It ended not with the bang of a gavel but the whimper of a memo. The fifteen-month saga of investigations launched, phones seized, raids conducted, and cronies forced into resignation that constituted the first ever federal indictment of a sitting New York City mayor concluded with the bombastic Eric Adams mewling obsequiously at the feet of Donald Trump. Just as he was once regularly boosted out of economy and into Turkish Airlines business class, Adams found himself rescued from the stiff seating in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Though an improvement on jail time, this upgrade came with a price.
The result was not entirely a surprise by the time the Department of Justice finally ordered federal prosecutors to drop all criminal charges in United States vs. Adams on February 10, given the mayor’s recent overtures to the president, but the content of the memo they released still stuns. It plainly states that the purpose of the dismissal is to strengthen Adams’s “ability to support critical, ongoing federal efforts ‘to protect the American people from the disastrous effects of unlawful mass migration and resettlement.’” (A one sentence footnote insists this is not, in fact, a quid pro quo arrangement.) The DOJ’s memo admits that the acting deputy attorney general “reached this conclusion without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.” Remarkably, at week’s end, Adams claimed to not have even read the text of the order.
The shamelessly politicized deal proved so objectionable that the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District, Danielle Sassoon, a Trump-appointed Federalist Society member and former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, resigned rather than kill the case, along with six other officials, including the lead prosecutor. Sassoon blasted the DOJ in a letter, declaring that the Southern District had had imminent plans to file a superseding indictment charging the mayor with destroying evidence and instructing people to lie to the FBI. Only after the DOJ’s entire Public Integrity Section was threatened with mass firings was a dismissal motion eventually filed late last Friday night. U.S. District Judge Dale Ho could still consider the unlikely move of rejecting the dismissal and appointing a special prosecutor; he has ordered the Justice Department and Adams’s lawyers to appear in court this afternoon to discuss the motion.
Though an improvement on jail time, this upgrade came with a price.
Federal prosecutors retained the right to reopen the case—which concerns allegations of trading influence for more than $100,000 in hotel and airline upgrades, as well as illegal campaign donations from foreign nationals—after the mayoral election in November. The intent is clear: ensuring Adams’s compliance. Should he stray from complete obedience to Trump’s immigration agenda, he could again find himself in the crosshairs of the DOJ. He is effectively a MAGA hostage, albeit a willing one.
The Vichy mayor immediately fell in line. The morning before the memo was released, Adams ordered top officials not to criticize Trump; earlier, his administration put out guidelines instructing city workers to comply with federal immigration enforcement officers against local sanctuary city policy. When the federal government stole $80 million directly from city bank accounts, which Elon Musk (with whom Adams shares a defense attorney) posted on X was used to put up migrants in luxury hotels that became gang headquarters, Adams, who regularly blasted Biden for not sufficiently funding migrant shelters, offered a subdued response, promising an investigation and dialogue. (The money, allocated through the FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, capped spending at $12.50 per night per person.) Adams then met with Trump’s “Border Czar” Tom Homan, who chided him for not doing enough to cooperate with the administration’s immigration agenda, after which Adams agreed to reopen an ICE facility on Rikers Island. As Adams said in an unsettling joint Fox & Friends appearance with Homan the next morning, “Let’s be clear—I’m not standing in the way. I’m collaborating!”
In typical Adams fashion, perhaps the most important moment of his mayoralty arrived while he attended a party for the archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church at Gallagher’s Steakhouse in Midtown. It is unclear whether he had finally made his haters into waiters at his table of success, as he once promised to do, or if it was just the establishment’s regular staff working that night. But in a video taken shortly after the news was broken to him by his dining companion, the Republican grocery store billionaire John Catsimatidis, as the two shared Diet Cokes, the mayor’s shell shock alternates with a barely suppressed smile. Hanging behind him on the wall is a caricature of a golfer sporting a devious grin while sneakily changing his scorecard. It’s titled “Temptation.”
