The last time we saw him, we saw all of him.
Our subject is Anthony Weiner, whose surname was a burden long before it became a curse—so fused with his disgrace that you can’t say it without triggering an avalanche of cringe. Weiner, who was caught texting pictures of his penis, first denied it, then admitted it, then resigned from Congress, then ran for mayor of New York City, at which point he sexted again under the alias Carlos Danger, was caught again, lost the election, sexted a photo with his young son in the background, sexted a minor, and forfeited a laptop with emails from his estranged wife that caused the FBI to reopen its Hillary Clinton email investigation, greasing the way for Donald Trump’s 2016 victory and hastening the possible end of the republic and democracy as we know it.
But for Weiner, even that wasn’t enough.
Almost 14 years after he accidentally posted the first lewd photo to his Twitter account, and six years after he walked out of a minimum-security prison, having served 18 months for transferring obscene material to a minor, Weiner is running for city council in New York. Is his candidacy a test of America’s capacity to forgive? A provocation for Democrats to stop clutching their pearls while Trump gropes his way to authoritarianism?
One consequence of living in an age when nothing seems to matter is a tendency, at least in some people, to overcorrect and insist that everything matters. The return of Anthony Weiner raises Big Societal Questions, and if that’s your thing, have at it.
My own interests are more narrow. For starters, I live in the downtown-Manhattan district Weiner is hoping to represent. (As an independent, I’m not eligible to vote in the primary.) Then there’s this: Weiner is the cherry atop one of the most absurd primary seasons in New York City history. On June 24, Democrats will make a mayoral choice from candidates including the hugely unpopular now-you’re-indicted, now-you’re-not incumbent (Eric Adams) and a vengeful former governor who resigned after accusations of sexual harassment that he has denied (Andrew Cuomo). There’s also a socialist who wants to use subway stations to house even more homeless people than they currently do. Weiner’s top rival in the city-council race is a previously anonymous assemblyman who went viral when Saturday Night Live spoofed his name—Harvey Epstein—which is somehow even more unfortunate than Weiner’s. We need to hurry up and vote before Rudy Giuliani gets any ideas.
When I first contacted Weiner, I figured he might be subdued by having to play the penitent. There’s not much evidence of his campaign in the neighborhood, and his one-word email response to my interview request felt like a sigh: “Ok.”
I should not have been concerned. Two weeks later, we met for breakfast. He’s still slim as a minnow, loud as a gong. “I’m a fucking Rorschach!” Weiner told me exuberantly.
“My thing is so sui generis,” he continued. “Everyone that I talk to about the race, they fundamentally know perfectly what approach I should take. Some people are like, ‘You should say, “Fuck it. Donald Trump got elected as a 34-time felon.” Or lean into it, you know. Make a joke about it.’ And about an equal number of people say, ‘You got to spend the first four or five pieces of mail apologizing, explaining that you served your whatever it is, you’ve learned your lesson.’”
Spending time with Weiner is like living inside an episode of The Bear. The profanity and fervor are relentless—and seemingly inextricable from the talent. Even with more than a decade of political rust on him, it only took a few minutes to be reminded that tact is often just the first casualty of his convictions.
Take, for instance, his views on the Democratic Party, which he believes has become a kind of emotional-support pet for every progressive interest. “Voters don’t expect you to have every answer and to agree with them on everything,” Weiner said, his face scrunched in exaggerated bewilderment. “Sometimes they actually kind of like it when you say, ‘Fuck me? Fuck you.’ That’s more of an acknowledgement that you’re actually listening to them than just saying ‘Yes, I agree.’”
If confrontation is the deepest form of love, Weiner is the Buddha. That’s the generous take. The less generous one is that he’s obsessive—he’s never met a boundary he respects or a consequence he fears. That his certainty and enthusiasm are tied up with a need to dominate. That he’s not merely tumescent; he needs you to see it.
