The President of Brooklyn

It has been the curse of many New York City mayors to see themselves as viable presidential candidates, indeed with one foot already in the White House. If Eric Adams nurtured similar ambitions—as some commentators speculated early in his mayoralty—the difference was that his presidency of the mind was unusually focused on foreign policy. “If you are a mayor that only stands on your block, you are not going to solve the problems of the globe,” he said to reporters in 2022.

That year, Adams met with the emir of Qatar and representatives from the country’s wealth fund at the World Cup, then stopped by Athens for a dinner with the president of Greece. In 2023 he visited Israel “to learn about Israeli technology” and discuss antisemitism. That same year he visited Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia—where he sported quasi-military fatigues and sunglasses—to dissuade migrants from coming to the United States. “Here’s where I have been,” he said in 2023 at an Arab heritage event in New York City, wearing a fez. “I have been to Lebanon, I have been to Jordan, I have been to Egypt, I have been to Dubai, I have been to Abu Dhabi, I have been to Morocco, I have been to Saudi Arabia. And every list that I didn’t get to, trust me, I will get there.”

Adams did much of his travel between 2014 and 2021, while serving as borough president of Brooklyn. Most often, he went to China and Turkey. “You cannot be a global changer if you are a domestic traveler,” he said in an interview with the pro-government Turkish newspaper The Daily Sabah in 2015, just a few months after a previous trip to the country. While there, he visited a camp of Syrian refugees and praised Turkey’s humanitarian response to increased migration, which he said the US should emulate. He also registered his enthusiasm for the city of Antalya, where he had just attended a tourism conference. Barack Obama had recently visited Antalya as well: “I’m glad that the president of the United States wanted to use the same location as the president of Brooklyn.”

In a way, his self-aggrandizement turned out to be prescient. This February the president of the United States found it worth his while to interfere directly in the affairs of the president of Brooklyn, both dragging Adams up onto the national stage and plunging down into the murk of New York City municipal politics. The scandal that seems likely to define Adams’s mayoralty has always been characterized by such dizzying confusions of scale. The charges that federal prosecutors brought against him last September involved both hyperlocal clubby dealings and international intrigue: allegations of bribery to secure a building’s fire department certification sat alongside accusations that Adams became willingly ensnared in a decade-long web of influence woven by the Turkish government, which possibly saw a future president in him. 

Then Trump’s Justice Department demanded that the charges be provisionally dropped, and the administration’s ham-handed attempt to instrumentalize the mayor became an early bellwether for just how much executive brute force officials would tolerate. Three senior federal prosecutors, including Danielle Sassoon, the US attorney for the Southern District, resigned rather than comply with Trump’s order, and more than twenty New York politicians called for Adams’s ouster. In late February Governor Kathy Hochul announced that she wouldn’t exercise her power to remove him. Adams, for his part, was adamant that he would remain in office. “I remember listening to some of Dr. King’s teachings, and he talked about the book Mein Kampf,” he said. “He indicated if you tell a lie long enough, loud enough, people will tend to believe it’s true. And that’s what you see right now, a modern-day Mein Kampf.”

When acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove ordered the case dismissed, he claimed not that there was any weakness in the evidence—which he promised to review after the mayoral election in November—but that the legal fiasco was preventing Adams from successfully fighting “violent crime” and “illegal immigration.” Numerous observers, including Sassoon, argued that Bove was demanding a quid pro quo, gifting Adams a legal reprieve in exchange for complying with Trump’s deportation campaigns. Adams did indeed fall in lockstep with Trump’s priorities. On February 13 he met with the administration’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, to discuss opening an ICE office on Rikers Island. When ICE detained the activist Mahmoud Khalil, Adams not only refused to criticize the arrest but asked self-pityingly why he hadn’t been offered the same grassroots support as Khalil.

Finally, on April 2, Judge Dale Ho dismissed Adams’s charges—on the grounds that, though “everything here smacks of a bargain,” prosecutors can’t pursue a case the Department of Justice has abandoned. Ho’s small rebellion was to do so “with prejudice,” meaning that the federal government can’t pick the case back up, which would have allowed it to be used as a cudgel against Adams: “Such an arrangement would be bad for Mayor Adams, and it would be bad for the people of New York City. And the Court cannot be complicit in it.” It’s a concerning sign of the state of the rule of law that protecting Adams from prosecution completely has come to seem the safest choice among a suite of bad options. For his part, the mayor convened a celebratory press conference: “Jesus stepped in,” he said, “and he uses who he uses.” At the end of his remarks he held up a copy of FBI director Kash Patel’s book Government Gangsters and urged his constituents to read it.

