Eric Adams’s Political Life Now Rests With Donald Trump

We will see if President Donald Trump is able to buy Gaza and Greenland. But as of Monday, Trump owns Eric Adams.

Last September, the mayor of New York City was charged with conspiracy, wire fraud, soliciting foreign campaign contributions, and bribery in a five-count federal indictment. Adams denied any wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty to all charges; he also quickly began claiming, without evidence, that the charges were punishment for the mayor’s complaints about Joe Biden’s immigration policy. That victimization argument found two very sympathetic ears on Trump: “We were persecuted, Eric,” the then presidential hopeful said at a charity dinner they both attended in October. “I was persecuted, and so are you, Eric.”

After Trump won in November—with Adams’s April-set trial looming—the mayor’s groveling kicked into full gear, aggressively and embarrassingly. Adams flew to Florida for lunch with the president-elect; he raced to Washington in the middle of the night to attend Trump’s inauguration; and he made another trip to DC to show his face at a prayer breakfast where Trump was speaking. The mayor also broadcast his willingness to get out of the way of Trump’s deportation offensive, and Adams wisely hired Elon Musk’s lawyer to handle his defense.

All the suck-uppery paid off. On Monday, Trump’s acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, sent a letter telling the prosecutors handling the case to drop it. As if the letter’s becoming public so quickly didn’t send a clear enough message, Bove’s language, while not criticizing the merits of the case or the prosecutors involved, made plain what Trump wants for his end of the deal: “We are particularly concerned about the impact of the prosecution on Mayor Adams’ ability to support critical, ongoing federal efforts ‘to protect the American people from the disastrous effects of unlawful mass migration and resettlement,’” Bove wrote, quoting, in that last bit, one of Trump’s executive orders. And if Adams does not supply sufficient “support” for the president’s agenda? Well, Bove happened to mention that the case could be reviewed down the road after this year’s mayoral election.

For the time being, though, New York City will be governed by a mayor who is beholden to a right-wing would-be tyrant. The ugly consequences were already in motion before Trump moved to squash Adams’s trial. Hours before news of Bove’s letter broke, The City reported that Adams was telling his top commissioners not to criticize the president and not to interfere with immigration raids. (“Mayor Adams often speaks to his top leaders to discuss what they’re seeing on the ground in their respective departments and ways we can continue working together to provide for the people of New York City,” mayoral press secretary Kayla Mamelak Altus told The City after its article was published. “As he has said publicly many times, the mayor wants to find ways to work with the federal administration, not war with them.”) “There should no longer be any doubt that Eric Adams is going to be selling out immigrant New Yorkers in order to keep himself out of prison,” says Murad Awawdeh, the president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition.

One of the many other dangers is Trump’s threat to dismantle the federal Department of Education, a move that could cost the city’s public schools $2 billion. Is Adams now too compromised to put up a fight?

Naturally, Adams’s Democratic primary rivals have wasted no time in blasting him. “I think New Yorkers are shocked that the mayor is willing to sell them out to absolve himself,” State Senator Zellnor Myrie tells me. “This is unprecedented, legally and morally. He is wholly compromised.” “Adams is standing up for precisely one person—and that’s himself. New Yorkers deserve better,” says Brad Lander, the current city comptroller.

Conspicuously silent, however, is the man who early polls say is the front-runner—yet who has not officially declared himself a candidate: Andrew Cuomo. The former governor is likely to continue waiting as long as possible before getting into the race, and to continue doing everything he can to avoid directly criticizing Adams. That’s partly because Cuomo presumably expects he’ll need many of the Black voters who were crucial to Adams’s victory in 2021. So Trump’s potential bailout of Adams, allowing the mayor to continue his reelection bid, could make the dynamic more complicated for Cuomo.

But Cuomo’s camp, like that of some of the other contenders, believes Adams’s reelection chances are approaching zero. “Politically, Eric Adams is dead, dead, dead,” a strategist for one of the mayor’s competitors tells me. Another says that Adams has fallen so low in terms of public approval that his opponents aren’t even bothering to poll whether the mayor’s alliance with Trump helps or hurts Adams. “His numbers aren’t bad because he was under investigation,” the operative says. “His numbers are bad because people think he’s an idiot. He is an irrelevant human being to the mayor’s race.”

But not, of course, to the functioning of the city, at least for the next 10 months or so. On Tuesday, instead of holding his regular in-person press conference and taking questions from reporters, Adams gave a brief livestreamed speech. The mayor proclaimed his innocence, invoked the Bible, decried “this cruel episode,” and vowed to restore public faith in his character. He will have plenty of opportunities, if the White House allows it.