Self-knowledge can be overrated, but Weiner, deep into his fourth decade in public life, has never been particularly good at disguising or explaining any of this. “I’m not sure where the snake is eating its tail—did I have a need that was being fed by my career? Did I go into that career because I was dealing with these inner demons and whatever?” He is the only subject where his conviction has consistently failed him. A Rorschach test even to himself.
Weiner’s latest comeback began at a countertop company in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. When Weiner left prison in 2020, a friend who owned the place and believed in employing the formerly incarcerated installed Weiner as its CEO. After the company became an employee-owned co-op, Weiner moved on to consulting before landing a regular gig as the left-wing foil on WABC, a conservative talk-radio station that doubles as a rescue shelter for New York’s unloved political animals.
Given the scale of the damage he’d caused, this was more than he had a right to hope for. Radio scratched an itch, and the hours allowed him to “make life as easy as possible for Huma”—Abedin, his ex-wife, famously an adviser to Hillary Clinton—and to be around for their then-9-year-old son, Jordan. Weiner frames this period as “a decision to live a smaller life,” before adding, “Now, I am open to the idea that I don’t want the last chapter to be ‘He served time in prison, came back, and went on terrestrial radio.’ I mean, I’m open to the idea that I didn’t like that last chapter.”
In 2024, Jordan reached the beginning of what parenting experts call the launching stage, and what Weiner jokingly calls a child’s “just doesn’t give a shit about having me around anymore” phase. At the same time, a term-limited seat in our shared city-council district opened. Weiner assessed the field, decided that “there’s not a Muhammad Ali in this fucking race,” and called Huma, with whom he shares custody.
“My first response was wanting reassurance that there was minimal impact on Jordan,” Abedin told me. “And I also know that was the reason why I was the first person he asked. I’ve never doubted that Anthony was and is a very gifted and charismatic politician, and was effective as a congressman. Those are just facts. Very few people who are familiar with his work disagree or dispute that, putting aside any human shortcomings. I’ve moved on with my life. And I’m glad he’s moved on with his, so I said, ‘I hope you can find joy and purpose in doing this.’ That’s basically it. It was a short conversation.”
Then Weiner made another call. “I have the sponsor, and he says, ‘You should constantly be thinking about what your motives are.’ Like, that was his first question.”
Anthony Weiner has a sponsor because Anthony Weiner is a sex addict. He doesn’t quite squirm while talking about it, but it’s the rare subject that causes him to slow down, to consider his words rather than spit them out like spent shell casings. “Let me just start by saying I’m not trying to persuade you or anyone else who wants to argue about whether sex addiction’s a thing or not.” Pause. “But the easiest way to look at it.” Pause. “If you define addiction in the clinical way of doing something that, when you try to stop and can’t, when you need more of that thing despite having more and more consequences for not being able to stop.”
For the record, the DSM-5 (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association) does not include sex addiction as a formal diagnosis. The World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases does, but calls it compulsive sexual behavior disorder. At least initially, Weiner was more of a DSM-5 guy. “I was skeptical,” he said. “I was a person who had this exaggerated belief in my own ability and worked really hard. So even though I lost my brother to addiction”—his older brother, Seth, struggled with drugs and alcohol and was inebriated when hit by a car as he crossed a Virginia highway on foot in 2000—“I never quite internalized it as a thing, right?”
Like a lot of people, rock bottom is what forced him to reconsider. In 2016, as he lost his wife, child, freedom, and possibly the election of the first female president, Weiner could not understand how it had all happened. “I knew that I couldn’t stop. I knew that I was doing it an enormous amount, despite increasing consequences. When people say ‘What were you thinking?,’ I could not answer.”
“I’m not a victim of some larger conspiracy,” he said. “It’s just a thing that I did that I’ve accepted responsibility for.” He credits the rituals of recovery—the naming of his condition; 12 steps; group meetings, which he says he still attends—for providing a ladder up: “It brought me relief. But I want to be careful that I’m not, like, an expert or exemplar or anything.”