Adams’s press conference the next day meandered from inaccuracies to outright lies to a half-hearted campaign speech about falling crime and rising housing supply. But he sounded hollow, not defiant, and looked drained in a way his late nights at Zero Bond or Casa Cipriani never seemed to leave him. Further rocked by the unprecedented resignations of half of his deputy mayors as well as a growing chorus of calls to step down, Adams has lost his cool. Over the weekend, he implored supporters to tell anyone they hear criticizing him in public to shut up and referred to widespread condemnation of his actions as “a modern day Mein Kampf.” This is what flailing looks like.
Somewhere—maybe while groveling at Mar-a-Lago, or rubbing elbows with Logan and Jake Paul in the inauguration’s overflow room, or in months of back-channel dinners with MAGA hacks—the mayor forgot the second half of his promise to not resign, but to “reign.” No matter how much longer he remains in office, his proverbial deal with the devil has cemented his legacy. He got what he wanted, but at the cost of his trademark swagger. It will cost New Yorkers more.
Carl Jung wrote that energy, forward motion, and life itself comes from a healthy internal tension between opposites: “Out of [the] collision of opposites the unconscious psyche always creates a third thing of an irrational nature, which the conscious mind neither expects nor understands.” Mystifying, contradictory, yet undeniably vigorous, you might say that Eric Adams represents the transcendent function in Jungian analysis. City councilmember Justin Brannan suggested as much when the mayor sported a baseball cap with logos for both the Yankees and the Mets last fall: “I’m all for Carl Jung and the duality of man, but this is egregious.” Of late, however, Adams’s transcendent spirit has noticeably dimmed.
His career long thrived on his ability to hold together conflicting realities and ideological commitments. An ex-Republican who voted for Bernie Sanders, a fanatical supporter of Israel with ties to Louis Farrakhan, the choice of the labor world also backed by big business, and a tough-on-crime cop who doubled as a crusading police reformer (not to mention a vegan who eats fish), his bizarre charisma, megawatt smile, and penchant for quotable turns-of-phrase helped paper over these contradictions and unite a broad coalition in the 2021 mayoral primary. Adams could promise black homeowners in southeast Queens that he would stop police violence and preserve their neighborhood character while telling Upper East Side real estate executives he would unleash NYPD crackdowns and incentivize city-wide development. All politicians pander to the rooms they are in, but few so brazenly.
His preternatural talent for retail politics, honed during eight years of powerless ribbon-cutting as Brooklyn borough president, met an insatiable energy for pounding pavement, shaking hands at every community institution in the city no matter how small or far-flung. For every Park Slope New York Times reader he lost with a gaffe on the campaign trail, he gained a low level Uzbek businessman thrilled to be invited to a flag raising ceremony (even more thrilled to hear that New York is the Tashkent of America)—and hoping for a return on a shady donation spread across a few employees. Still, it was just barely enough to squeak out victory: Adams beat out runner-up Kathryn Garcia by only seven thousand votes, less than a single percentage point.
It makes sense that the mayoralty of a paradoxical man would emerge out of a similarly divided political moment, one suspended between social upheaval and reactionary backlash. Adams paid lip service to each. Though the peak of the George Floyd uprisings had long since passed by the time of New York’s 2021 election, left-wing ideas still dominated discourse during the primary. Half of the major candidates proudly endorsed defunding the NYPD in some form, unthinkable in this year’s race. Adams ran hard against Defund and openly disdained his rivals to the left while making significant progressive appeals to his working-class base—from bringing up his reform history with 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care to running TV ads trumpeting a universal child care proposal.
