This will be my last column about Eric Adams. It is, to be blunt, a tremendous relief. In January of 2022, I approached John Tarleton, editor-in-chief of The Indypendent, with an idea. Eric Adams, I pitched, is a genuine eccentric. He says and does ridiculous things, seemingly with no awareness of how ridiculous they are. His mayoral administration was going to be a lot of fun. Why not a monthly column recapping all the wacky goings-on of New York City’s chief executive? We could call it, “The Month In Eric Adams” (can’t accuse me of burying ledes).

John liked it, and my first column for The Indy was born. As I read it now, I’m struck by how the seeds of Adams’ eventual destruction were planted right at the start. He spent that initial month defending his hiring of scandal-scarred Philip Banks as deputy mayor for public safety and his brother David as schools chancellor. Both David and Banks resigned in October 2024 after the FBI confiscated their cell phones as part of a far-reaching investigation into bribery claims.

I ended that column with a pithy “47 months to go.” I knew there would be scandals, as there always are, and I knew that an Eric Adams NYPD would reach dystopian levels. But I never foresaw the depths to which the Adams administration would sink — that he would be indicted, that he would come to a corrupt understanding with Donald Trump to quash that indictment, that his NYPD would fall apart in a whirlwind of scandal and crime. Who could have anticipated, in those innocent days of 2022, that the United States would soon be taken over by fascists and that the mayor of New York City would find common cause with them?

I tried to keep up. I made it five months with timely columns before I started having dreams of Eric Adams telling me my horoscope in my mother’s voice and had to step back to semi-monthly. I bought, for $30 I could have given to a homeless person, Adams’ absurd, fear-mongering book Don’t Let It Happen, and I read the whole thing, with intentions of writing a review that never happened. (“What does this mean???” is one of my scrawled notes in the margins.) I wrote a detailed analysis of how Eric Adams cost the Democrats the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms, and I muted notifications when AOC tweeted out my breakdown of Adams’ incredible and irresponsible giveaway to the police unions. In the Village Voice, I tried to figure out who had the best chance of beating Adams in the next primary. (Full disclosure: I was a Jessica Ramos fan at the time, so probably no one should ever listen to me). I met people, in real life, who had read my work and wanted to talk Adams. My dad, who lives on Long Island, said to me, “Johnny, what is wrong with that Eric Adams?”

I watched the NYPD slowly, then quickly, morph into a bluntly politicized right-wing militia under Adams. Amid the constant hum of psychopathy that lives in our ears now, it can be hard to recognize and remember every insane thing, but surely it was insane when top-ranking members of the NYPD attacked journalists, politicians and judges from their Twitter accounts. In October 2024, after Adams was indicted, I felt in my blood a burning desire for accountability, and I wrote a column castigating the fools who had helped foist Adams upon us. Nobody who calls Adams a “godsend” who would “save New York” — as Bret Stephens did in the Times — should ever work in media again.

Accountability will never come directly for most of the people who promoted Eric Adams, just as it never comes for any evil, powerful person in America. Al Sharpton continues to have an MSNBC show. Hakeem Jeffries, who endorsed Adams in the 2021 primary, has since become the leader of House Democrats. Nate Silver’s comeuppance will solely be in the form of the endless replies to his tweets reminding him that this ostensible sage of politics once said he believed Adams may well be the Democratic nominee for president one day. Eric Adams was the worst mayor in New York City’s history. I can say that without knowing a tremendous amount about New York’s past mayors, because I know this: No other mayor used our city as leverage to get a fascist President to drop the criminal charges against him. Adams can point to some statistics in his favor — some housing built, better trash policies. All of it ceased to matter when he handed New York to Donald Trump. That was the point at which the Adams administration went from comical to dangerous, when we as New Yorkers felt powerless to stop the ground being sold from under our feet.

In a final act of selfishness, Adams decided to skip the next Democratic primary, ran on a made-up ballot line, and stayed in the race for mayor long after it was clear to all that he could never win. He did this as leverage for a post-mayoralty job, again cynically abusing public institutions for his own gain. Adams will probably become wealthy in his life after Gracie Mansion. Although he is a stain on history nearly universally loathed by New Yorkers, he will also suffer no consequences.

That said: Zohran Mamdani is about to be mayor, and that doesn’t happen in a world where Kathryn Garcia or Maya Wiley is the incumbent. If Jeffries and Ritchie Torres and Tom Suozzi and Farah Louis and all the other Adams boosters hadn’t pushed him over the line in 2021, where Adams just narrowly beat Garcia and Wiley in the primary, there would be no socialist mayor. That’s an Eric Adams legacy we can
be thankful for.

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