It’s impossible to know if Weiner has really become more decipherable to himself. He says all the things a sincere person would say about addiction—which are also the things a clever insincere person would say. We live in an era when every scoundrel has a pathology. It’s hard to imagine a person less suited to the Serenity Prayer.
He at least seems to have arrived at an understanding that the forces inside him can not be dissociated. I asked if politics and sexting were intertwined compulsions, if chasing votes would lead to the world waking up to another shot of his junk on social media. “I worry about it a lot,” he replied. Weiner said he got sober in 2016. But there’s still vintage material out there from the Carlos Danger era. “Part of the risk of all this is that people are like, ‘Sorry, I didn’t get a chance to cash in then, but I’ve got this text from whatever.’”
As for motive, Weiner listened to his sponsor and asked himself if he was chasing fame (“no”), redemption (“a little”), or action (“I did have the sense I ain’t doing enough”). He looked at his life. Jordan and Abedin are thriving and will not be at risk of financial ruin should he implode. (Weiner and Abedin separated in 2016 and officially divorced in early 2025; Abedin is now engaged to George Soros’s son Alex.) “I mean, look, to some degree, this is what I’m really good at. It’s as basic as that,” Weiner said. “From there, it becomes, Well, if I do have this ability, and that ability translates into a better city and a better neighborhood for my son, why not do it? And then the answer is usually some version of: People are gonna say mean things to you. I don’t want people to be mean to me, but that didn’t seem like all that good a reason. So here we are.”
To appear on New York City’s primary ballot, candidates for city council need 450 people to sign a petition supporting their candidacy. The Weiner campaign has no headquarters and one full-time staffer, so the candidate grabbed a clipboard. “When I first got out there, I had fight-or-flight at every door,” Weiner told me. “It’s not like I’ve got a strategic view of how to deal with the scandal. I’m trying to deal with these things with honesty. Even if I wanted to do a poll and say, ‘All right, what do you think?,’ I’d have to read, like, two pages of preamble, right?”
A few people opened their doors, saw Anthony Weiner, and started yelling—and by now it should not surprise you that he yelled back. Some gently teased him or showed him grace. Most barely recognized him. Some mistook him for Andrew Cuomo, or Eliot Spitzer (“Wrong Jew,” Weiner told me), or never knew him in the first place. This tracks with my own experience of being in public with Weiner. A few glances, but time has passed. Recognition fades. So many pariahs under the bridge. “I get a lot of ‘Boy, you must be a glutton for punishment,’’’ he said. “Or someone will say ‘I believe in second chances,’ or ‘I voted for you before; I’ll vote for you again,’ that kind of thing. But I always include in my calculus that people will say nice things and generally keep nasty things to themselves, especially when you’re out there face-to-face.”
Weirdly, the biggest obstacle to Weiner’s comeback may be not his past, but his politics. He’s lived in District 2 since 2011, but it’s far from the mostly white, middle-class parts of Queens and Brooklyn he represented as a congressman. Every District 2 council member since the early 1990s has been Hispanic. Just 8 percent of the district’s 175,000 residents are registered Republicans. Fresh Defund the Police graffiti appears regularly. Our rats share their pronouns.
Weiner’s a centrist Democrat—he thinks the neighborhood needs more cops and fewer pot shops. “If this election is about the most anti-Trump, crazy-making person on the left, you’re not going to pick a Cuomo or a Weiner,” he said. “Now, I could be completely wrong, but there seems to be a disconnect with the brand that New York Democrats are selling and what people want to buy right now.” I asked what evidence he had to support this. “I’m in New York with a head on my shoulders seeing what’s going on on 14th Street.”
The minimalist composer Philip Glass is a longtime District 2 resident. I mention this because the Weiner campaign is basically just two loud hunches, played repeatedly, in a way that may or may not cohere into a melody.
The first hunch is focusing the campaign relentlessly on quality-of-life issues, with moderate to conservative positions on subway-fare evasion (stop it), sidewalk scaffolding (stop it), and the recent proliferation of missile-like E-bikes in bike lanes (stop it). Technocratic intolerance for disorder was last a thing in New York City during the Bloomberg administration, but it’s hardly novel.