His failed mayoralty has robbed him of this essential mutability. In office, he could no longer speak out of both sides of his mouth; actual governance necessarily alienated parts of his fragile coalition. City of Yes, his modest-in-scope, impressive-in-difficulty-of-passage initiative to incentivize the private development of eighty thousand new homes over the next fifteen years enraged conservative outer-borough NIMBYs. Hiking rents 9 percent on the city’s more than two million rent-stabilized tenants in three years, greater than the increase that occurred over the entirety of Bill de Blasio’s tenure, alienated many working-class renters. An influx of over 230,000 migrants strained city resources and became a target for xenophobic scapegoating, while Adams felt rebuffed in his attempts to secure support from the Biden administration. In more than three years, what truly ambitious program did he even try to win?
Beyond policy missteps, seemingly omnipresent corruption stories pissed off voters of all stripes, including wealthy business leaders pining for an efficient technocrat through whom to quietly channel their agenda. And though crime has mostly decreased under Adams overall, major crimes remain about 30 percent higher than before the pandemic. The hysteria that Adams the candidate helped whip up about a city in flames has stymied his efforts to calm the public. The combination of these factors has significantly shrunk his base of support. Personal magnetism only goes so far.
On top of it all, a highly publicized trial threatened to do the unthinkable: distill Adams to a single identity—guilty. This violation of his fundamentally mercurial nature is the culprit for not just his political unpopularity but his freefalling joie de vivre. Though he has, for now, escaped judgement from the feds, his politicized rescue by and flagrant subservience to Trump have sentenced him in the court of public opinion. His job approval and personal favorability lie deep underwater. Adams is now the least popular mayor in almost three decades of polling history, one whom even the city’s recent Democrat-to-Trump converts with similar ideological commitments do not seem compelled to support.
His newly chummy relationship with the president renders him particularly unpopular with the highly partisan Democratic primary electorate. But even if Adams chose to run in the Republican primary, which would require approval from local party leaders, he would face a city where Democrats have a seven-to-one registration advantage, one which Trump lost by 40 percent despite making gains in predominantly non-white outer-borough neighborhoods. Circumstances shift rapidly during mayoral primaries, but it’s nearly impossible to game out a sequence of events that ends with Adams on top. He may not completely crater in the polls, but he lacks the tangible accomplishments to change enough voters’ minds—if he makes it to Election Day at all.
If each New York mayor symbolizes something essential about the national political period they serve in, from Koch the combative ur-neoliberal to de Blasio the Occupy/Black Lives Matter-era white progressive, Adams’s governance represents not just the country’s reactionary turn but raw transactionalism brought to its natural conclusion, brutality set to work in the service of naked grift. Elon Musk’s gutting of government programs and the pathetic servility of tech CEOs lining up behind the Trump administration makes the epochal dynamic obvious. So does Adams pushing for severe budget cuts while enriching himself, his cronies, and his donors. From urban to federal governance, crudeness and cruelty wrestle for top billing.
But there’s also a more pedestrian line connecting Donald Trump and Eric Adams, and it runs through a modest building in Canarsie: the Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club, political home of Meade Esposito, the commanding, corrupt boss of the Brooklyn Democratic Party from 1969 to 1984. A domineering leader who kept a baseball bat under his desk, Esposito’s machine took care of many residents’ basic needs, delivered major blocs of votes to his chosen candidates, rigged vast patronage schemes, and facilitated widespread graft. He remains a figure of inspiration for Trump, a heroic ideal for how to singularly wield top-down power with an “iron fist.” The two crossed paths in the cutthroat world of New York real estate. As John Ganz wrote recently in Airmail, “What Esposito really did for Fred and Donald Trump is still unclear, but its outlines can be readily imagined: he served as a conduit between the worlds of legitimate business and politics and New York’s underbelly, with contacts in the unions and the Mob,” no doubt greasing the wheels for all sorts of development projects.
Quid pro quo is just a fancy way of saying the art of the deal.
