Michael Nigro/AP
The grand arc of Eric Adams’ political evolution, which kicked off in 2021 with a bombastic claim that the former NYPD officer was the “future of the Democratic Party,” only for him to find salvation in Donald Trump’s return to office, appears to be reaching its logical endpoint: a prominent gig with the Trump administration.
The New York Times reports that advisers to the president, who has been drumming up ways to meddle in the politics of a hometown that hates him, are weighing potential positions for Adams in the Trump administration. (The other guy, in the red beret? He’s also reportedly being considered for a job.) The president’s advisers believe that the move could put an end to the game of chicken between Adams and Andrew Cuomo, helping the latter out of a virtually nonviable path to defeat Zohran Mamdani, the mayoral race’s overwhelming frontrunner.
If true, the plan would be the logical next step in Trump and Adams’ increasing alliance: a scandal-plagued mayor, in the most official capacity, answering to the guy whose Justice Department dropped criminal charges against him. Yet, it’s difficult to see how a wide-open contest between Cuomo and Mamdani, the 33-year-old frontrunner and democratic socialist, would work the way Trump apparently thinks: that defeating the Republican Party’s biggest bogeyman would be good for him politically. Even Cuomo seems skeptical. He told the Times that Mamdani’s victory “would be a political gift to the Republican Party, which would then use him to characterize the Democrats across the country going into the midterms.”
Of course, Trump’s decision-making is rarely governed by logic. Here, the president appears to relish the opportunity of meddling in New York’s mayoral race, flexing real political muscle with imagined, even potentially self-destructive, results. As for Adams, it would merely make official what we already know.