This is where the second hunch comes in. Given Democrats’ generally foul mood, it’s not enough to be moderate. To reach the electorate, moderates must also be angry. “You know, usually we associate firebrands with an extreme kind of thing,” Weiner said. “Well, what if the fire is just, like, Ya gotta collect the fucking garbage, man?”
I watched some game tape of Weiner at candidate forums and interest-group Zooms from the past few months. The truth is that these events can be both a bore and a circus. Sometimes Weiner was the clown—“I will take questions on anything. And you know what I mean by this.”
But more often, I smiled, as you do watching anyone be excellent at something.
When a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) group that represents medical residents and interns told him that its top priority is more housing close to hospitals, Weiner shot back, “Am I going to do that for the firefighters also? Am I going to do that for the guys who work in the sanitation department? You tell me how you expect this to work.” He did not sound like the unreasonable one. From the Village Independent Democrats, he took a simple question about a local homeless man and, with compassion, lit into the progressive orthodoxy on homelessness—which prioritizes an unhoused person’s right to stay on the street over getting troubled people necessary care and preserving public spaces.
Most politicians know how to live on the surface in these moments. But Weiner uses conflict to make small things feel more urgent, to make local democracy into something worthy of passion. He’s not a beautiful speaker, but he challenges Democrats to hear the jagged melody blaring through his septum: Do we want to be polite, or do we want to solve this? If I’m willing to fight with you, imagine how hard I’ll fight for you.
Weiner has few ways to know if any of this is working. He and his rivals are on the verge of reaching the council fundraising cap, $207,000, and none of them can afford a proper poll, so he monitors the signals that he can. Endorsements are spotty, though, notably, the SEIU group went with Harvey Epstein. The New York Times appears to find him too prurient to cover, while the New York Post sticks to dick jokes and contempt.
When he entered the race, a rival candidate proposed the Withholding Eligibility in NYC Elections for Restricted Individuals Act, or WEINER Act, to ban registered sex offenders from seeking office. In this, Weiner saw a hopeful glimmer of fear. But at the most recent candidate forum, his opponents seemed to have settled on a series of shared facial expressions that convey patience and pity. They patronized even as he schooled them on the fundamentals, like standing when you answer a voter’s question and underlining your policy differences from the rest of the field.
Aside from voters, Weiner seems most desperate to hear from the old-guard New York Democrats who once embraced him as the future. He hasn’t spoken with Cuomo or Chuck Schumer—his political mentor, the man whose congressional seat he inherited—in years. He has thoughts about how they should talk to voters. (When Schumer blinked in his March staredown with Trump and funded the government with a continuing resolution, Weiner told me, “How many times did Chuck say ‘CR, CR, CR’? Just say ‘They want to close down the government because if they do, they’re never gonna reopen it.’ English!”) He says he wants to be useful, but in the meantime he’s happy to use them as a foil. “I do lean into the idea that there’s not much they can do to me, right? I’m not running with their institutional support. I’m not asking for it in a real way. And also, I’m not going to wilt very easily. If you have Mayor Cuomo, I’m going to be the tallest pygmy in the city council.”
I asked Weiner what happens if he loses, and he reached for an “I’m not that guy anymore” story. Back in the 1990s, when he was first running for Congress, Brooklyn had one 24-hour supermarket. “So at 2 o’clock in the morning, I’m like, ‘I have nowhere else to be. I’ll be at the supermarket, talk to some voters.’ There’s no one there!” He laughed.
So what does he do at 2 a.m. now?
“I’m not running around every moment of the day like I have to be maximizing my voter contact. But campaigning now, here in Manhattan, that’s very different than it was when I did this in Brooklyn in 1991. And listen, if I want to reach people at 2 a.m., there are people I can reach.”
I was hoping he’d say “sleep.”
The post Is Anthony Weiner Ready to Go Another Round? appeared first on The Atlantic.
