Eric Adams’ Trials Are a Trial for All New Yorkers

New York City’s fever is about to finally break after a nagging condition flared into raging illness when Eric Adams and his aides were publicly exposed last year as the subjects of federal investigation and Adams himself was then indicted.

It didn’t break after the presidential election when the Trump Justice Department ordered prosecutors to drop the case, for now, in a nakedly corrupt arrangement to compel the mayor’s support for their agenda. 

It didn’t break with Judge Dale Ho’s decision last week to bring in conservative heavyweight Paul Clement to argue against dropping the case, forcing the feds to defend their transparently political decision, or with Gov. Kathy Hochul’s public hemming and hawing about using her power for fire Adams, or with resistance fantasies of Attorney General Letitia James or Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg stepping in where the feds now fear to tread.

It’s finally breaking with petitioning in the mayoral election beginning this week, and New Yorkers who soured on Adams long before the FBI seized his phones and raided his aides tuning in to what’s at stake when they vote in June. 

It took just a year for the same voters who’d made Adams mayor to recognize that his swagger far exceeded his delivery and that when push came to shove — sometimes literally — he inevitably proved more concerned with protecting his crooked friends than in delivering for the people of this city. 

There’s a line that Adams’ ally Al Sharpton returned to in his brilliantly disruptive (and Roger Stone-advised) 2004 presidential primary run: “They keep saying I can’t win. How do they know what I’m trying to win?”

As the great Jim Chapin observed decades back about Sharpton, he grew his power not by expanding his base or winning elections but by shrinking the Democratic electorate around him to make himself a relatively bigger fish in an absolutely smaller pond.

Sharpton’s been a king-killer, not a king-maker, and Adams — the reverend’s old bodyguard and a gifted retail politician who isn’t going to be outworked — is playing a similar role now to stay in the game and at the table.

Adams already played for time in “forgetting” his phone password and bricking his device, which helped set back the feds’ case long enough for his sucking up to Trump to pay dividends before his criminal trial began. 

Even with that case potentially behind him now, Adams has no evident path to reelection. Yet his very presence in the race, his insistence he’ll “reign not resign” and his aggressive talk about how people are nefariously plotting to take out the city’s second Black mayor (“if you’re not going to be with a brother — Negro, shut up!”) have made it much harder for other candidates to claim the middle lane he’s refusing to give up. 

It’s King Lear meets Norman Lear: Who wants to run against a crazed, kamikaze incumbent throwing his sharpest elbows?

Just months after elevating some very competent public servants in a last-ditch effort to restore the public’s lost confidence in his administration, Adams shrugged when — in the wake of his dirty deal with the feds and vow not to publicly criticize Trump — four well-respected deputy mayors resigned in a blaring warning to New Yorkers that the mayor can’t be trusted.  

Meanwhile, he’s been hitting churches to wildly reference “Mein Kampf” and call reporters “liars.” Adams isn’t ranting about all that to help New Yorkers but to save his own skin, keep his seat at the table and see if he can’t get lucky and claim a win, whatever that turns out to mean.    

In doing so, he’s made it harder for New Yorkers to work out what’s at stake and the choice they’re making. That’s changing, with petitioning and as the mayor will finally appear at a mayoral forum with the other declared candidates later this week. 

Understandably, Adams’ declared rivals have struggled to pick up early traction with the city’s attention to this point focused elsewhere, and Adams is hopeful that a surge of grassroots support for Socialist Zohran Mamdani — who’s kept to his wild principles while others the progressives in the field have been, as Josh Greenman memorably put it, “mugged by the polls” — could help him run against the right strawmen in a Democratic primary and perhaps also in November’s general election if he can get Trump’s help to compel Republican leaders to give him their line. 

It’s a fever dream. 

What may finally break the city’s fever? The petitioning starting this week will force prospective candidates to commit to a race and a political party or walk away. That will bring the contest into focus for New Yorkers, who start voting in less than four months — when the field and the race are going to look very different than they do right now.  

There are serious candidates already running who are positioned to surge late, like Adams did in 2021 and Bill de Blasio in 2013. 

And there are potentially even more serious ones about to enter who could shake things up like Andrew Yang did four years ago and Anthony Weiner did eight years before that. Neither of those two won, of course, but they shot to the top of the polls despite their severe and obvious flaws because even Democratic primary voters are hungry for more than what the Democratic Party regulars have been offering. 

Andrew Cuomo is about to enter the race, driving his steamroller right into Adams’ lane with pre-endorsements from Carl McCall and Ritchie Torres. He’ll start with a big war chest, an overlapping base of support and a huge polling advantage. The former governor, who must already be thinking about a 2028 presidential run if he can pull off the comeback this year, knows that this is a much tighter race than the early polling suggests but also that his challengers have only a little time to close that gap.  

In the meantime, groups desperate to find a viable alternative to both the current mayor and the former governor have been trying to rally behind Council Speaker Adrienne Adams — no relation, though she went to high school with Eric — with Letitia James drumming up support for her after declining entreaties to enter the race herself. 

Then there’s Jessica Tisch, Adams’ highly competent new police commissioner and former sanitation commissioner. A well-regarded public servant and a member of one of the city’s most prominent and wealthiest families, the New York Post — whose backing was crucial to Adams’ win in 2021 — floated her on Sunday as a mayoral candidate. 

In November, Adams brought in Tisch, who’d done a fine job as his sanitation, as PC not because he wanted a credible and independent person in charge of the police but because he had no choice but to restore his own squandered credibility after his first commissioner walked away from the job because of his meddling and cronyism and his next two were both raided by the FBI. 

But Adams’ reported decision to install Kaz Daughtry — who’s had a meteoric rise under Adams and was already in way over his head — to be his next deputy mayor for public safety, a position Adams previously used to micromanage the police department while reducing its commissioners to figureheads, is a bright flashing warning sign to Tisch. 

It strongly suggests that the mayor isn’t inclined to live up to his end of their deal and let her do the hard and essential job he’s placed her in the right way. 

If Adams won’t give her the space to do this the right way, she’d have good reason to run for his job, with the resumé and resources to credibly pitch herself as a Bloombergian city manager in a field full of elected officials and party regulars.   

In 2021’s bizarre COVID election, Eric Adams eked out his narrow primary victory — the one that effectively elected him mayor and led him to proclaim himself “the Biden of Brooklyn” while introducing a new narrative about how God had told him decades earlier that he would win the election — in the city’s first-ever ranked-choice primary.

After seven rounds of counting, Adams led by nearly 90,000 votes as the contest boiled down to him, Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia. 

When Wiley was eliminated in the eighth round, roughly 130,000 of her voters went to Garcia while 50,000 went to Adams, which is how Garcia ended up just 8,000 votes short of victory. But 75,000 Wiley voters had their ballots “exhausted,” since they hadn’t ranked either Garcia or Adams, suggesting that if that group had ranked more choices, Garcia would have won. 

Soon, New Yorkers will have their chance to revisit their 2021 decision — and maybe a second opportunity to pick a competent former sanitation commissioner over a crooked ex-cop.