As he headed by motorcade to Lower Manhattan in the spring of 2023 for a seven-hour deposition in a fraud trial, former President Donald J. Trump was greeted by crowds who chanted: “New York hates you.” That had been more or less established during his 2016 presidential run, when about 79 percent of New York City voters chose Hillary Clinton. Still, despite the pride the city seems to take in its status as the epicenter of Trump antagonism, it elected Eric Adams — a mayor with a certain affection for the former president’s playbook.
Regardless of their political differences, the two men share striking similarities of personality and style — along with what has now emerged as an uncanny likeness of circumstance. Both men are “firsts”: Mr. Trump is the first former president to be tried and convicted of crimes, in his case for funneling hush money to the porn star Stormy Daniels; and Mr. Adams, charged on Thursday with soliciting and accepting improper campaign contributions, is the first sitting New York City mayor in modern history to face a criminal indictment.
In both instances there were red flags that voters choose to ignore. As a state senator nearly a decade before he ran for mayor, Mr. Adams drew the unwelcome attention of the New York inspector general. In a scathing 308-page report, the inspector general concluded that Mr. Adams had shown “exceedingly poor judgment” in the role he played to select an operator for a casino at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens.
The mayor, whose administration has been unraveling for weeks, arrived at City Hall nearly three years ago as a showman, a relentless self-publicist in the Trumpian vein. In a speech on his third day in office, he referred to his “swagger” — the freshness of it, and its apparent relevance to municipal governance — nearly a dozen times. Well before he took office he was calling himself “the future of the Democratic Party.” Once, he compared himself to Jesus.
Like the 45th president, Mr. Adams, a former cop, positioned himself not only as a champion of law and order but as a purveyor of a dystopian view of the city, where good, ordinary people were losing ground to Gotham-style criminality. When Mr. Adams was campaigning for mayor in 2021, Victoria Davis, the sister of Delrawn Small, whom the police shot to death in 2016, accused him of “playing off of fear.” Mr. Adams struck this note again last year when, to much outrage, he said that migrants, thousands of whom had been arriving in New York by bus from Texas, would “destroy New York City.”
Most of these migrants have come from Latin America. In 2023, the Police Department recorded more stops of New Yorkers than it had in a decade — 16,971 — 89 percent of whom were Black or Latino.
During his tenure, Mr. Adams has also displayed a Trumpian distaste for the press, accusing reporters of criticizing him, of ignoring his triumphs, of misunderstanding his intentions. “If you want to acknowledge or not, I have been doing a darn good job,” he said in February 2022, “and we just can’t live in this alternate reality.” The next year, he announced that he would answer off-topic questions from reporters — those unrelated to whatever he had already planned to talk about — only once a week. At the same time, he argued that “no mayor in the history of this city” had been as “approachable.”
It had been a long time since the city elected a mayor with such an outwardly masculine posture, a mayor who was saying things like, “If you’re going to hang out with the boys at night, you have to get up with the men in the morning.” Praising outdoor dining last year, Mr. Adams embraced the hookup angle: “You may see eye candy sitting down somewhere. You may want to park and come and slip them your number. Hey, listen, come have fun, man.” This prompted the blog Upper East Site to run a piece with the headline: “Outdoor Dining Is a Great Way to Harass Women: Mayor Adams.”
New Yorkers elected this mayor during the Covid crisis when homicides were up, when the mood was bleak, when no one was going to the office, when everyone was wearing sweatpants, when the fun and charisma that the self-proclaimed nightlife mayor seemed to embody felt like the right antidote to the earnest, earth-toned de Blasio years. Submerged in the collective DNA of the city is a draw to the outsize character, the big ego, the player, the criss-crosser of ethical boundaries. This trait reveals itself in waves.
“It’s like the ‘Sweet Smell of Success,’’’ observed Kurt Andersen, the novelist, social critic and co-founder of Spy Magazine, the city’s original organ of Trump antagonism. “It’s this feeling of ‘I love this town!’ People never loved Trump. But it’s that dirty city cynicism that makes someone like him attractive in certain ways.”
Amid calls to resign, Mr. Adams has made it clear that he will not comply, that he is a victim. His self-defense has struck a combative tone that feels resoundingly familiar. On Wednesday he said that any charges against him would be “entirely false” and “based on lies.” He was, in his view, a target of federal authorities because he had “stood my ground” for New Yorkers.
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