It was a revealing gesture. The saga of Adams’s mayoralty has come to seem emblematic of the early months of Trump’s second term, from its ethos of aggrieved narcissism to its punitive approach toward the vulnerable. In hindsight the success of Adams’s law-and-order electoral campaign in 2021 prefigured New York’s rightward lurch in the 2024 presidential election. When asylum seekers first started arriving in the city in increased numbers in the spring of 2022, Adams paid some lip service to New York’s reputation as a city of immigrants and portrayed himself as hapless and overwhelmed rather than vindictive. But even then he was insisting that he had “never witnessed crime at this level”—despite the fact that murders and shootings were down from the previous year, and murders down 78 percent from what he would have seen as a police officer in 1990. That year he cited the apparent disorder generated by homeless people on the subway, people freed from pretrial detention by bail reform, and the supposedly pernicious influence of drill music.

It wasn’t, therefore, much of a leap for him to eventually start scapegoating “criminal” migrants and migrant gangs as well. When Trump took office, his Department of Justice didn’t have to push Adams far to get him to crack down on migration, as he himself has admitted. “People are saying, OK, after the president-elect is coming in, Eric is now saying different things,” he said in a television interview soon after Trump’s election, in which he also claimed that Venezuela was “empty[ing] their jails” and sending “the worst” to America. “No, I was saying this prior to the election. I was saying those who are committing crimes in our city must be addressed.” And yet where Trump’s tyrannical immigration policy has been met by the public with a disturbing degree of approval, Adams has been less successful at convincing his constituents that they should tolerate allegations of illegality and compromised interests as the necessary price of managing a crisis.

None of the charges against Adams are, on their own, particularly shocking, but the allegations in the indictment, if true, suggest that even the early parts of his political career were defined by everyday corruption. So, to a still greater degree, was the alleged behavior of many of his senior administrators, a number of whom have resigned. Various investigations and subpoenas had been circling around Adams and senior members of his administration since late 2023, and last September’s indictment covered five counts: conspiracy, bribery, fraud, and two counts of soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations.

The sections of the indictment most gleefully shared on social media recorded the clumsy and seemingly incriminating text messages that Adams and his staffers exchanged with various affiliates of the Turkish government as they arranged to give him free or heavily discounted flights on Turkish Airlines—he referred to the airline as “my way of flying” in a 2017 interview—and to illegally fund his mayoral campaign by funneling money through “straw donors” who would be reimbursed, both to hide the money’s foreign origin and to take advantage of New York’s generous small-donor matching program. “No, dear. $50? What? Quote a proper price,” an Adams staffer wrote to a Turkish Airlines manager after he suggested charging the equivalent of a nice steak for a last-minute international flight. (The New York Times identified the staffer as Rana Abbasova and the manager as Cenk Öcal.) “How much should I charge? :)” Öcal replied sweetly. “$1,000 or so,” wrote Abbasova. “His every step is being watched right now…. Let it be somewhat real.” 

There are also records of texts among Adams’s Turkish handlers celebrating his mayoral election in November 2021. The next day Arda Sayıner, an entrepreneur who was Adams’s connection to various Turkish officials, texted one businessman the good news. “The president is our brother from now on, sir,” he wrote. “I’m going to go and talk to our elders in Ankara about how we can turn this into an advantage for our country’s lobby.” “That would be nice,” his contact responded.

As Adams hobnobbed with businesspeople and minor officials on the periphery of power, allegedly accepting their gifts and illegal donations, people closer to the top began to notice. As Reyhan Özgür, the Turkish deputy consul general, wrote to Abbasova in 2021, “at this point” the foreign minister of Turkey “is personally paying attention to him.” The advantages a mayor could provide were relatively modest: according to the indictment, Adams apparently stopped working with a charitable foundation associated with the Gülenists, a movement the Turkish government considers hostile; fast-tracked fire-safety approval for a diplomatic building ahead of a visit from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; and declined to commemorate the Armenian Genocide. But the indictment suggests that Adams’s business contacts seem to have had higher hopes for him: it includes an allegation that, against Özgür’s advice, Adams at one point met with a businessman in Turkey who offered to make an illegal contribution of $50,000 to his mayoral campaign in the hope that Adams would remember him when he “might one day be the President of the United States.”

