Donald Trump’s latest rhetoric about Zohran Mamdani was controversial in its own right, but the president’s comments about the man the New York City mayoral candidate hopes to replace stood out, too. NBC News reported:
Discussing the New York City mayoral race, Trump said he ‘helped out’ Mayor Eric Adams, who had faced federal corruption charges. ‘You have a good independent running, Mayor Adams, who’s a very good person. I helped him out a little bit. He had a problem, and he was unfairly hurt over this question,’ Trump said.
The president made the comments at an event in Florida on Tuesday afternoon.
Trump: "You have a good independent running — Mayor Adams, who's a very good person. I helped him out a little bit. He had a problem."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-07-01T16:46:33.670Z
In case anyone needs a refresher, the beleaguered mayor was indicted by federal prosecutors on corruption charges last fall. Soon after, Adams, who pleaded not guilty, launched an unsubtle effort to cozy up to Trump and his team.
Those efforts proved effective: Just three weeks into the president’s second term, former Trump defense attorney Emil Bove, in his capacity as the acting deputy attorney general, ordered federal prosecutors in New York to drop the corruption charges against the mayor. While this sometimes happens because officials conclude that there’s a problem with the merits of the case or the reliability of the evidence, Bove argued, among other things, that the case should go away because of Adams’ willingness to work with the Trump administration on matters related to immigration and crime policy.
It raised widespread and unavoidable concerns that politicians aligned with the White House were effectively eligible for “get out of jail free” cards.
The developments were so egregious that a variety of career prosecutors — by one count, 10 different lawyers — resigned over the administration’s handling of the case.
It was easy to understand why. Indeed, the circumstances appeared scandalous: At issue was a dynamic in which a presidential administration told an allegedly corrupt public official that his legal troubles would go away if he agreed to play ball with the White House on an unrelated issue — not only setting a radical precedent, but also sending a signal to other politicians facing potential corruption charges. (Bove and Adams have denied allegations of a quid pro quo.) It was against this backdrop that the president, months later, voluntarily added some additional details and context, admitting to the public that he personally “helped [Adams] out a little bit,” suggesting that Trump wasn’t just aware of the scheme, but also that he played a direct role in the developments. I can appreciate the fact that there’s a lot going on, including a seemingly endless list of overlapping controversies surrounding the White House, but in a normal political environment, this would be a very big deal. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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