CNN
—
The victor of a cutthroat primary for mayor in 2021, New York City’s Eric Adams rushed to embrace national political stardom.
He declared himself the “face of the new Democratic Party” and, after an early invitation to the White House from President Joe Biden, dropped a line that now makes rival New York politicos snicker.
“I am the ‘Biden of Brooklyn,’” Adams said. “I’m sure if you were to ask (the president), who is his favorite mayor, he’d clearly tell you, ‘It’s Eric.’”
Now, on the cusp of Donald Trump’s return to office, Adams is largely an outcast in his own party. He started privately bashing Biden’s immigration policy and the influx of new migrants to the city within months of becoming mayor and, by 2023, publicly declared that “the president and the White House have failed New York City.” He will meet with the president-elect’s border czar, Tom Homan, on Thursday to discuss the incoming administration’s deportation plans.
Adams had previously been compared to Trump by critics, who saw strains of the former president’s chaotic behavior and divisive nature in the retired police captain-turned-politician. But as Adams’ approval rating cratered and federal prosecutors began raiding the homes of his top aides, a new dynamic emerged.
It came in the form of a 57-page indictment, unsealed in late September, containing five federal charges related to bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy and soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals. The mayor has denied any wrongdoing. But a trial looms and prosecutors are on a winning streak in New York.
If Adams is indeed now making eyes at Trump, it is in part because he has few other places to look. The overlap in their political styles has been chewed over by the chattering classes for years. And both men have voiced nearly identical, often conspiratorial, criticisms of Biden’s Justice Department. Trump in 2020 commuted the sentence of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat who had served eight years in prison on a pay-for-play conviction.
“I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would be a target — and a target I became,” Adams told reporters in late September, claiming without evidence that his condemnations of Biden’s handling of the border prompted a probe that, after a trial scheduled for early next year, could send him to prison. (In reality, the investigation into Adams’ fundraising practices began much earlier.)
Trump, of course, took notice.
A few weeks later, at the Al Smith charity dinner in New York, the former president – less than a month before clinching a return to the White House – wished Adams “good luck” and expressed confidence he would beat the case.
“I know what it’s like to be persecuted by the DOJ for speaking out against open borders,” Trump said. “We were persecuted, Eric. I was persecuted, and so are you, Eric.”
Adams and Trump were seated in close proximity on the dais that evening, alongside the likes of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Mike Johnson. Adams himself was flanked by a pair of Republicans, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former New York Gov. George Pataki.
John Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of the Gristedes grocery store chain, occasional radio host and longtime Trump pal, was close by, too. As he listened to Trump, he recalled to CNN the federal raid of a top Adams fundraiser’s home about a year before. The mayor was on his way to Washington when investigators arrived. He returned to New York without taking any meetings.
“Does that seem like a coincidence?” Catsimatidis said of the raid, echoing the paranoid thinking that Adams and his closest allies seem taken with.
Asked if he planned to make the case to Trump that he should pardon Adams, Catsimatidis suggested it was unnecessary.
“He doesn’t need me to do that. Connect the dots if you will – his lawyer is the same lawyer as Elon Musk,” Catsimatidis said of Adams, whose defense team includes longtime Musk attorney Alex Spiro.
Adams is “looking to survive,” the Republican added, and his cozying up to Trump should be viewed as a matter of personal and political self-preservation.
“He sees there is a new sheriff in town and he’s aligning himself with the sheriff and he’s telling everybody else to go to hell,” Catsimatidis said. “You want to listen to the president of the United States.”
Adams’ political rivals are casting his behavior in less flattering terms.
“At first blush, you could think of (Adams’) comments as unhinged, kind of like when Trump goes off the rails. But it’s not. Make no mistake, he is auditioning for his pardon. He is hunting for his food and nothing’s going to get in the way,” said former New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, one of Adams’ challengers in next year’s Democratic primary.
State Sen. Zellnor Myrie of Brooklyn, another primary rival who ousted an old Adams ally when he ran for his current office back in 2018, said New Yorkers “should be concerned about this shift in rhetoric that we’re seeing from the mayor.”
Asked if he expected Adams to run in the Democratic primary, Myrie nearly laughed.
“I don’t think he knows!”
Adams has always reserved his harshest criticism for the progressive left and democratic socialists, whom he openly regards as a pack of hyper-online gentrifiers dedicated to hastening his political demise. His election was a chastening of sorts for that wing of the Democratic Party, which never coalesced around a candidate in the primary. Before Adams’s legal troubles came into sharper focus, few New York Democrats expected a progressive challenge in 2025.
That has, of course, changed. Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani is perhaps the furthest left of the current primary field.
“This mayor’s engagement has been on the terms of flattering Trump and Musk for his own narrow self-interest,” Mamdani told CNN, calling Adams’ recent refusal “to say whether he’ll defend the city from a massive deportation program … both embarrassing and disturbing.”