Some of the details from the indictment, if true, come pretty close to meeting even the extraordinarily explicit standard our lax domestic bribery law requires to prove intent: “In a phone call to the Adams Staffer, the Turkish Official stated that because Turkey had supported ADAMS, it was now ‘his turn’ to support Turkey. The Adams Staffer relayed this message to ADAMS, and ADAMS responded, ‘I know.’” It didn’t help that the mayor’s office behaved clumsily with the prosecutors themselves. According to the indictment, Abbasova went to the bathroom in the middle of an FBI interview and deleted encrypted messaging apps off her phone, while Adams chose to lengthen his password after his phone was subpoenaed, with the excuse that he wanted to protect its contents for the investigators, then said he had forgotten what the new password was. (Prosecutors had hinted they were collecting evidence for a sixth charge, obstruction of justice, before the case was dropped.)

As investigators probed more and more members of his inner circle, Adams seemed to feel the heat. “I’m just in my Job moment,” he said at a church a few weeks before the federal indictment came down. Once indicted, he suggested that the Biden administration was retaliating against him for criticizing its approach to migration: “I always knew that if I stood my ground for New Yorkers, that I would be a target—and a target I became.” ​​In the days that followed, though, he became more cheerful and resolute, tweeting a video of himself dancing amid a circle of senior citizens chanting “Go Eric, go Eric” and announcing to the press, “When people say, ‘You need to resign,’ I say, ‘I need to reign.’” Standing outside the courthouse with Adams after he pled not guilty, his lawyer Alex Spiro said, “This case isn’t even a real case. This is the airline upgrade corruption case.”

And yet for all its lurid details, in retrospect Adams’s case might be less revealing for what it says about the mayor himself than for what it reveals about how often financial enticements are dangled in front of city politicians at essentially every level. The Turkish government had tested the waters with previous New York City politicians and found at least some of them receptive: Adams’s predecessor as Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, took his wife along on a free junket to Turkey to promote tourism in Brooklyn. “When they bring you over, it’s not vacation,” Markowitz said during an investigation by the Conflict of Interests Board, citing his visits to mosques and schools. “They make you work.” (Adams’s successor, Antonio Reynoso, rebuffed the country’s advances, refusing Özgür’s offer of trips and ten gold-plated tea sets.) 

Nor is Adams the only prominent New York City politician in recent years to be accused of quid-pro-quo dealings. Mayor Bill de Blasio faced a coordinated state and federal investigation in 2016 into whether donors to his nonprofit Campaign for One New York sought political favors. (For example, members of a group that was lobbying the mayor to ban carriage horses donated $100,000 and financed a campaign against one of his rivals in the 2013 primary.) The investigation concluded that de Blasio had solicited checks for his nonprofit from supporters “with a matter pending or about to be pending” before the city, but he was never charged with any crimes. In 2018, meanwhile, a Long Island restaurateur named Harendra Singh pled guilty to making contributions to the mayor’s official election campaign through straw donors in an effort to secure a favorable lease for a restaurant. (Here too de Blasio denied any wrongdoing.) Last year one of Adams’s lawyers said that straw donors were nearly unavoidable: “Unfortunately, it is fairly common for contributors to engage in straw donor actions without a campaign’s knowledge, and very difficult for a campaign that receives thousands of contributions to weed out every bad actor.” City campaign finance officials disagreed.

In any case, it is extremely difficult to prosecute bribery and campaign finance violations. In recent years the Supreme Court has enthusiastically chipped away at anticorruption laws. Last summer, in Snyder v. United States, the Court ruled that it is legal to give “gratuities” to officials after they take a particular action, overturning the conviction of a former Indiana mayor who accepted a $13,000 check from a garbage truck company he had given a contract to. In his ruling, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the 6–3 conservative majority, compared this behavior to students taking a college professor out to a meal at Chipotle for an “end-of-term celebration.” Spiro—who has also represented Elon Musk, the Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and Alec Baldwin—cited Snyder while taking the aggressive strategy of filing a motion to have the bribery charge against Adams thrown out. “Courtesies to politicians are not federal crimes,” he said. “Congressmen get upgrades. They get corner suites, they get better tables in restaurants. They get free appetizers. They have their iced tea filled up.”

