Facing a swirl of questions about a potential job in the Trump administration, Mayor Eric Adams of New York City stood outside City Hall on Thursday and suggested he was not going anywhere.
But in private, Mr. Adams has told a small group of friends and advisers that he is seriously considering job opportunities that could prompt him to suspend his re-election campaign, according to people familiar with the conversations.
The talks about Mr. Adams’s future have involved intermediaries for President Trump, including Steve Witkoff, a New York real estate investor who is one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers. The mayor and Mr. Witkoff conferred in Florida this week in a previously undisclosed meeting, according to four people briefed on it.
The meeting was a closely guarded secret. City Hall said at first that the mayor was attending to a “personal matter”; Mr. Adams’s campaign spokesman then asserted the mayor was in Miami to celebrate his 65th birthday. Pressed later, Mr. Adams said only that he was meeting with “political figures,” including the mayor of Miami.
What exactly the two men discussed was not immediately clear, including whether Mr. Adams had been offered a position or would accept one. Even people close to Mr. Adams acknowledged it can be difficult to predict what he might do.
But several of the people, who insisted on anonymity, said that the job discussions have accelerated as the mayor’s chances of winning a second term have faded. He has faced a cloud of corruption scandals and sagging poll numbers, driven in part by the Trump administration’s February move to abandon a corruption case against Mr. Adams so he could help implement its immigration agenda.
Former Gov. David A. Paterson, a close confidant who recently endorsed Mr. Adams, said the mayor told him Wednesday morning that he wanted to stay in the race but admitted he was exploring other options.
“He said something like, ‘That’s what I want to do, but I’m listening,’” Mr. Paterson said. “But of course, what ‘I’m listening’ means is that he realizes the odds of winning aren’t what he’d like them to be, so there might be another alternative for him.”
Another person close to the mayor said that Mr. Adams was considering job options that may only be available to him if he quits the race. They would not necessarily require him to resign his mayoralty before his term ends in December.
The New York Times and other media outlets reported on Wednesday that intermediaries for Mr. Trump had been in touch with the mayor and his associates about a potential job in his administration in Washington. The Times reported that Trump advisers had also discussed finding a job for Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, in hopes of creating a one-on-one race between former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee. (Mr. Sliwa said he was not interested.)
Mr. Trump, a native New Yorker whose voter registration is now in Florida, has taken an intense interest in the race for mayor since the Democratic primary in June, when Mr. Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist state assemblyman, won an upset victory over Mr. Cuomo.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Todd Shapiro, a spokesman for Mr. Adams’s campaign, did not immediately comment.
Even if Mr. Adams was to step aside, it would be an uphill fight for anyone to stop Mr. Mamdani. Most polls show the assemblyman with a comfortable lead in the heavily Democratic city, and even tacit Trump backing for Mr. Cuomo, 67, could alienate voters who disdain the president.
Mr. Adams’s support has eroded so much that if he quits the race, he could leave relatively few votes for Mr. Cuomo to pick up. Getting Mr. Sliwa out could have more political impact. He won close to 30 percent of the vote in 2021 against Mr. Adams and is polling in the mid-teens now. But many of Mr. Sliwa’s supporters also deeply dislike Mr. Cuomo after his governorship, which ended in scandal.
Many Republicans are rooting for a Mamdani victory, arguing he would provide the party a useful foil in next year’s midterm elections. But old friends of Mr. Trump have sounded alarms to the president about the possibilities of a Mamdani mayoralty, and the president has signaled he shares their view.
Several of the friends — including Andrew Stein, a former New York City Council president, and John Catsimatidis, a billionaire Republican businessman — have played roles in trying to move Mr. Adams or Mr. Sliwa aside.
And Mr. Witkoff has been involved in discussions with Mr. Adams and the president before. He joined the two men; Eric Trump, the president’s son; and Frank Carone, a close adviser to the mayor, at a lunch in Florida in January. Around that time, Mr. Adams was seeking a pardon from federal corruption charges.
Mr. Trump’s Justice Department moved to dismiss those charges, though career prosecutors working on the case suggested that Mr. Adams and Trump-appointed officials had entered into a corrupt deal. While the judge ultimately granted the government’s motion, he wrote in his decision that “everything here smacks of a bargain.”
The people trying to persuade Mr. Adams and Mr. Sliwa to drop out believe Mr. Cuomo presents the best shot of defeating Mr. Mamdani. Mr. Trump and Mr. Cuomo have a close relationship that goes back decades, and the president has made clear to several associates he would feel most comfortable with the moderate former governor leading New York City.
Mr. Cuomo, now running as an independent, has in turn predicted to donors at a private fund-raiser (co-hosted by Mr. Stein) that Mr. Trump would wade into the race and help clear a path for him to the mayoralty. The Times has reported that the two men have spoken directly about the race, citing people briefed on the matter, though both men denied the account afterward.
Mr. Sliwa, the roguish founder of the Guardian Angels, has been adamant he would never accept a job from the Trump administration and would remain in the race until the end.
During Sid Rosenberg’s talk radio show on Thursday morning, Mr. Rosenberg asked Mr. Sliwa point blank, “Is there any scenario, any, where Curtis Sliwa drops out of this race?”
“Yeah, if somebody puts a bullet in the back of my head, and I’m in a casket, and you’re giving me the greatest eulogy of all time,” responded Mr. Sliwa, who was shot several times in the back of a taxi in 1992, in what prosecutors alleged was a failed Gambino family kidnapping.
Mr. Adams has more selectively disputed reports that he is involved in talks over a possible position.
On Thursday, he denied a Politico report that he had been offered a position in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, though the mayor incorrectly attributed the report to The Times.
The Times in fact reported that the administration had been reviewing open ambassadorships that could be offered to Mr. Adams, and that business leaders had also been discussing making him an offer of a private sector job.
Mr. Adams walked away as reporters asked whether he was talking about taking other government posts.
Later, at a celebration of the 1,500th anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday that the mayor’s campaign billed as an endorsement event, to the surprise of some attendees, Mr. Adams continued to describe himself as a mayoral candidate.
“My life has been pressure,” he said. “No pressure, no diamonds.”
In private, though, Mr. Adams has spoken differently with advisers and allies.
The people familiar with Mr. Adams’s thinking said he had long insisted there would be a path to re-election. After Mr. Mamdani soundly defeated Mr. Cuomo in the primary, Mr. Adams and his advisers believed there was a window in which the mayor could step forward as the anti-Mamdani general election candidate.
But the mayor continued to struggle. Mr. Cuomo re-entered the race and appeared to have far more support in polls than Mr. Adams did. After Mr. Adams’s longtime closest aide faced fresh indictments last month accusing her of putting the city up for sale under his watch, he began acknowledging privately that his electoral path was growing untenable.
One of the allies who said Mr. Adams was considering taking a job, if offered, said that he was not actively considering stepping down early or leaving the state, which could allow his name to be removed from the November ballot before a key deadline next week.
The mayor, the person said, was wary of creating chaos in the city and empowering Jumaane D. Williams, the city’s left-leaning public advocate, who would become mayor for the remainder of Mr. Adams’s term in that scenario.
There are other considerations.
Most high-level positions in the Trump administration, including ambassadorships, would require Senate confirmation, a process that can take months or longer. Mr. Adams also has millions of dollars in legal debt to consider, and taking another government job could make soliciting funds to help pay it down difficult.
Maria Cramer contributed reporting.
Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government.
William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
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