President Trump has always known how to exploit New York City’s potential for drama, and Mayor Eric Adams is the latest actor witlessly dragged onto his national stage.
The president appears to have done a favor for Mr. Adams, in having his Justice Department direct federal prosecutors to drop corruption charges against the mayor. But in reality, Mr. Trump has effortlessly humiliated Mr. Adams and the state’s Democratic establishment and further weakened the party’s reputation.
The letter from Mr. Trump’s Department of Justice outlining its decision is a poisoned offering to the mayor.
The mayor has always said that he wanted to prove his innocence in court before the June primary in which he is running for re-election. Yet the Department of Justice made clear it was not absolving him and could refile charges after the November election.
The letter also makes clear the price that the White House has exacted from the mayor in the meantime. It said the criminal case had limited the mayor’s ability to help the federal government “protect the American people from the disastrous effects of unlawful mass migration and resettlement.” The implication is that Mr. Adams will use this reprieve to cooperate with Trump deportations — or else.
But Mr. Adams had already signaled that he wanted to cooperate with Mr. Trump. Hours before the letter, the mayor had reportedly told deputies and other city officials not to publicly criticize the president.
The president could have simply pardoned the mayor if, say, he was acting out of gratitude for Mr. Adams’s criticism of the Biden administration’s border failures beginning in 2022, or because he wanted to wield the mayor’s example as more evidence for his claim that Mr. Biden weaponized the justice system.
By laying out the connection between what Mr. Adams is getting and what he is expected to give, Mr. Trump is demonstrating to the nation that Mr. Adams, once even considered (albeit briefly) a potential Democratic presidential contender, is so weak that he can be hooked into a transparently dirty arrangement. Mr. Adams does not even appear to notice this abject mortification.
Mr. Trump’s move also reveals to the country the fecklessness of the state’s Democratic Party. Gov. Kathy Hochul could neutralize Mr. Trump’s compromising rescue of the mayor by removing Mr. Adams from office. Yet all she has said of Mr. Adams since the Justice Department moved to cancel his April trial date is that “I will continue working with him.”
She thus reveals that New York State, a Democratic bellwether, will tolerate a mayor who suffused his administration with the appearance of corruption and whose own behavior has left him in a position of untenable duress.
Governor Hochul has her own workaday transactional motive for knuckling to Mr. Trump. She wants to protect Manhattan’s five-week-old congestion-pricing program, which the president has threatened, and she has no good bargaining moves of her own, as the Democratic-controlled State Legislature’s clumsy effort to delay an election for an open G.O.P. congressional seat has foundered. She has stooped to playing Mr. Trump’s game and is losing.
The weakness that the country can see in the state is important. With the defeat of Kamala Harris diminishing California’s Democratic Party, New York is the party’s base of leadership, money and visibility.
The potentially good news for the city and the state is the coming mayoral race. Mr. Adams’s favorability rating in the state is abysmal, worse than Mr. Trump’s. Voters don’t need the courts to defeat Mr. Adams. The ballot box — starting with the mayoral race — is where New York’s Democrats can rebuild strength.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Adams are both in office because more-respectable candidates failed to address voters’ concerns. Mr. Trump won the election last year largely because he was the only candidate who promised to tackle the unprecedented Biden-era rise in irregular border crossings. Mr. Adams won the mayoralty in 2021, notwithstanding the fact that his brushes with corruption were common knowledge, because he was the only Democratic candidate who consistently focused on the abrupt increase in murder (53 percent between 2019 and 2021) and disorder.
Mr. Adams’s challengers this year are largely an assortment of progressives, when voters, still concerned about crime and quality of life, prefer a moderate.
The one pragmatic Democrat in the race, the former financier Whitney Tilson, remains largely unknown. The candidate whose polling numbers are strongest is Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, who is not even officially running. And though opponents to Mr. Cuomo’s left are likely to focus on the sexual-harassment allegations that led to his 2021 resignation (and which he denies), the corruption that infected his own administration and his Covid-19 mistakes, he is weak on an issue important to moderates as well: He was the governor who, when it appeared that progressives were in the ascendancy, agreed to radical reform of the state’s criminal-justice laws between 2017 and 2019, changes with which the state and the city are still grappling.
To claw its way back from ignominy, New York’s Democratic Party should give the voters what they want: robust choice. New Yorkers should not have been cornered into choosing Mr. Adams in the first place — and should not be cornered into choosing him or another unpalatable option again.
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