The law is stricter, however, on keeping foreign influence out of politics. New Jersey senator Bob Menendez, who signed off on arms deals for the Egyptian government and gave them sensitive information about embassy staff, was found guilty on sixteen charges, and in January he was sentenced to eleven years in prison. Just weeks before the charges against Adams were announced, Linda Sun, an official in the New York state government under both Kathy Hochul and Andrew Cuomo, was indicted for, among other things, blocking meetings between top state officials and Taiwanese representatives and removing references to Uyghur internment from the governor’s Lunar New Year speech—for which prosecutors allege that she received millions of dollars in business opportunities from the Chinese government. (She and her husband have pled not guilty.) There’s no reason to assume Adams would have gotten off scot-free had his case gone to trial.

Investigations—many still ongoing—into other members of Adams’s administration have at the same time painted a dispiriting picture of alleged kickbacks, sexual harassment, and nepotism throughout City Hall. Adams has been dealing with the departures of advisers and agency heads for almost his entire tenure: veteran City Hall staffers resigned amid reports of unprecedented dysfunction; people he appointed to lead city agencies have had their homes and offices raided by federal officials, or been indicted, or resigned in advance of probable indictment. The Manhattan district attorney accused Eric Ulrich, the Department of Buildings commissioner, of engaging in “conduct antithetical to his oath of office,” including illegal gambling and bribery, “on an almost daily basis.” (Ulrich denied the charges “unequivocally,” his lawyer told The New York Times.)

The Adams administration is a family business. In 2022 his brother Bernard, then an assistant director for parking at Virginia Commonwealth University, was poached to become “executive director of mayoral security,” a position with “command authority” at the NYPD—only for the Conflict of Interests Board to demote him to an advisory position within City Hall and dock his new salary from $210,000 to $1. Bernard’s wife, Sharon, is now the breadwinner, having been promoted to “strategic initiative specialist” at the Department of Education. 

Two sets of brothers with ties to Adams are under investigation: two Cabans, three Bankses. School chancellor David Banks and first deputy mayor Sheena Wright, both of whom had their phones seized by federal agents as part of the bribery investigation, got married the day after Adams’s arraignment, which allows them not to have to testify against each other; they denied that the timing had any relation to the scandal. (The mayor’s office, meanwhile, dismissed as “vile and sexist” the New York Post’s suggestion that Banks hired Tracey Collins, Adams’s longtime girlfriend, as thanks to Adams for hiring Wright.) Terence Banks, the youngest Banks brother and the only one without an official position in City Hall, runs a “government-relations consulting company” that, as of September, federal agents suspected of taking bribes for city contracts, according to inside sources cited by the Times. David Banks, Wright, and the third Banks brother, Philip, who had been deputy mayor for public safety, all resigned last fall.

James Caban, a former police officer who was fired decades ago for falsely jailing and extorting a taxi driver, had by 2023 been brought back into the NYPD orbit as a consultant. His identical twin, Edward, served as Adams’s police commissioner for about a year before resigning. In that short span of time, as reporters for ProPublica have found, he shut down more internal disciplinary cases than any other commissioner in NYPD history, reportedly including cases against three officers implicated in what the owner of a Coney Island bar has publicly called “a shakedown.” The owner, Shamel Kelly, alleged that the associate director of Adams’s Office of Entertainment and Nightlife instructed him to pay James Caban $2,500 to protect his business from harassment by NYPD officers—and that the harassment increased when he refused, forcing him to close shop. (No charges have been brought, and both Caban brothers have denied any wrongdoing.) “I don’t think it’s just me,” Kelly said last September. “I think that is probably a thing that is going on in New York specifically, to be honest.”

Perhaps the most egregious allegations surround Timothy Pearson, a top aide to Adams who was his supervisor back in their police days and became a close friend. Pearson resigned last September “to focus on family, self-care and new endeavors.” In 2022 he was hired for the nebulous role of “senior advisor to the mayor for public safety,” not directly but through a city-run nonprofit. For a time, however, he continued earning hundreds of thousands of dollars as a public safety consultant for a Queens casino that was seeking the city’s approval to expand. (He dropped this job after a report by the Times.) He was also still drawing his $124,000 city pension as a former cop, which would have been illegal had he been hired as an active city employee. His duties involved “interacting with the police department,” in the Times’s words, which apparently gave him arbitrary power over promotions.

