How Mayor Eric Adams Lost New York City

Mayor Eric Adams was milling around a Manhattan ballroom, tuxedoed and small-talking, on a Thursday night a few weeks before the 2024 election. Donald J. Trump made the first move.

Since Adams’s indictment in late September on federal corruption charges, those close to him told us, he had felt abandoned and isolated, a mayor unmoored. Here was a relative stranger, the once and future president, edging his way at a white-tie charity dinner. “He actually put his arm around him,” David Paterson, a former New York governor and a fellow attendee, told us. Adams looked touched. He said little the rest of the night. “He was kind of quiet, almost like he’s thinking about it,” Paterson, a longtime friend, said. “Like: ‘Is this possible? Boy.’”

Once they reached the dais, Paterson recalled, Trump had a parting message for Adams: “Hang in there.” At the microphone moments later, before an audience of city dignitaries who largely disdained them both, Trump turned the subtext to text: A connection had been made. “We were persecuted, Eric,” he told the crowd at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, a $5,000-a-plate annual benefit for Catholic charities that historically hosts presidential candidates. “I was persecuted, and so are you, Eric.”

The chance encounter set in motion what would become the signal political emergency in New York’s modern history, perpetrated by two sons of Queens with a shared instinct for brazen survival and naked transaction.

But, really, what could surprise the city by now? Elected to deliver New York from disorder and disrepair, Adams established himself as the avatar of its chaos well before his arrest — a proper ambassador for a place that increasingly seemed to be losing its collective mind.

For reasons by turns entirely, partly and not particularly his fault, New York in the time of Eric Adams has become surreal and dislocating even by the city’s lofty historical standards. Its overlapping crises — mental health, housing, immigration, identity — have collided with enough force to knock the city itself off its bearings, overpowering the head-down-keep-it-moving impulse that has long been our default setting. There is no staring at phones, no overinspecting subway ads, pretending not to see.