Comparisons to Donald J. Trump began shortly after Eric Adams was sworn in as mayor of New York City in 2022.
Mr. Adams called himself the Biden of Brooklyn, but his style was much more similar to the man who lost to President Biden in the 2020 election.
Like Trump, Adams has repeatedly criticized the coverage he has received since taking office. Adams, a former police officer and the city’s second Black mayor, who created his own newsletter to avoid local media coverage, said in late 2022 that he told the press, “Enough is enough, enough is enough, enough is enough.” ‘I have to tell them,’ he said. .
Both are trying to demonstrate what Adams calls “swagger,” or macho toughness. Both have demonstrated the strength of law and order, surrounded by people under legal supervision.
And both claim to be victims of political efforts to prosecute their positions on the issue, claiming that the real corruption is real corruption, not their actions. There is.
Mr. Adams will now be testing the extent to which he can follow President Trump’s strategy with the aim of continuing in office. It remains to be seen whether the political gravity that usually comes with an indictment will drag him down. In six weeks, Trump will face a similar test of whether his criminal record will prevent him from winning the presidential election, despite widespread support within his party.
Mr. Trump grew up in Queens, surrounded by the Brooklyn political machine his father, a successful real estate developer, built to help bring construction projects to fruition. Mr. Adams emerged from a different iteration of the Brooklyn machine, formed from a rising black political power base.
In both cases, they were shapeshifters. Trump, a Republican-turned-Democrat-turned-independent-turned-Republican, once supported universal health care, but has since been slow to repudiate his support for white supremacist David Duke. Adams, a Democrat-turned-Republican who has been under investigation for some time, admired Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam.
Both were embodiments of transactional politics, willing to assume positions different from those they had previously held, and who were seen by business elites and political centrists as bulwarks against what the elites saw as creeping progressivism. There is.
A Democratic strategist active in New York politics spoke candidly about the situation surrounding both men on condition of anonymity, but sarcastically asked whether their supporters were more worried about progress or corruption.
On Thursday, Trump announced his position on the Adams case, whether intentionally or not. The charges against the mayor, who was himself convicted of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal and has been indicted on three other occasions, were announced just before a press conference at Trump Tower.
For Adams, being elected to New York City’s highest office is a powerful role often described as the second-toughest job in the United States, rivaling that of the president, but with New York City becoming the epicenter of the coronavirus and the Black Lives Matter movement It comes a year after it became the epicenter of protests. Crime has skyrocketed amid pandemic shutdowns, sometimes erupting into violence.
Democrats are at odds with candidates who advocate extremely liberal positions on a range of issues, particularly police, and Adams is seen by centrists, some Republicans and the city’s business interests as an antidote. It had been done. It took until the end of his first year in office for the mayor’s image as the new face of the Democratic Party to begin to falter.
Trump resigned as president after his efforts to cling to power culminated in the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. Since then, his popularity among Republican voters has not waned as much as many Washingtonians had hoped. The fact that Trump was indicted four times in as many months in 2023 only strengthened him politically within his party.
This week, Mr. Trump’s advisers privately rejoiced at having yet another public official facing corruption charges, creating news stories about legal disputes in which the former president was not involved and showing him how the system is corrupt. It gave them an opportunity to claim that they were.
Trump has been saying for more than two years that the Justice Department is pursuing him for political reasons. Adams has said similar things multiple times, suggesting the focus of the investigation against him is racially biased.
While some have called for Adams to resign, many Democrats are either looking away or offering subdued criticism. It’s not the full-throated defense Trump has received from elected officials in his own party, but it’s still different from what existed just a few years ago for the scandal-plagued mayor.
One of the loudest defenses of Mr. Adams came, unsurprisingly, from Mr. Trump.
Trump defended Adams during his own press conference Thursday, baselessly claiming the mayor was indicted because he blamed the Biden administration over the immigration crisis that has strained city services. It’s a restraint similar to his own political message. But Trump also admitted he didn’t actually know what the mayor had done and declined to answer repeated questions from reporters about whether he would pardon the mayor once he returned to the White House.
“Let me just say this: About a year ago, he said how much damage illegal immigrants are doing to our city, that the federal government should pay us, that we don’t have to take them in. , I saw him talking,” he said. “And I said, you know what? He’s going to be indicted within a year. And I was right, because that’s what we have. I said he would be prosecuted because he did that. Look, that’s what they’re doing. These guys are bad people. They cheated and they needed it. They’ll do anything. They’re bad people.”
Trump added: “I wish him the best.”