Four lawsuits describing sexual harassment were filed against Pearson last year, one by a female colleague in a small unit who resigned because he allegedly repeatedly blocked her from promotions when she declined his advances, and the other three filed by men in the unit who allege that he retaliated against them after they complained about his behavior. One lawsuit alleges that Pearson “liked to brag about his power and his ability to punish NYPD officers.” In another, a veteran police chief recounted a history of sexual impropriety going back decades; he claims that Pearson sexually abused a female pastor and described a police precinct as his “hen house” because it gave him access to subordinate women. Pearson’s lawyer has denied all wrongdoing on his behalf and promised to “vigorously” fight the claims.

Pearson’s other primary duties involved overseeing the city’s contracts with organizations that provide food and shelter for migrants. When he visited one facility in this capacity, the guards, who did not recognize him, denied him entry. He allegedly attacked several of them, fracturing a woman’s shoulder. (Sources recently told The Daily News that the city was expected to settle a lawsuit brought by the security guards for six figures.) According to one former police sergeant’s lawsuit, Pearson openly complained in his unit—which was devoted to agency efficiency and cost management—about not getting kickbacks. “People are doing very well on these contracts,” he is alleged to have said. “I have to get mine. Where are my crumbs?”

Adams’s close adviser Ingrid Lewis-Martin and her son Glenn are currently being tried in state court for the pursuit of literal crumbs: a Chick-fil-A franchise, as well as a fashion line, for which they allegedly tried to secure funding from developers by trading municipal favors. Some of the money may have been redirected to a Porsche Panamera for Glenn, professionally known as DJ Suave Luciano. (Both of them have denied the charges.) And the Eastern District prosecutor’s office is still investigating Winnie Greco, one of Adams’s oldest and dearest allies, who escorted him on some of the six visits he made to China as Brooklyn borough president, for allegedly arranging more straw donations and for what the Times called “evidence of a possible Chinese government scheme to influence Mr. Adams’s election.” She has also come under notice for her connection to a major Adams fundraiser accused of defrauding millions from the Emergency Housing Program, which was supposed to rehouse prison inmates in hotels during the pandemic. The month before Greco eventually resigned “on her own volition,” Adams’s lawyer advised him to fire her, along with the five officials whose phones were seized by the FBI in September, but he refused. His lawyer quit instead.

A recent survey found that more than half of city voters want Adams to resign. He has been polling far behind the disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral race; in the last reporting period his campaign raised only $19,000, a paltry number compared to the $1.5 million that Cuomo raised in under two weeks, or the socialist state representative Zohran Mamdani’s recent $840,000 haul (public matching funds have brought that figure to $8 million, hitting the public fundraising cap), or indeed the $100,000 raised by Corinne Fisher, an essentially unknown standup comedian. Adams has chalked his poor performance up to being hamstrung by the investigation. He will, he says, run as an independent, skipping the Democratic primary in order to have more time to bolster an “uninhibited” campaign. “I have been this racehorse that has been held back,” he said to Politico. “Now I need this runway until November to redefine and remind people: This is why you elected me in the first place.”

What, in the meantime, will the legacy of his first term have been? In large part it will be the NYPDification of everything: giving the police pay raises while imposing budget cuts elsewhere, relaxing rules punishing police misconduct, moving armed police into civilian agencies like the Parks Department, and, most visibly, crowding many more officers onto public transit. There have been a number of violent arrests in the subway for fare evasions, and Adams’s policies bear responsibility for what should have been a much bigger scandal: a police shooting at the Sutter Avenue station in Brownsville that began with cops pursuing a man for fare evasion and ended with them shooting the suspect (who had a knife and was resisting arrest), one of their own officers, and two bystanders. Though none were killed, one of these bystanders, on his way to his job at a hospital, was shot in the head; his family says he has brain damage. Adams has also announced plans to construct Philip Banks’s pet project: a $225 million “public safety academy” in Queens, where workers from other city agencies with public safety responsibilities will train alongside cops and corrections officers. This would effectively expand the influence and authority of an infamously corrupt and violent police department over almost every aspect of municipal life, from homeless services to sanitation and parks, if it goes through—the other leading mayoral candidates have said they oppose it.