Adams, too, swims in Esposito’s wake. Though the power of Democratic clubhouses has far receded from its mid-century heyday, Adams’s political rise steeped him in the rules, practices, and personnel of these smoke-filled backrooms. Esposito’s successor as head of both the Thomas Jefferson Club and the Brooklyn Democratic Party, Frank Seddio—deemed a “king of corruption” by the New York Daily News—has touted being a close ally of Adams since the 1980s, calling him “one of the finest men I’ve ever met.” Frank Carone, Adams’s former chief of staff and ultra-connected key personal advisor, grew up around the Thomas Jefferson Club as a youth in Canarsie. He later opened a law practice with Seddio, further demonstrating the long reach of machine politics into Adams’s City Hall.
The mass base of organizations like the Thomas Jefferson Club has long since evaporated, leaving only individualist residue. Today, Trump and Adams are connected less by tangible political infrastructure than by the logic on which these groups operated. Just as Adams knows whose hands to shake at a random Business Improvement District gathering in south Brooklyn, he knows whose ring to kiss—the guy with the biggest baseball bat. Trump, for his part, understands Adams’s taste for kickbacks as simply a normal part of the job, maybe even the point of accruing power. Quid pro quo is just a fancy way of saying the art of the deal. But neither Trump nor Adams have quite grasped or seem to care about the other tenet of clubhouse politics: providing for your voters. It’s an impressive feat to make the machines of the past look magnanimous.
Using the DOJ to control Adams grants Trump wins both personal and political. He can go further than inflaming right-wing rhetoric about dangerous, failed liberal cities and enact the conservative fantasy of actually crushing the largest one, strangling the city’s funding and terrorizing its over four hundred thousand undocumented residents, whose economic contributions help keep it running. With the leverage he has, it’s hard to imagine his attacks will stop there. Trump also gets to live out a boyhood fantasy of being the top boss of his hometown. He is symbolically conquering New York, parading around its leader’s head on a spike.
Though at first outrage confined itself mostly to the left, once top Adams aides began to depart en masse, calls for the mayor’s resignation have spread across the ideological spectrum. By Tuesday of this week, ever-wavering governor Kathy Hochul held a series of meetings with city leaders (the unelected Al Sharpton among them) to discuss a “path forward,” including the possibility of removing Adams from office—powers no New York governor has exercised before. City officials have also threatened to convene an “Inability Committee,” a likewise never-before-used mechanism, to remove the mayor themselves. With both processes risky and untested, it’s likely Hochul and the others are hoping that by making noise, they can spook him into abandoning office. Little about Adams suggests he would relinquish power so easily.
With the 2025 mayoral election looming, will New Yorkers back a candidate capable of standing up to Trump’s hostile takeover? Whomever they choose, it will almost certainly not be Adams. His future likely lies in his past as a bandwagon Republican, like he was from 1997 to 2001. It’s easy to envision him becoming a side character in the Trump cinematic universe—possibly as an appointee in the administration, or more believably as a Fox News talking head. His charm, creative phraseology, and complete moral vacuousness would go a long way there, and the conservative gravy train might be too lucrative to resist. Maybe his recent appearance on Tucker Carlson was more audition than interview. It’s also possible this overestimates his ideological motivation. A cushy lobbying gig, liaising between sleazy real estate figures and sleazier pols, would make a fittingly low-rent last act.
Whenever his time in Gracie Mansion is done, however he leaves it, and wherever he goes after, Adams’s tenure will stack up as one of, if not the single weakest, in city history, his exceedingly modest accomplishments drowned out by a din of chaos. He could end up best remembered as the mayor who, through avarice and low integrity, enabled a new era of distant conservatives meddling in urban affairs, forging a nightmare version of the close connection between New York and Washington he once craved.
Adams has been compared to Abe Beame, a longtime member of Esposito’s Brooklyn machine turned one-term mayor in the mid-1970s. Quickly overwhelmed by the widespread fiscal crisis and rightward turn that engulfed postwar urban liberalism, Beame faced down low popularity and a vicious host of primary challengers, including a Cuomo. One imagines that if Adams, rather than Beame, were in office when Gerald Ford told the city, in so many words, to “drop dead,” he might’ve turned around and asked, “What’s in it for me?”