Why Eric Adams Rose So High
In the hours after Eric Adams’ downfall, as cheers rang out from open windows and the sun’s rays touched our faces for the first time in three years, haters who had narrowly avoided becoming waiters played a timeless game: Who looked the most foolish in retrospect?
Was it Nate Silver, once famed for accurately calling the 2012 election, and now better known for predicting that Adams could one day be the Democratic nominee for President? Or maybe it was Bret Stephens, who from his lofty perch at The Times called Adams a “godsend” who would “save New York?” (Some fun trivia: Stephens quotes Adams complaining about how long it took the Buildings Department to issue certificates of occupancy — maybe the Turks were already in his ear.) And what about Al Sharpton, who went from an Adams attack dog against Maya Wiley to baptizing the mayor at Rikers Island, of all places?
Let’s be clear: These hacks look foolish not because Adams fell. That happens. Lots of people liked Anthony Weiner at one point, too. (I didn’t.) The Adams sycophants are laughingstocks because from the start it was clear that he was a grifter and a liar. During the campaign, he awkwardly pretended to live in his son’s Brooklyn apartment, forgetting to clean out the meat from the fridge and the shoes from the floor. He theatrically announced an intention to receive his pay in cryptocurrency, that evergreen shiny object for idiots and scammers. Throughout the ’90s, he ping-ponged from being a vocal Louis Farrakhan supporter who criticized a Latino politician for not marrying a Latina woman to a “conservative Republican,” David Dinkins critic and Giuliani fan. He was endorsed by the New York Post!
Why were so many powerful political figures willing to overlook Adams’ clear dysfunction? To answer that we can look at the most powerful politician of Adams’ time: President Joe Biden. In February of 2022, with midterm elections on the horizon, Biden trekked to New York for a “public-safety summit” with Adams. Speaking directly from the NYPD’s headquarters, Biden declared, “The answer is not to defund the police” but was instead to give police “the funding to be partners, to be protectors.” At the same appearance, Adams called for a “9/11-type response” against urban crime, which he classified as “domestic terror that is pervasive in this city and country.”
Such was the direction of the Democratic party in the post-George Floyd, post-Trump malaise, when heavily posed and highly cringe photos of kneeling in kente cloth gave way to billions more in federal funding for local police departments. As memories of Floyd’s brutal murder faded, protests died down without Trump to serve as a unifying force and Biden’s limp police reform legislation died a quiet death in Congress, Democrats across the country embraced the same police forces they had once promised to rein in.
At the center of this shift was Eric Adams. Third-ranking House Democrat and Biden booster James Clyburn claimed that Eric Adams’ victory was “proof” that defunding the police is a “non-starter, even with Black people. In The Atlantic Democratic pundit Juan Williams authored a fawning longform piece on Adams focused on his policing career and fight against crime, castigating the “white liberals” uncomfortable with Adams’ “working-class” persona (a truly spectacular assertion for a mayor who favored expensive suits, veganism and nights at exclusive social clubs). Another puff piece, this one at resistance-heavy The Bulwark, quoted a bevy of Democratic consultants and politicians extolling Adams’ “centrism,” pro-police politics and even his decision to bring solitary confinement back to city jails, arguing that “his victory could have national implications for himself and for the Democratic party.” USA Today, in an ostensible straight news piece, announced “Eric Adams’ Win Slows New York Democrats’ March to the Left.”
Adams rose to the top because he was a convenient way for Democrats to distance themselves from the Black Lives Matter campaign, which you may remember as the largest spontaneous mass protest movement in modern history — and one with which Democrats were never truly comfortable. Starting at the very top of the party, Democrats made their deal with the devil: They would ignore Adams’ history and general weirdness to trumpet him as the ultimate foil to critics of the police and to pivot from Black lives to blue lines.
We can see where this led us. Every year since George Floyd’s murder, police have killed more Americans. Biden increased federal police funding by the aforementioned billions, and state funding increased nearly across the board. Just last month when Kamala Harris was asked about police reform, she pivoted to gun violence, talked up the long-dead George Floyd Police Reform Act, and ended her answer by implying that many American communities are under-policed. By any measure, Black Lives Matter lost.
That’s why Eric Adams isn’t just another awful politician, or even just another corrupt one. His victory was a symbol — a Black man, a former cop, giving Democrats permission to throw overboard the millions of marchers, activists and protestors who voted for Joe Biden, in part because George Floyd’s public execution sickened them so.
Adams would prove to be a liability long before the indictments broke. New York was a weak point for Democrats in the 2022 midterms, possibly costing the party control of the House, as Democrats fully internalized the GOP’s crime talking points Adams had laundered into the national discourse. He and the president would go on to have a falling-out after Adams viciously criticized the Biden administration for allegedly failing to contain the migrant influx, which Adams claimed would “destroy” New York. New Yorkers themselves have fully internalized the near-constant fear mongering of the last few years and feel less safe now than they did in 2017, despite crime levels being comparable.
It is too early to say if Adams’ downfall will have similar symbolic consequences to his rise. I’d expect to see arguments that Adams’ personal corruption is unrelated to his general fascism. This is, of course, shortsighted and foolish, and not something most people would argue about, say, Donald Trump. There is by necessity a certain lawlessness inherent in law enforcement — when society walls off from criticism the same group of people who have a legal monopoly on violence, it creates a toxic, exploitative sense of entitlement. In other words, by accepting bribes and defrauding the city, Adams was just being a cop in a different context.
For now, let’s try and remember the fools, cowards and freaks who helped Adams to the top even when they knew he was a scam artist of the first order, and for the worst reason: because they wanted to protect cops from accountability. Shame on them.
John Teufel is a lawyer and freelance writer with a monthly column at The Indypendent. Follow him on Twitter: @JohnTeufelNYC.