Mayor Eric Adams received his workplace 4 years in the past pledging to ship New Yorkers from chaos and calamity — a former lawman entrusted to tame a proudly unruly metropolis.
It hasn’t occurred that approach.
Over almost 100 interviews with aides, allies and adversaries spanning Adams’s life and profession, The Times Magazine found a mayor and a city unmoored, their fates entwined whether or not or not residents need them to be. Lengthy earlier than his indictment final fall on federal corruption prices, Adams grew to become the avatar of New York’s day-to-day dysfunction, a unstable chief to match (and contribute to) unstable occasions.
His chosen path out of his private disaster, many particulars of which haven’t been beforehand reported, concerned cozying as much as a brand new president whom most of Adams’s constituents oppose — and providing these constituents, federal prosecutors have stated, as human collateral to the Trump White Home.
Listed here are 5 takeaways from our reporting:
Adams (and Trump) have performed the lengthy sport
President Trump and Adams, two sons of Queens, appeared to grasp one another from the beginning. When Trump encountered the mayor at a charity dinner in October, weeks earlier than the presidential election, he put his arm round him in personal. Adams’s good friend, former Gov. David Paterson, stated that Adams was quiet for the remainder of the night time. “Nearly like he’s desirous about it,” Paterson stated. “Like: ‘Is that this doable? Boy.’”
Trump urged Adams to “hold in there” earlier than publicly suggesting that each males had been persecuted by the Biden Justice Division. Adams, a Democrat who criticized Trump’s “fool habits” throughout the president’s first time period, has not stated a cross phrase about him since. By January, he was flying to Florida to dine with Trump days earlier than the inauguration. And Trump had acquired a helpful new good friend in his native metropolis: a mayor straining to cling to each his workplace and his freedom.
Adams is a political shape-shifter
Adams has all the time been an adaptable politician, comfy flip-flopping between the 2 main events because the winds shifted. He was a Democrat, then a Republican within the Nineties, then a Democrat once more. He briefly thought of operating in 2021 as a Republican. And he has thought of it once more in 2025.
In an interview, Tucker Carlson instructed Adams had previously been “intimidated into supporting issues he doesn’t consider” and stated he and the mayor “have a whole lot of gut-level agreements.” Adams was so open to Trump world that he even thought of attending Trump’s October marketing campaign rally at Madison Sq. Backyard, Carlson instructed us, earlier than deciding towards the concept.
“Eric all the time was extra proper of middle,” the Rev. Al Sharpton instructed us. “He was not a fellow traveler.”
The migrant disaster was Adams’s first main check as mayor
The town’s migrant inflow grew to become a defining administration disaster of Adams’s time period, decisively shaping his relationship with two presidents. “Joe Biden is making an attempt to hold me out to dry,” the mayor instructed members of Congress visiting Metropolis Corridor in 2023, in response to an attendee. By 2025, the Trump administration, pushing for a dismissal of Adams’s corruption prices, stated the mayor wanted to be uninhibited in aiding the brand new White Home’s deportation agenda.
However Adams’s views on immigration are extra sophisticated than is broadly understood. He has greeted asylum seekers personally upon their arrival to New York and slept on a cot in a tent shelter. He additionally predicted, lengthy earlier than his indictment, that the problem would “destroy” town, amplifying fears about migrants’ committing each petty and violent crimes.
Adams is commonly loyal to a fault
“I’m going to verify my individuals are taken care of,” Adams stated privately simply after his win within the major, noting that the white mayors earlier than him did the identical.
And so fairly than select a cupboard based mostly solely on experience, he created a Metropolis Corridor divided between technocrats and cronies.
The fallout has devastated Metropolis Corridor and rendered it rudderless. By his fourth 12 months in workplace, almost all of Adams’s most trusted aides had left amid investigations and scandal, together with Adams’s chief adviser, police commissioner, interim police commissioner, first deputy mayor and colleges chancellor. Invoice Bratton, a police commissioner beneath two earlier mayors, identified the issue: “Too many pals with too many issues in too many excessive locations.”
Adams has lengthy tied his personal story to town’s
Adams has repeatedly instructed his audiences “I’m you.” At his best, he has woven his biography — as a scofflaw youth who grew to become an officer who grew to become the mayor — into New York’s personal tumultuous and resilient historical past.
“The mayor should match the attribute of town,” Adams stated final 12 months. He does, particularly now: self-regarding, sleepless, quick and free, saddled with knotty crime issues. His authorized duress has unfolded towards the backdrop of a metropolis that may really feel as whether it is dropping its collective thoughts, unsettled by a reel of semi-surreal scenes, from the subways to the streets, that New Yorkers encounter every single day.
Possibly Adams is New York. However New York won’t be his for lengthy.
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