Eric Adams is the Most Unintentionally Hilarious Politician

This indictment has cemented his status.

Oct 07, 2024

Big Business Saw an Ally in Eric Adams, and Overlooked His Issues - The New York Times

“New York, this is a place where everyday you wake up, you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center to a person who’s celebrating a new business that’s open.”
—Eric Adams, Mayor of New York City

Over the last several years, I have made a concerted editorial effort to make This is a Newsletter! a less politically-oriented feed, for both my fragile mental state and for the well-being of my readers. Unfortunately, I have succumbed to my worst impulses by covering the first and second assassination attempts on Donald Trump, these god-awful presidential debates, the abject weirdness of J.D. Vance, and, more recently, the increasing horniness of American politics. Now, if I were as self-serious as many other political bloggers on this platform, I could dive into the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah and how it is a prelude to a probable full-scale Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon or the apocalyptic flooding in North Carolina. Those developments are a bit heady for my pay grade, and my general assessment of those situations is basically: Capitalism is fucked and liberal democracy is failing. Instead, I want to discuss America’s Mayor, Eric Adams, and how he was caught accepting bribes in the form of airline tickets, which are notoriously difficult for law enforcement to trace. This is the type of uniquely stupid scandal that could only afflict American politics, which is catnip for my diseased and deteriorating brain.

Say what you want about Eric Adams… No, seriously, say whatever you want because it’s probably accurate. He looks like someone who takes chemo for fun and acts like someone who’s been struck by lightning at least twice. For all that he talks about the lawlessness and dysfunction of the city he governs—and he talks about it a lot, and in the familiar Death Wish 3 dudgeon of New York tabloids and sometimes in more psychedelic and dreamlike tones—there is a deeper corrosiveness inherent to the sense that he thought he would never get caught for fraud. If his first term as mayor of New York reflects a bleak new understanding of governance as pure reflective spectacle, this scandal unfolded in a way that seems like he convinced himself that if he offered to pay $900 for a flight from NYC to Burbank with a layover in Ankara, it would somehow look less suspicious than if he had received those flights for free.

This is some Burn After Reading shit on its face, but the New York Times ran a story about two of his staffers getting married shortly after news of this backroom scuzz broke. This slapdash maneuver is similar to the conceit of the film Double Jeopardy, in that the idea of spousal privilege is a get-out-of-prosecution card, which is something every stupid person believes is a way to circumvent consequences for their criminality.

At a wedding in Martha’s Vineyard, key players in City Hall sought refuge this weekend from the several Federal investigations plaguing mayor Eric Adams’s Administration. A day after Mr. Adams pleaded not guilty to criminal charges including bribery and fraud, Sheena Wright, Mr. Adams first Deputy Mayor, and David C. Banks, the school’s chancellor, married on the island in Massachusetts, according to three people familiar with their plans. The marriage was said to have been planned for some time, and it followed a years-long relationship during which they shared to home. But it might also allow Mr. Banks and Ms. Wright to claim spousal privilege, which gives them the right to decline to testify against each other in court should that become necessary, the legal experts said.

All of his staffers have texts that basically say, When does my bribe get here? Delete this by the way.

A damning factor here is that, while Eric Adams really does seem happy to be Eric Adams, he also tells a lot of strange lies. Some of these dishonesties are more consequential than others—ranging from familiar governmental graft to a weird picayune and longstanding insistence that he lives “a plant-based centered life.” When the FBI asked one of his staffers about the investigation surrounding her boss, she excused herself to go to the bathroom and promptly deleted all the text exchanges. It is unclear how much of this desperate gambit reflects the heedless headlong improvisations of a sloppy and heroically self-absorbed person. Adams was a cop for 22 years, and the NYPD probably works with federal law enforcement more than any other police department in America, and he and his staff thought that deleting texts off your phone would make them disappear forever. If they all resorted to shoving their phones up their asses, at least the agent responsible for recovering the data would see poop all over their phones and wouldn’t want to deal with it. It’s like spousal privilege—once contraband is shoved up your ass and covered in your feces, it becomes rectal privilege.

A great deal of the friction between the man and his job clearly comes down to his frustration with having to do so much mayor stuff and not being permitted to do enough Eric Adams stuff, like hyping his constituents by filming himself talking about buying fruit while not actually buying fruit. Adams is a vibes guy, and if those vibes are strange, it’s because he lives in whatever office he works out of as a matter of course, never goes to sleep, drives on the sidewalk, instantly and almost instinctually got into cryptocurrency, referred to Yankee Stadium as “Yankee Park,” tells weird lies about being a skateboarder, puts sweet potatoes in pasta, and has haters who eventually became waiters as he dines at the table of success. “Between 2018 and 2021,” Ian Parker wrote in a sprawling New Yorker feature story, “Adams appeared on dozens of podcasts with names such as ‘Plantstrong’ and ‘Spiritual Shit.’”

