Mayor Eric Adams won his office four years ago, promising the delivery of New Yorkers from Haos and the accident – the former MP was entrusted to tamed the proudly rude city.
That didn’t happen that way.
During almost 100 interviews with assistants, allies and opponents who extend in Adam’s life and career, The Times magazine found the mayor and the city motionless, Their destinies are intertwined whether residents want to be or not. Long before the indictment last fall for federal charges of corruption, Adams has become an avatar of everyday disorder in New York, a volatile leader who has harmonized (and contributed) unstable times.
His chosen path from his personal crisis, whose details were not reported earlier, included in accordance with the new president, which most Adam’s voters opposed – and offering these voters, said Federal Prosecutors, as human collateral to Trump’s White House.
Here are five deposits from our reporting:
Adams (and Trump) played a long game
President Trump and Adams, two Queens sons, seemed to understand each other from the beginning. When Trump met the mayor in October at a charity dinner, weeks before the presidential election, he put his hand around. Adams’s friend, former government David Paterson, said Adams was calm for the rest of the night. “It’s almost like thinking about it,” Paterson said. “Like, ‘Is that possible? The boy.'”
Trump urged Adams to “keep himself there” before publicly suggested that both had been persecuted by the Ministry of Justice Biden. Adams, a Democrat who criticized Trump’s “idiotic behavior” during the president’s first term, has not said since then. By January, he flew to Florida to have dinner with Trump’s days before the inauguration. And Trump acquired a useful new friend in his hometown: the mayor who tried to attach to his office and his freedom.
Adams is a political movement of the form
Adams has always been an adaptable politician, a pleasant overturning between the two main parties as the winds moved. He was a Democrat, then a Republican in the 1990s, then a democrat. He briefly considered running in 2021 as a Republican. And again he considered it in 2025.
In an interview, Tucker Carlson suggested that Adams had been “intimidated earlier to support things he did not believe” and said that he and the mayor “have a lot of bowel levels”. Adams was so open to Trump’s world that he even thought about participating in Trump’s October campaign in Madison Square Garden, Carlson told us before he decided against that idea.
“Eric has always been more center,” Rev. told us. Al Sharpton. “He wasn’t a colleague of a traveler.”
The migrant crisis was Adams’s first major test as mayor
The migrant city influx has become a decisive crisis of Adam’s management term, decisively shaping his relationship with two presidents. “Joe Biden is trying to hang me to dry,” the mayor told the members of the Congress who visited the City Hall in 2023, said the participant. By 2025, Trump’s administration, advocating rejecting Adam’s corruption charges, said the mayor should have been unspoiled in helping the daily deportation of a new white house.
But Adam’s views on immigration are more complex than they are widely understood. He personally welcomed the asylum seekers upon their arrival in New York and slept on a crib at a tent shelter. He also predicted, long before the indictment, that the issue would “destroy” the city, enhancing the fears of a migrant committing small and violent crimes.
Adams is often a loyal guilt
“I will make sure my people are worried,” Adams said privately immediately after winning the primary, noting that the White Mayors had done the same before him.
And so, instead of choosing a cabinet based only on expertise, he created a city hall divided between technocrats and diving.
Fallout ravaged the City Hall and made it without a helm. By the age of fourth year, almost all Adams left the most loyal assistants in the middle of an investigation and scandal, including Adam’s chief advisor, police commissioner, a temporary police commissioner, the first deputy mayor and chancellor of the school. Bill Bratton, a police commissioner under two previous mayor, diagnosed the problem: “Too many friends with too many problems in too many high places.”
Adams has long tied his story to the city
Adams told his audience repeatedly “I am you.” In his most effective, he woven his biography – as a youth of a derision who became an officer who became a mayor – to New York his own turbulent and resistant history.
“The mayor must match the city’s characteristics,” Adams said last year. Especially now: self -examination, sleepless, fast and loose, obsessed with knot problems with crime. His legal affiliation took place on the background of a city that may feel like he is losing his collective mind, unregistered for semi-silosing scenes, from the subway to the streets, with which New Yorkers meet every day.
Maybe Adams is New York. But New York may not be his long.
