Eric Adams Wants NYC to Be Small Enough to Fit in Donald Trump's Pocket
And why you should care even if you don't live here
I wasn’t overly thrilled with New York City Mayor Eric Adams even before Donald Trump tried to get him in his pocket. He was first elected in November 2021 after a cascading collection of crises hobbled the progressive wing of the NYC Democratic party and our many and varied candidates for the Democratic nominee. His first year or two in office, local news was awash with his troubling policies, including appointing a string of anti-LGBTQ+ people to his administration, and proposing city budgets with dramatic cuts to public schools and libraries. In the immediate aftermath of the first Trump administration and a resoundingly progressive Democratic primary, still in the depths of COVID and a mounting backlash to the movement for equality and police reform that followed the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, Eric Adams’ election was perhaps a harbinger we should have paid more attention to.
When you dig into Adams career and his political philosophy, it all starts to feel familiarly Trump-ian. For one, Adams lies a lot - about a photo he claimed to keep in his wallet of a police officer friend who had been killed; about being a vegan; about living in New York City to begin with. There are rumors surrounding his relationship with a consultant to a Russian oligarch, and even before he was elected mayor there was the whiff of corruption around him. In a remarkable New Yorker profile of Adams, aptly titled “Eric Adams’ Administration of Bluster” he also betrays a similar tendency to mix up elections and coronations. The piece quotes an Adams’ advisor saying, “To him, he is the city, because he’s running the city.” When asked by Hillary Clinton in an interview what his agenda for New York City was, he described his own history rather than any policy objective. And throughout his current legal troubles he has compared himself to Jesus Christ on the cross.
Now, Eric Adams is not Trump. For one, in spite of his legal jeopardy, Eric Adams doesn’t seem to be trying to remake the entire government as part of some broad spectrum revenge scheme. For another, Eric Adams was not born wealthy - he has in fact done a job or two. But both Trump and Adams seem to operate under the assumption that elections do not just confer responsibility, but statehood. They were not chosen to do a job, they were chosen to be New York City, to be the United States of America. And whether that entitles them to remake the state in their image, or to use the state for their own enrichment, or both, to question them is to question the state itself.
Of course, the other big difference between Eric Adams and Donald Trump is that Donald Trump has the entire justice department at his beck and call, and Eric Adams does not. So when Donald Trump tells federal prosecutors to drop the case against Eric Adams so that Adams can help Trump with his draconian immigration policies, he has Adams over a barrel. And when Donald Trumps tells federal prosecutors to drop the charges against Eric Adams in a way that makes those charges very easy to pick up again should Eric Adams step out of line, Donald Trump suddenly has the whole of New York City over a barrel.
Now if you’ve made it this far, you may be asking yourself why you should care. Based on the limited information that Substack provides me, most of you don’t live in New York, let alone New York City. And while NYC looms large both culturally and numerically, there’s rather a lot going on right now, much of it dangerous and horrifying.
I’ll admit that I rather hate playing the attention game - the “this is a distraction so you shouldn’t care about it,” game or the “if you’re not paying attention to this then you’re doing something wrong,” game. It’s enough to be paying attention to any of it at all, let alone the trials and tribulations of a city you don’t live in. But you’ve made it this far, so let me make the case to you anyway.
Let’s start with the obvious - if Donald Trump can put the mayor of the largest city in the country in his pocket, there’s nothing to say he can’t or won’t do it to the mayor smaller cities where he needs something - immigration enforcement, a building site for his presidential “library,” a protest he wants to violently suppress, toxic chemicals he wants to dump, etc., etc. Eric Adams is pretty obviously corrupt, but plenty of Mayors and Governors and State Treasurers have things in their past that they aren’t proud of, things that a vengeful Justice Department could investigate, that Trump’s hand picked prosecutors could turn into up charges, that could then be dangled over the head of government officials now less and less interested in doing the job that their constituents elected them to do. And even if their records are spotless, I wouldn’t put it past this administration to just make something up.
But here’s the thing - we’re in the middle of a hostile government takeover, or early onset authoritarianism as journalist Max Fisher said recently in an episode of the podcast Offline. More than the actual act of stuffing this country’s mayoralty into his pockets, along with most of its billionaires, a significant number of major corporations, and a dismaying portion of the media (it’s getting very crowded in there), is the fear. We desperately need as many prominent people as possible to stand up to the Trump administration’s machinations and say that this is cruel, illegal, and unconscionable, and that they will not participate. And while it’d be great to expose as much of the corruption in our elected government as possible, from school boards to the White House, the possibility that instead of exposing corruption, the Trump administration will use it, or create it to destroy our democracy is deeply disconcerting.
New York City is a weird place. It’s the setting of a thousand movies. For generations it was the country’s front porch, a microcosm of the American Dream - which sometimes turned into nightmares. It’s a city of unfathomable wealth, but it’s also populated by millions of people struggling to make ends meet. In the conservative imagination it is a den of iniquity. It’s not real America. But it's home to millions of Americans who go to work and grocery shop and endure long commutes and fight with and for their families just like everyone else in this country. It is not the city of our collective imagination, but that city exists too, hidden beneath the real place like a palimpsest. It would be great to have a mayor that not only does not try to reduce this city to a vessel for the ambitions of one man, but who is also able and willing to stand up for the people who live here, and for this place as one of possibility, diversity, ambition, and community.
So where does that leave us? The Democratic primary for NYC’s city elections is coming up in June. Eric Adams is running to keep his seat and we are once again awash in progressives attempting to replace him on the ballot come November. And as of this weekend, Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York has also entered the race. Cuomo, who resigned before the end of his last term as governor due to allegations of widespread sexual harassment and workplace abuse, investigations into using government resources to write a book he personally got a $5 million deal for, and investigations into miscounting COVID deaths, is largely considered to be the front runner at the moment.
So as we head into this election, New Yorkers have the opportunity to stick on our current path, with a mayor under indictment for corruption and beholden to our aspiring autocrat of a president; or we can dip our toes back into the cool waters of nostalgia and choose a disgraced former governor who doesn’t really live here, a known quantity unlikely to shake up the system but very likely to demean it; or we can take a chance. We can take a chance on someone like Zoran Mamdani, a New York state assembly member from NYC who is already fighting for working people, and who will bring that energy to the hallowed halls of city government, who wants to make this city a place where we can all thrive. We can take a chance on Brad Lander or Zellnor Myrie or Jessica Ramos. So much of our politics these days is consumed with looking backwards - to some mythical golden age, to the same policy fights and the same politicians having them, to the thing we recognize as the world around us becomes more uncertain and unfamiliar. But what if, just this once, we took the chance on a new idea, the idea that something new could also be better?
How to Save Democracy This Week
I made a group chat action memo to send to friends and family each week. My plan is to have one document where I can swap out scripts and other important messaging info to make it easy for folks to take action on critical issues. You can find it here, and you can feel free to share! But also think about what would work best for your own group chats - I’d love to hear how you share this kind of information and what kind of responses you get!
Do you know when your next city and state elections are coming up? For a lot of places it might not be 2026, but there are elections happening all the time, so you never know! Virginia and New Jersey have statewide elections this November! When are your next elections?
Why can’t these disgraced men just go away. Like seriously leave us alone. I’m speaking of Andrew Cuomo but it could be said about a lot of men that think they’re so important they can’t just go away. 😩