Mayor Eric Adams won his office four years ago pledging to deliver New Yorkers from chaos and calamity — a former lawman entrusted to tame a proudly unruly city.
It hasn’t happened that way.
Over nearly 100 interviews with aides, allies and adversaries spanning Adams’s life and career, The Times Magazine found a mayor and a city unmoored, their fates entwined whether or not residents want them to be. Long before his indictment last fall on federal corruption charges, Adams became the avatar of New York’s day-to-day disorder, a volatile leader to match (and contribute to) volatile times.
His chosen path out of his personal crisis, many details of which have not been previously reported, involved cozying up to a new president whom most of Adams’s constituents oppose — and offering those constituents, federal prosecutors have said, as human collateral to the Trump White House.
Here are five takeaways from our reporting:
Adams (and Trump) have played the long game
President Trump and Adams, two sons of Queens, seemed to understand each other from the start. When Trump encountered the mayor at a charity dinner in October, weeks before the presidential election, he put his arm around him in private. Adams’s friend, former Gov. David Paterson, said that Adams was quiet for the rest of the night. “Almost like he’s thinking about it,” Paterson said. “Like: ‘Is this possible? Boy.’”
Trump urged Adams to “hang in there” before publicly suggesting that both men had been persecuted by the Biden Justice Department. Adams, a Democrat who criticized Trump’s “idiot behavior” during the president’s first term, has not said a cross word about him since. By January, he was flying to Florida to dine with Trump days before the inauguration. And Trump had acquired a useful new friend in his native city: a mayor straining to cling to both his office and his freedom.
Adams is a political shape-shifter
Adams has always been an adaptable politician, comfortable flip-flopping between the two major parties as the winds shifted. He was a Democrat, then a Republican in the 1990s, then a Democrat again. He briefly considered running in 2021 as a Republican. And he has considered it again in 2025.
In an interview, Tucker Carlson suggested Adams had formerly been “intimidated into supporting things he doesn’t believe” and said he and the mayor “have a lot of gut-level agreements.” Adams was so open to Trump world that he even considered attending Trump’s October campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, Carlson told us, before deciding against the idea.
“Eric always was more right of center,” the Rev. Al Sharpton told us. “He was not a fellow traveler.”
The migrant crisis was Adams’s first major test as mayor
The city’s migrant influx became a defining management crisis of Adams’s term, decisively shaping his relationship with two presidents. “Joe Biden is trying to hang me out to dry,” the mayor told members of Congress visiting City Hall in 2023, according to an attendee. By 2025, the Trump administration, pushing for a dismissal of Adams’s corruption charges, said the mayor needed to be uninhibited in assisting the new White House’s deportation agenda.
But Adams’s views on immigration are more complicated than is widely understood. He has greeted asylum seekers personally upon their arrival to New York and slept on a cot in a tent shelter. He also predicted, long before his indictment, that the issue would “destroy” the city, amplifying fears about migrants’ committing both petty and violent crimes.
Adams is often loyal to a fault
“I’m going to make sure my people are taken care of,” Adams said privately just after his win in the primary, noting that the white mayors before him did the same.
And so rather than choose a cabinet based solely on expertise, he created a City Hall divided between technocrats and cronies.
The fallout has devastated City Hall and rendered it rudderless. By his fourth year in office, nearly all of Adams’s most trusted aides had left amid investigations and scandal, including Adams’s chief adviser, police commissioner, interim police commissioner, first deputy mayor and schools chancellor. Bill Bratton, a police commissioner under two previous mayors, diagnosed the problem: “Too many friends with too many problems in too many high places.”
Adams has long tied his own story to the city’s
Adams has repeatedly told his audiences “I am you.” At his most effective, he has woven his biography — as a scofflaw youth who became an officer who became the mayor — into New York’s own tumultuous and resilient history.
“The mayor must fit the characteristic of the city,” Adams said last year. He does, especially now: self-regarding, sleepless, fast and loose, saddled with knotty crime problems. His legal duress has unfolded against the backdrop of a city that can feel as if it is losing its collective mind, unsettled by a reel of semi-surreal scenes, from the subways to the streets, that New Yorkers encounter every day.
Maybe Adams is New York. But New York might not be his for long.
