An accused mayor, an accused former mayor and the parallels between them

Not long after Eric Adams became mayor of New York in 2022, comparisons to Donald Trump began.

Adams called himself Brooklyn’s Biden, but his style was much more similar to the man President Joe Biden defeated in the 2020 election.

Like Trump, Adams has repeatedly challenged media reports since taking office. “We have to say to our newscasts: Enough, enough, enough,” said Adams, a former police officer and the city’s second black mayor who created his own newsletter to circumvent local media covering him in late 2022.

Both seek to display what Adams calls “cool,” the macho patina of toughness. Both projected the power of law and order as they surrounded themselves with people under their legal scrutiny.

And both insisted they were victims of political efforts to prosecute them for their positions on the issues; The prosecutions, which they insist are real corruption, are not their own actions.

Adams will now test how far he can push Trump’s tactics to stay in office. It remains to be seen whether the political pull that usually comes with an indictment will drag him down. Trump will face a similar test in less than six weeks over whether his criminal travails will prevent him from winning the presidential election, despite broad support within his party.

Trump grew up in New York City’s Queens borough but was nurtured by the political machine’s connections in Brooklyn, where his father, a successful real estate developer, built up to help realize construction projects. Adams came from a different iteration of the Brooklyn machine, comprised of an emerging Black political power base.

In both cases, the two men were shapeshifters. Trump is a Republican-turned-Democrat-turned-independent-turned-Republican who once advocated for universal healthcare and was slow to reject the support of white supremacist David Duke. Adams is a Democrat-turned-Republican who admires Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam who was previously under investigation and promoted anti-Semitism.

Both were avatars of transactional politics; they were willing to assume positions different from those they had previously held; They allowed business elites and political centrists to see themselves as a bulwark against what the elites saw as creeping progressivism.

A Democratic strategist who works in New York politics granted anonymity to speak candidly about the circumstances surrounding both men, sarcastically asking which is more worrisome to their supporters: progressivism or corruption.

On Thursday, Trump inadvertently gave himself a platform regarding the Adams case. The indictment against the mayor was announced shortly before Trump, who has also been convicted of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal and has been indicted on three other counts, was to hold a news conference at Trump Tower.

For Adams, the election to New York City’s highest office (a powerful post that rivals the presidency, often described as the second-toughest job in America) has led to the city becoming the epicenter of the coronavirus and sometimes-breaking Black Lives Matter protests. It happened a year after his arrival. There is an increase in violence and crime rates amid pandemic-related closures.

The Democratic Party was facing candidates who took deeply liberal positions on a variety of issues, especially policing, and Adams was seen as an antidote by centrists, some Republicans and the city’s business interests. It took until the end of his first year in office for the mayor’s image as the new face of the Democratic Party to begin to erode.

Trump left office after his efforts to cling to power resulted in a pro-Trump mob attacking the Capitol. Afterwards, his popularity with the Republican base never waned as much as many in Washington had hoped. Trump being impeached four times in a matter of months in 2023 has only made him politically more powerful within his party.

This week, Trump’s advisers were privately pleased that another public official was facing corruption charges, creating a story about legal troubles that did not involve the former president and giving him the opportunity to argue that the system is corrupt.

That the Justice Department is going after him for political reasons has been a constant refrain from Trump for more than two years. Adams said versions of the same thing and suggested that the investigation’s focus on him was racist.

While there have been some calls for Adams to resign, many Democrats are either looking away or offering muted criticism. It’s not the impassioned defense Trump has received from elected officials in his own party, but it’s still different than the defense that might have been for a scandal-tainted mayor years ago.

One of the most vocal defenses of Adams unsurprisingly came from Trump.

Trump defended Adams at his own news conference Thursday, insisting baselessly that the mayor was impeached for criticizing the Biden administration over the immigration crisis that has strained city services; It was another refrain similar to Trump’s own political messaging. But Trump also acknowledged that he didn’t really know what the mayor was doing and refused to acknowledge reporters’ repeated questions about whether he would pardon the mayor if he returned to the White House.

“I will say this: About a year ago I watched him talk about how illegal immigrants were damaging our city and that the federal government should pay us and we shouldn’t have to take them in,” he said. “So I said, ‘You know what? ‘He will be charged within a year.’ And I was absolutely right, because that’s what we have. I told him he would be blamed for doing this. Look, that’s what they do. These are dirty players. These are bad people. They cheat and do whatever it takes. “These are bad people.”

“I wish him luck,” Trump said.

This article was first published on: New York Times.