Eric Adams promised New Yorkers he would be unlike any mayor his city had ever seen.
On that — and often so little else — his word was never in doubt.
It can be said that no other mayor had his eyebrows threaded in public, claimed to take bubble baths with roses, mused openly about carrying a handgun in church; that no other mayor was equally likely to spend his evenings out with old police friends, known felons, bemused celebrities, homeless subway riders; that no other mayor left so much uncertainty about where he slept, what he ate, whether he really just said what he said, whose side he was on.
He was for law and order and reform and inertia and immigrants and crackdowns and swagger and nightlife and mornings and protesters and counterprotesters and possessive adjectives (“my workers,” “my teachers,” “my bond rating”) and official city attire that said “MAYOR” on as many surfaces as possible.
He was for the old ways — the clubhouse, the unions, the people who knew people — and the new ways, with their viral influencers and crypto bros and Big Ideas Guys who always seemed to have a contact in Florida.
He had two maxims that resonate most in hindsight.
“I’m perfectly imperfect,” Mr. Adams said often. True enough.
“I am you,” he often told voters. That one was more complicated.
In many ways, Mr. Adams’s choice to end his flailing re-election campaign was the most conventional thing he had done in some time. He was acceding, for once, to the laws of political gravity as he weighed how best to position himself for a post-mayoral future.
That set of options, like much of his last year, is already shadowed by the more brazen gambit he has long appeared to embrace amid federal corruption charges and the wholesale collapse of his inner circle: becoming a MAGA-amenable mayor of America’s signature big blue city and seeing where that might take him.
In the video on Sunday announcing the end of his run, Mr. Adams inveighed, as ever, against the news media and perceived political enemies whom he accused of dooming his re-election beyond salvation. He noted the very real external challenges he faced, particularly the Covid aftermath and the migrant crisis, and saluted his own leadership.
He endorsed neither Zohran Mamdani, the left-wing Democratic nominee, nor Andrew M. Cuomo, the now-independent challenger whom Mr. Adams has come to despise.
For weeks, as his campaign wheezed, Mr. Adams had made little secret of his disdain for his political adversaries, suggesting that those opposing him were out for themselves and not New Yorkers.
Yet Mr. Adams, whose election four years ago invited speculation (often from Mr. Adams) that he represented the future of the national Democratic Party, was undone when too many voters had too many suspicions that Eric Adams was out for himself and not them.
For months, as President Trump and those around him dangled the dismissal of Mr. Adams’s federal case like a golden ticket, the mayor declined to criticize the president, gushed about helping the White House deport criminal migrants, said conspicuously nice things about Elon Musk (before Mr. Musk’s falling out with the president) and canceled various plans in the city to attend sessions with Mr. Trump or his acolytes.
In his indictment last year, which said Mr. Adams had accepted free and heavily discounted travel arrangements from the Turkish government, the mayor stood criminally accused of leveraging his office to help himself.
In trying to escape that indictment, he appeared to be leveraging his office to help himself.
In an Inauguration Day sequence that, to Mr. Adams’s many critics, best encapsulated his willingness to sell out his city if necessary, the mayor was driven to Washington around 3 a.m. after scoring a last-minute invitation to Mr. Trump’s swearing-in. Inside the Capitol, he subsisted in an overflow room with fellow borderline V.I.P. elected officials, congressional spouses and pro-Trump YouTubers.
New Yorkers can take a lot. Obsequiousness is a tough look.
“Resiiiiiign!” a few subway riders shouted at Mr. Adams in January during an unannounced ride through the system.
Some cursed him out. Mr. Adams’s smile never broke.
“Eight point three million people,” Adams said of one profane passer-by. “Thirty-five million opinions.”
The shame of his mayoralty, even allies have long said, is that it did not need to be this way. His visceral in-the-room appeal, bootstraps biography and ideological nonfussiness — he alternately called himself a “pragmatic moderate” and “the original progressive” — had earned him his dream job for a reason.
As he liked to say, without ever totally closing the loop on the metaphor, he had “turned his haters into his waiters.”
“Why do I keep winning?” Mr. Adams asked, extremely rhetorically, in an interview shortly before his election. He kept winning because he was a winner.
Still, even back then, some close to him knew (and repeatedly told Mr. Adams) that others close to him might get him into trouble. When the investigative raids and indictments mounted last year, leveling his City Hall, there was almost a grim resignation among some longtime supporters.
Political prognosticators can be wrong about a lot, including Mr. Adams (as he still likes to remind anyone who doubted him).
But they were not wrong, broadly, in assessing that if an Adams administration failed, its end would look at least something like this.
Forewarnings abounded.
Four years ago, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has known the mayor for decades, came to Mr. Adams with a gentle reminder.
The then-candidate was facing minor criticism for dining at Rao’s, the famed Scorsese-worthy East Harlem red sauce spot, with John Catsimatidis, a billionaire friend of Mr. Trump’s, and Bo Dietl, a gadfly former police detective.
Mr. Adams was about to be mayor, Mr. Sharpton told him, and things would be different. Appearances mattered.
“He says, ‘Well, I hear you,’” Mr. Sharpton recalled then, laughing. “‘But you know me. I’m going to do me.’”
He kept that promise, too.
Matt Flegenheimer is a correspondent for The Times focusing on in-depth profiles of powerful figures.
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