For his part, Adams has sought to cast himself as a cool head on experienced shoulders – operating above the partisan passions of the moment.
He has talked up plans to chat with Homan, who is expected to lead the new administration’s “mass deportation” project, and expressed some openness to Trump’s immigration agenda.
“I don’t want people talking at each other. I want people to talk to each other. And I made it clear that I’m not going to be warring with this administration. I’m going to be working with this administration,” Adams said last week about the sit-down.
New York has been a “sanctuary city” since 1989, when Mayor Ed Koch issued an executive order barring the city from cooperating with federal immigration officials in most cases. The policy was endorsed by his successors, including Democrat David Dinkins and, after him, tough-on-crime prosecutor-turned-mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican and longtime Trump ally. The City Council in 2011 codified limits on local government’s relationship with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, by a vote of 44 to 4.
Several years later in 2014, former Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council added teeth to the order’s language, putting a law on the books that removed ICE from Department of Correction facilities and barred the NYPD or DOC from honoring detainer requests from ICE. Detainer requests are issued by ICE as an official ask to hold an individual for possible deportation.
Those guidelines, long favored by liberals and scorned by conservatives, are expected to come under fire from the second Trump administration. Adams has said de Blasio, his predecessor, “went too far” in extending the protections, but also defended “Dreamers” and said law-abiding migrants, regardless of their legal status, “should not be rounded up in the middle of the night.”
The treatment of migrants accused of crimes, he said last week, should be up for discussion. Pressed on whether a migrant should be tried and convicted before being deported, Adams bristled, saying, “I’m not a person who snuck into this country,” then asking a reporter if her blouse was made of cotton.
“My ancestors have been here for a long time, for a long time,” Adams said. “They used to pick some of that.”
He then argued that Trump had a mandate to “fix the immigration problem in this city.”
“The president-elect hit the popular vote, hit the electoral vote. He was not undecisive, indecisive on what his positions were,” Adams said. “He was clear we need to secure our border deal with the immigration issue. The American people heard it. They voted for it.”
Adams was unusually coy during the final few weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign. He had previously endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, but rarely spoke about her. On November 4, a day before the election, a reporter asked Adams why he seemed so reticent to say the Democratic nominee’s name.
“Everything I do is critiqued highly, and I have to be careful,” Adams said. “And if I’m doing electioneering here at this podium, you’re going to write a story on me.”
He would, as he entered a public school in Brooklyn to cast his ballot, confirm that “VP Harris” was his pick – but only after he was directly asked to “say her name.”
Adams, who was registered as a Republican in the 1990s, has been less shy when it comes to the president-elect.
He steadfastly refused to describe Trump as a “fascist” when Democrats were doubling and tripling down on the line shortly before the election. Adams mocked a local political foe who said the mayor’s rhetoric was undermining the party and, in late October, lashed out at a reporter for asking when he last spoke to Trump.
“Give me another question,” Adams said to a staffer. To the questioner: “You lost your opportunity.”
Since Trump’s victory, Adams has consistently made headlines with his kind or deferential words for Trump and the incoming administration. He praised the selection of billionaire Elon Musk to lead the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.” He refused to criticize former Rep. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s scandal-ridden first pick for US attorney general. Last Friday, Adams repeatedly demurred when asked if he was considering switching parties again.
“The party that’s the most important for me is the American party,” Adams told NY1’s Jamie Stelter, who asked if would consider leaving the Democrats. He gave a similar response later on, telling WPIX, “No matter what party I’m on or vote on, I’m going to push for American values.”
Reprising a line he embraced earlier in the week, Adams promised to push only for “American values” before mocking his critics.
“Those who don’t like it, they will cancel me,” Adams said. “And I say: Cancel me. I’m for America.”
One former aide told CNN that his recent rhetoric should not be surprising, that Adams has always enjoyed “trolling” the press and doubted Adams would switch parties.
Later in the day, the mayor said he did not, in fact, plan on returning to the GOP.
When Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, Adams held it up as further as evidence that the DOJ has been weaponized against him.
At a press conference last week, he even brought along a prop to underscore his point.
“I just want to bring out something. I want to read. I’m going to read the front page of the New York Times,” he said, holding up the paper and reading from an analysis of Biden’s decision: “’President Biden and President-elect Donald Trump now agree on one thing. The Biden Justice Department has been politicized.’”
He added, “Does that sound familiar? Rest my case.”
Adams’ political case is, indeed, fully formed. How the legal end of it will be resolved is murkier. His trial date is currently set for April 21, 2025, in Lower Manhattan.
The jury pool for the Southern District of New York is not expected to be especially friendly. It includes a handful of counties outside the city, along with Manhattan, where Adams finished third in the first round of the 2021 mayoral primary, and the Bronx, where he came in first.
His electoral strongholds in Queens and Brooklyn are part of the Eastern District.
Prosecutors there searched the home of a prominent Adams adviser earlier this year. It is unclear if the US Attorney there is planning to bring charges.
