New York Mayor Eric Adams rolled over and showed his belly, and now President Donald Trump has him on a leash.
On Monday morning, the mayor convened his commissioners behind closed doors and ordered them not to say anything bad about the president and to give ICE agents in the city as much deference as possible. On Monday evening, Trump’s Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors in Manhattan to drop the historic criminal corruption case against Adams — for now.
A legal assist from Trump doling out dispensations isn’t a recipe for a political revival in a city where the only public official less popular than The Donald is the mayor.
The charges, the acting deputy attorney general wrote, had hindered Adams from fully leaning into the president’s immigration agenda — as if charges should get made or dropped depending on their subject’s compliance with Trump’s agenda. And, the letter dubiously claimed, those charges had been brought too close to the city’s election. (They came in September, nine months before NYC’s primaries.)
The letter explicitly did not contest the facts prosecutors had already laid out, involving Adams’ scoring first-class airline tickets from the Turkish government while it secreted money in his campaign, in exchange for his help opening a building in New York of huge importance to the country’s strongman leader.
More charges had most likely been coming, prosecutors had said, sparking speculation about witness tampering from the mayor who bricked his phone before turning it over to the feds (he said he changed his password to keep it safe from his aides and then forgot it), not to mention the numerous open investigations into his almost cartoonishly crooked inner circle who kept leaving for “personal reasons” shortly after the feds raided them.
That’s all presumably on hold now, even as the letter from Washington explicitly said the case against Adams would be reviewed again after November.
That’s a stage whisper: Behave, or this can all come back to bite you.
But by noon on Tuesday, Adams, without taking questions, gave a speech claiming the letter proved he’d been totally vindicated and the whole matter was done.
Never mind that the letter didn’t say that at all or that prosecutors in Manhattan’s Southern District — long nicknamed the Sovereign District for their independence — haven’t yet dropped the case, let alone had the judge sign off on their doing so, or that local prosecutors could still pick it up.
Hizzoner instructed New Yorkers, in what amounted to the unofficial opening of his seemingly quixotic bid for a second term, that “we can put this cruel episode behind us and focus entirely on the future of our city.” New Yorkers are, and it’s nearly impossible to see that future including Adams. That isn’t about corruption, per se. November’s election was another reminder that most voters don’t care about that, so long as things are getting done.
But they haven’t been, which is why Adams’ approval ratings had plummeted by the end of his first year in office — long before the FBI seized his phones — because he never delivered on his swagger.
New Yorkers may be stuck along for the ride between now and the city’s Democratic primary in June.
A legal assist from Trump doling out dispensations isn’t a recipe for a political revival in a city where the only public official less popular than The Donald is the mayor. But the reprieve from his trial buys Adams a little more time to remain relevant and hope to draw an inside straight with city voters while auditioning for a future role in the Trump administration.
Meantime, he’s drawing a Greek chorus of Bronx cheers:
“The mayor is trying to sell misinformation to a city he’s already decided to sell out. This is not in fact over, it’s just being held over his head,” New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said in a statement.
“The DOJ’s message is clear: Assent to President Donald Trump or face renewed criminal charges,” state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, a Democratic mayoral candidate, wrote in a letter to the judge presiding over Adams’ case. “A hostage-taking (with a willing hostage),” veteran New York political journalist Ben Max posted to X. It’s not just political rivals and journalists. The Rev. Al Sharpton, a longtime Adams ally (and MSNBC host), echoed that, saying, “The president is holding the city and the mayor hostage.” And New Yorkers may be stuck along for the ride between now and the city’s Democratic primary in June — or even the general election in November. Adams foreshadowed a heel turn when he told Tucker Carlson just after the presidential election that “the party left me” while ridiculously claiming the Biden administration had decided to railroad the Democratic mayor of America’s biggest city. (Polls, though, show the city’s Republicans have an even lower opinion of Adams than its Democrats.) While Trump’s legal gift is, to quote another disgraced Democratic leader-turned-beta dog whom the president rewarded this week for heeling, “f—ing golden” for Adams, who’s been struggling to raise money for either his re-election campaign or his legal defense fund, it may actually be clarifying for New Yorkers. (Adams has consistently said, and he repeated in his speech Thursday, that he “never broke the law” and that he always acted in the city’s best interest.) After all these years of hoping for a prosecutor to accomplish what voters did not and amid calls for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg or New York Attorney General Letitia James to pick up the prosecutorial torch, New Yorkers may have to finally face the fact that there’s finally no justice — just us. Adams beat the feds’ case, for now, but he still has to face the city. What’s important isn’t what the candidates vying to replace Adams say prosecutors should do to him. What’s important is what those candidates would be if they replaced Adams as mayor to deal with a president who’s going to keep severely stress-testing New York City and who’d like nothing more than to have his hometown’s leader by the short hairs.
Harry Siegel
Harry Siegel is a senior editor at the newsroom The City, a columnist for the New York Daily News and the producer and a co-host of the "FAQ NYC" podcast. 