Adams’s other legacy will be botching the city’s response to migrant arrivals and stoking a climate of fear, alarmism, and resentment over immigration, which certainly contributed to making the debate around the issue as toxic as it is today. It takes impressive gall to claim that migrants would “destroy New York City” and necessitate enormous budget cuts while his “best friend” allegedly expressed interest in skimming money off the top of contracts for housing them. In Adams’s New York City, people fleeing violence and economic crises have found themselves repeatedly abused by staff with no experience in shelter management and no ability to speak their languages, eating spoiled food that sent them and their children to the emergency room, and crammed together in unfinished buildings without working showers—that is, when the administration wasn’t bouncing them onto the street in the middle of the winter. Adams might instead have taken a cue from the Turkish approach to migrants that impressed him so much back in 2015: “I saw here a very caring, compassionate body of people that identified with the Syrian refugees—or visitors, as they prefer to call them—treating them as their fellow mankind,” he said then. “If I were thrown out of America, I would like that type of condition to live in to rebuild my country and my life.”

Cuomo, if elected, seems poised to carry on many of these policies. The early days of the Adams administration came soon after regime change in Albany, when Cuomo resigned to preempt an impeachment investigation into his conduct in office. The former governor has been accused of sexual impropriety toward at least thirteen women, one of whom dropped her civil suit amid what she described as “abusive filings and invasive subpoenas.” Cuomo has contested the findings of two separate investigations, by the state attorney general and by the Department of Justice, that described the sexually “hostile work environment” under his leadership; he has denied the charges in the civil suits brought against him by several of his former subordinates; and he is countersuing one of them for defamation. Since state law allows him to expense his defense against accusations of misconduct that took place while he was in office, New York state residents have paid his lawyers’ bills—according to the state comptroller, almost $18 million over these scandals alone.

Some of Cuomo’s aides and allies have, meanwhile, been convicted of corruption, and he too has faced federal probes into his conduct while in office, including for interfering with a watchdog commission and undercounting deaths in nursing homes by up to 50 percent during the height of the pandemic. Since resigning he has moved to the city and joined a series of legal teams; his clients range from a crypto exchange accused of illegally operating in the US to Benjamin Netanyahu. The rest of his time seems to have been spent diligently breakfasting with labor leaders and politicians—including Adams, with whom he maintained a friendship until very recently. “I think they have been very heavy-handed here with the mayor, publicly humiliating the mayor,” Cuomo said in 2023 after the federal investigation had become public.

In that interview Cuomo also defended Adams’s actions on immigration: “There is no legal, moral, political argument why New York City should be responsible for 130,000 migrants,” he said, suggesting it was the federal government’s responsibility to take care of the new arrivals. (The Cuomo of five years earlier had said—repeatedly—“You want to deport an undocumented person, start with me, because I’m an undocumented person.”) Those who expected the former governor to campaign on his Covid-era reputation as an anti-Trump crusader have been confronted with a candidate who seems, like Adams, to have absorbed the lessons of Trumpism. 

Above all those lessons have involved stoking baseless fears and legitimizing a hysterical response to them. “The city just feels threatening, out of control and in crisis,” Cuomo said in a campaign launch video. “You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person, or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway, you see it in the empty storefronts, the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence,” he continued, drawing a nasty equivalence. At other times he has suggested that the National Guard be deployed against protesters and that buying a gun is a reasonable response to New York’s “problem with antisemitism.” He’s running to the right of Adams on subway crime, promising to increase staffing in the NYPD transit bureau by 50 percent. None of this seems to have dimmed his chances: Cuomo has maintained his double-digit polling lead since formally entering the race last month.

The success of all this law-and-order messaging suggests that Adams has become a victim of his own fearmongering. During his campaign he declared that “this city is out of control” at a moment when crime was in fact close to historic lows; now voters consistently express high concerns about public safety in polling, even as Adams stresses that crime has fallen under his leadership. “The average New Yorker,” he said in January, “would believe that they’re living in a city that is out of control—that is not the reality.” 

It has become obvious that he was instead projecting his own out-of-control behavior onto his constituents. “I am you, I am you,” he told the crowd when he won, an assertion that now reads not as an expression of solidarity with the working class that supported him but as a demand that they be satisfied with one of their own taking power—and with whatever he might do there. Adams, like Trump, will sometimes admit that he too breaks the rules from time to time—which makes it particularly important to cling to power, so you can avoid the same consequences you try to enforce on others. At a recent town hall he waxed nostalgic about when he used to jump the turnstile to visit “a shorty” in the Rockaways. “The statute of limitations is over,” he said, chuckling.