Even by the standards of the high-voltage riffage that became his normal mode of communication, Adams is pledging to fight these unjust and spurious charges while his lawyers are advancing a fairly novel defense.

From Gothamist:

In Monday’s filing, Adams’ lawyers mocked federal prosecutors for doing a “makeover” of a previous investigation that was limited by the Supreme Court’s ruling in June, which allows government officials to accept gratuities for past acts. Gratuities are defined as gifts given to thank an official — but not directly in exchange for their help — or to “curry favor” without any specific request.
“Gratuities are not federal crimes,” Spiro told reporters on Monday. “Courtesies to politicians are not federal crimes. They do not violate federal rule. Congressmen get upgrades. They get corner suites, they get better tables at restaurants, they get free appetizers. They have their iced tea filled up. That’s just what happens.”

Getting iced tea refills should only win you favor at Cracker and Barrel. That’s like having a “special deal” with Olive Garden that exchanges bottomless breadsticks for corporate tax breaks. Taking the dubious gratuities are not crimes rationale at face value, this specific graft is still reflective of some penny-smart-dollar-dumb thinking. If he was taking layovers in Turkey every time he flew, Adams missed the opportunity to at least get hair plugs out of the arrangement. Knowing Eric Adams, he’d return to New York City with a full head of hair and say, This is what happens when you cut sugar out of your diet.

If Adams is not alone in the debauched community of messianic-but-mid American politicians, his performance of that vanity is both triumphant and sour, mayoral in its form and tone and tragicomic thwartedness. It is also exemplary in how effortlessly extra and involuted this scandal is. Of all the weirdo mayors currently gripping and grinning and laughing at inappropriate times, Adams is especially triumphal and paranoid, grandiose and petty, transparently consumed by feuds and resentments while outwardly being too blessed to be stressed. Another element of this cartoonish corruption is the idea that these charges are a form of “lawfare” directed at the New York mayor for his support for Israel—unlike anyone else in the Democratic Party—and because he has spoken about how illegal migrants are hurting New York City. Aside from his hamfisted Turkish bribery scheme, the biggest charge Adams is facing is defrauding New York City’s matching funds program to receive more than $10 million in taxpayer dollars.

From the unsealed indictment:

Eric Adams, the defendant, compounded his gains from the straw contributions by using them to defraud New York City and steal public funds. New York City has a matching funds program that matches small-dollar contributions from individual City residents with up to eight times their amounts in public funds to give New Yorkers a greater voice in the election. Adams’s campaign applied for matching funds based on known straw donations, fraudulently obtaining as much as $2,000 in public funds for each illegal contribution. Adams and those working at his direction falsely certified compliance with applicable campaign finance regulations despite Adams’s repeated acceptance of straw donations relying on the concealed nature of these illegal contributions and falsely portraying his campaign as law-abiding. As a result of those false contributions, Adams’s 2021 mayoral campaign received more than $10 million in public funds.

For a while, Adams talked about himself as the future of Democratic politics. But he is just an ultra-vain ex-cop who fetishizes deference and discipline and seems to have no actual beliefs beyond a strange, harsh devotion to a highly aestheticized hierarchy of both authority and personal worth. This hasn’t stopped his legal team from throwing out the term “lawfare,” which now refers to any time anyone gets arrested. I assume any person using the word “lawfare” is most certainly guilty.

His statement that was basically, “I knew they’d come after me for loving NYC too hard” sounds like what someone would say after killing their wife.

Next up from the unsealed indictment:

Because Turkish Airlines provided free travel benefits worth tens of thousands of dollars to Eric Adams, the defendant, he flew Turkish Airline even when doing so was otherwise inconvenient. For example, during the July in August 2017 trip, Adams’s partner was surprised to learn that Adams was in Turkey when she had understood him to be flying from New York to France. Adams responded in a text message, “Transferring here. You know first stop is always Istanbul. When Adam’s partner later inquired about planning a trip to Easter Island, Chile, Adams repeatedly asked whether her whether Turkish Airline could be used for their flights, requiring her to call Turkish Airline to confirm that they did not have routes between New York and Chile.

Eric Adams is a man who believes he was divinely ordained to hold the awful job of New York City mayor. Assuming he was convinced he’d win a second term, he would also figure that, for eight years and despite his flight logs being a matter of public record, no one would notice all the Turkish airline tickets falling out of his pockets every time he gives a press conference.