Photo: Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times/Redux
If our city feels rudderless and out of control these days, it’s not your imagination: To a remarkable degree, the man New York elected to hold things together, Mayor Eric Adams, has been in steady retreat — and in some cases, outright irrelevance — as his political and legal troubles continue mounting. Political insiders have been predicting a mayoral resignation for weeks, although Adams’s criminal-defense attorney calls the rumors “completely false.”
Even if Adams doesn’t quit, his reelection is looking less likely every day as the all-important June 24 Democratic primary approaches. Last month, a Quinnipiac poll gave Adams an anemic 28 percent approval rating among registered voters, with 58 percent voicing disapproval, the worst favorability level recorded for a New York City mayor since Quinnipiac began asking the question in 1996. A more recent private poll shows only 18 percent of likely Black voters support Adams, with 46 percent favoring former governor Andrew Cuomo, who has not yet entered the race but is putting the finishing touches on a possible campaign launch.
With Adams’s upcoming federal trial on bribery charges looming large, his legal-defense fund is $735,000 in the hole, even with high-profile attorney Alex Spiro charging half his usual rate of $2,000 per hour. Adams is reportedly having a hard time finding new donors.
Governor Kathy Hochul has stepped in to cover some functions normally handled by the mayor, as has Attorney General Letitia James. Despite some early interest in a mayoral run from James, allies say she plans to stay put; as the official who successfully sued Donald Trump in a major civil-fraud case, she ranks high on the list of enemies the president may target for retribution.
Allies of Cuomo, meanwhile, are quietly approaching political consultants, drafting policy memos and talking points for speeches, setting up an independent expenditure committee, and otherwise laying the groundwork for a possible candidate who famously does not make political moves until and unless victory looks certain.
Think of Cuomo’s preparations as the modern equivalent of 1991, when his father, ex-governor Mario Cuomo, famously had a plane idling on the tarmac and lawyers with paperwork ready to fly to New Hampshire to meet a filing deadline for entering the presidential primary. Mario Cuomo ultimately decided at the last minute not to get on the plane; Andrew Cuomo is planning to have his own political plane ready for takeoff.
Andrew Cuomo far outpolls eight of Adams’s other challengers, including a trio of young upstarts (State Senators Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani), three longtime pols (Comptroller Brad Lander, ex-comptroller Scott Stringer and ex-assemblyman Michael Blake), and two private-sector newcomers (banker Whitney Tilson and attorney Jim Walden).
The political vacuum at City Hall was in full view this week, with the Trump administration’s new mass-deportation campaign including a visit from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to personally supervise immigration raids and arrests in midtown and the Bronx. “Dirtbags like this will continue to be removed from our streets,” Noem boasted on social media, sharing a video of a man being led away in handcuffs.
The NYPD did not participate in the raid, and normally, it would be unthinkable to see that kind of high-profile federal action on city streets without involvement or comment from City Hall. But Adams has already made it clear that he will not be saying anything publicly that might displease Trump.
“I’ve said it before: I’m not going to be warring with the president. I’m going to be working with the president. And that’s my responsibility as the mayor,” Adams told reporters. “If I do disagree, I will communicate with him directly on them,” said Adams. “I don’t want to be part of what feeds the anxiety of going back and forth in this public discourse that we’re seeing. If [there are] things that he does that I disagree on, I will reach out to the president and communicate with him.”
Adams said this a day after he canceled multiple Martin Luther King Jr. Day appearances and instead raced to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration, where he watched Trump’s swearing-in from an overflow room in the Capitol and later had lunch with top Republicans.
“These actions naturally raise eyebrows and leave us with questions,” the Reverend Al Sharpton, a longtime Adams ally, said on social media and MSNBC.
New Yorkers worried about whether their homes, schools, or businesses are going to be raided will not hear a word of complaint from the mayor, who says it’s all no big deal.
“My life is the life that Dr. King was talking about when he [said] he had a dream. I’m living that dream,” said the mayor, who is in the middle of a political nightmare.
The mayor’s retreat from public relevance coincides with power moves by Hochul, who says she will fight Trump initiatives if and when necessary.
“We can’t spend four years of Whac-a-Mole, “ Hochul told me. “Sometimes he’s going to say something dramatic to get the headline and get the attention, but what that really means is he’s going to punt it over to an agency to come up with some regulations. So we can’t be in this hyperreactive mode every 20 minutes to what they’re doing.”
So when Trump issued an executive order to nullify birthright citizenship — a decision based on a shaky legal theory — Hochul and James activated a previously created legal task force that joined 21 other states to immediately file a lawsuit to block the move.
“Our constitution is not open to reinterpretation by executive order or presidential decree. President Trump’s attempt to undermine the fundamental right to birthright citizenship is not just unconstitutional, it is profoundly dangerous,” James said in a statement. A federal judge swiftly issued an injunction blocking Trump’s order, which he called “blatantly unconstitutional.”
Hochul says she won’t fall for the Trump strategy of flooding the zone with a blizzard of actions. “I’ve got to govern a vast, complex state, and we can’t be distracted by every single move they make,” she told me, saying she will continue to look out for New Yorkers facing immigration challenges. “I do believe that people have hearts and compassion and they don’t want to see their neighbors or their friends’ lives disrupted that way because we are New York and we know who we stand for. We know our values. “ (Our full conversation is on my podcast, You Decide).
I asked Hochul point-blank: With Adams AWOL on criticism of the Trump administration, will you step in and stand up for New Yorkers who are afraid of what might be coming down from the federal government?
“I’m not going to judge people on how they want to respond to this. I know what I have to do as governor, and that is to execute a budget that meets New Yorkers where they are, what their concerns are,” she told me. “We’ll deal with immigration as it arises. And we will not stand for families being torn apart. We know what our values are.”
That doesn’t wholly answer the question of what will happen in New York as mass deportation ramps up, but it demonstrates that Hochul, unlike Adams, is prepared to speak to — and for — New Yorkers, who have every reason to be unsettled about a coming storm of federal action and a mayor who has, in many ways, abdicated.
