as openness to Trump rose in New York, support for an increasingly Trumpian Adams dwindled. His poll numbers fell and fell until, on September 28, Adams recorded a video of himself descending the front steps of the mayoral residence and announcing that he would end his campaign. Trump’s 2015 ride down the escalator at Trump Tower marked the start of his horrendous political career; Adams’s walk down the staircase at Gracie Mansion marked his end.
In many ways, Adams’s New York was also Trump’s New York. Although he couldn’t succeed, Adams tried to paper over his corruption with Trumpian charisma. He benefited from the radically diminished expectations of American government that Trump has instantiated, spinning anything short of complete failure as some kind of success. His administration’s endemic kleptocracy was met with a shrug by many New Yorkers, who have come to expect all but open corruption from their political leadership. The everyday letdowns of the Adams Administration were serious, and yet they were far less catastrophic than the authoritarian crackdowns in Washington.
Over the past four years, New Yorkers lived life by a thousand cuts, enduring austerity, indignities, and an overall feeling — sometimes but not always backed up by official statistics — that conditions were slowly but steadily deteriorating. Things did not fall apart, but they did not come together, either.
For all his self-interested overtures to the racist in the White House, Eric Adams may have been the one man standing between the city of New York and the full force of federal fascism. Would a mayor who takes dead aim at the New York real estate industry provoke the president, himself the city’s most famous landlord and developer, to cut even more federal funding to the city of New York? If so, would the city’s tenants blame the president, or the mayor? Would a mayor who staunchly opposed the president’s deportation terror and backed anti-ICE protesters be met with military occupation? If so, would the NYPD side with the mayor, their ostensible boss, or with the president and his blood-and-soil nationalism? We will soon find out.
In 2006, Governor Eliot Spitzer was caught hiring sex workers and quickly resigned. Lieutenant Governor David Paterson then became governor, leaving his previous, usually symbolic former office empty. ↩
These speculations were only heightened by an awkwardly staged press tour of a Bed-Stuy brownstone apartment where Adams claimed to live but which to all appearances seemed to be the home of his twentysomething son. ↩
At times, Adams seems to be embracing a tactic Trump’s (now remorseful) ghostwriter Tony Schwartz described in Trump’s first memoir, Trump: The Art of the Deal: “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular,” Schwartz wrote in Trump’s voice. “I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and it’s a very effective form of promotion.” ↩
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