Advisers to President Trump have discussed the possibility of giving Mayor Eric Adams of New York City a position in the administration as a way to clear the field in November’s mayoral election and damage the chances of the Democratic front-runner, Zohran Mamdani, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions.
The talks have also involved finding a possible place in the administration for the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa.
The goal, the people said, would be to give former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo a better chance of defeating Mr. Mamdani in November’s general election.
The discussions within Mr. Trump’s orbit about making a potentially audacious intervention date back weeks — and it is unclear if they will ultimately amount to anything. But the topic has taken on added urgency in New York in recent days as an already chaotic race steams into the last stretch of the campaign season.
Overlapping conversations have been playing out among some of the city’s biggest real estate executives and among allies of Mr. Cuomo, 67, a moderate Democrat who has known Mr. Trump for more than 40 years. Mr. Cuomo is running as a third-party candidate after badly losing June’s Democratic primary to Mr. Mamdani.
Those New Yorkers have been frantically searching for any way to halt the rise of the Mr. Mamdani, a 33-year-old state assemblyman and democratic socialist who they fear will sour the city’s business climate, and have discussed potentially offering the mayor public or private sector jobs to encourage him to drop out.
John Catsimatidis, a billionaire grocery and oil magnate in New York, said in an interview that he had spoken with Mr. Trump about the race on Sunday and expected the shape of the contest could change in the coming days.
“He’s very concerned,” Mr. Catsimatidis said of the president. “How do they say it, this is for all the tea in China. This is serious.”
Any move by the Trump administration could be explosive in a deeply Democratic city like New York, where the president remains unpopular.
Most senior Republicans in Washington like the idea of a Mamdani victory, seeing him as a useful foil with which to paint the entire Democratic Party, in what is shaping up to be a rocky midterms climate.
But Mr. Trump is not most Republicans. Despite switching his residence to Florida in 2019, he owns property in New York and is sympathetic to some wealthy New Yorkers’ concerns. He also still considers New York home, and has marveled at how he fared better in the 2024 election in the city than he did in either of his previous races.
Intermediaries for Mr. Trump have been in touch with the associates of Mr. Adams, a Democrat running as an independent, about the possibility of leaving the race, according to two of the people briefed on the discussions. One of the sources, who like the others insisted on anonymity to detail private conversations, said the talks with Mr. Adams were ongoing “in several different directions.”
It was unclear, though, if a specific job had yet been discussed with those intermediaries, or if Mr. Adams would accept it. The mayor has recently said he plans to continue his campaign and win, despite running fourth in the polls.
Despite their shared party affiliation, Mr. Trump has fewer connections to Mr. Sliwa. The founder of the Guardian Angels, Mr. Sliwa has a history of bucking his party and has repeatedly said he has no interest in a job in Washington. Nonetheless, people in Mr. Trump’s orbit have talked about whether Mr. Sliwa might be amenable to a federal job, according to two people briefed on the conversations.
The White House declined to comment.
A spokeswoman for the mayor said Mr. Adams had not spoken with the president about a position.
“Mayor Adams is a lifelong New Yorker who has dedicated his entire career to this city, and he intends to continue that work for another four years as mayor,” the spokeswoman, Kayla Mamelak Altus, said in a statement.
Frank Carone, the mayor’s former chief of staff who is helping to oversee his re-election effort, said on Tuesday night that he was unaware of any such discussions and contended in a statement that the campaign was going well, suggesting that there was no reason to for Mr. Adams drop out.
“He won’t be distracted by responding to rumors,” Mr. Carone said.
Mr. Sliwa said in a statement that he was “committed to carrying this fight through to Election Day” and believed he could defeat Mr. Mamdani. He did not directly address whether anyone connected to Mr. Trump had made contact with him about a federal post.
Mr. Mamdani has comfortably led in polls taken since his June primary victory, in part because the city’s more moderate and conservative vote is splintering between Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Sliwa and Mr. Adams. A fifth candidate, the lawyer Jim Walden, suspended his campaign on Tuesday, urging his fellow candidate to coalesce around a single alternative to Mr. Mamdani.
Mr. Sliwa, who also ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2021, is currently in third place in most polls, often hovering around 15 percent — too little to win, but potentially enough to affect the outcome.
Polls have shown Mr. Adams in fourth place, often polling in the single digits.
Mr. Trump and his advisers have been weighing whether or how to intercede for some time.
The New York Times reported last month that Mr. Trump had been briefed on polling that showed Mr. Cuomo was the strongest candidate in a head-to-head fight with Mr. Mamdani and that the president and former governor had spoken about the race. The story cited people briefed on the discussions, though both men said publicly afterward that they had not talked about the contest.
In recent weeks, Mr. Cuomo has told business leaders and Trump-friendly audiences at fund-raisers that he had a good working relationship with Mr. Trump, and that he expected Mr. Trump to wade into the race for mayor and help clear a path for his election.
In a brief interview on Wednesday, Mr. Cuomo continued to deny he had spoken to Mr. Trump about the race and said that logically, it made more sense for Mr. Trump to cheer the prospect of a Mamdani mayoralty.
“It would be a political gift to the Republican Party, which would then use him to characterize the Democrats across the country going into the midterms,” Mr. Cuomo said.
Mr. Adams has been actively campaigning in recent days, but took a trip to Florida overnight Monday that he did not initially disclose. City Hall initially said he was attending to a “personal matter,” and Mr. Adams’s campaign spokesman then said he was in Miami to celebrate his 65th birthday.
But on Wednesday morning, Mr. Adams told PIX11 that he had also met with the mayor of Miami and other “political figures.” He didn’t name them.
When the PIX11 reporter pressed Mr. Adams on whether he intended to stay in the mayor’s race through November, and if he was looking for another job, Mr. Adams gave a more equivocal answer than normal.
“Listen, I’m a retired captain in the Police Department, former state senator, former borough president,” Mr. Adams said. “I’ve never had a problem finding jobs as I transition. And that’s not what I’m looking for right now. I’m looking to continue to serve the people of the city of New York.”
The Trump administration has showed its willingness to wade into New York mayoral politics in the past.
A lobbying campaign by Mr. Adams, who declined to criticize Mr. Trump during and after the 2024 presidential campaign, targeted multiple people around him and the mayor directly sought to curry favor. Afterward, the Justice Department in February agreed to abandon federal corruption charges against him.
The department said the arrangement was necessary to allow Mr. Adams to assist the president’s immigration agenda and so as not to interfere in the mayor’s re-election prospects.
Both prosecutors working on the case and the judge who ultimately granted a motion to dismiss the charges, said it appeared that Trump-appointed officials at the department had offered the mayor a quid pro quo, but Mr. Adams maintained he had done nothing wrong.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government.
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York.
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