Photo: Barry Williams/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Over the past few weeks, former president Donald Trump has gone out of his way to speak about Eric Adams in favorable terms, in comments that have prompted questions and not a lot of answers from the Democratic mayor. Adams, meanwhile, has seemed to pull any rhetorical punches against the Republican nominee.
This strange dance continued when Trump brought up Adams again during his incendiary MAGA rally at Madison Square Garden Sunday, praising the mayor for his recent refusal to deem Trump a “fascist,” which Vice-President Kamala Harris and former members of Trump’s administration have done. “He’s been really great,” he said. “And he said that they shouldn’t be calling Trump a dictator. Because it’s not true. That’s nice. That was nice. Very nice. So we want to thank Mayor Adams. He’s been going through a hard time with these people.”
During a briefing on security for the rally at the Garden, Adams was asked if he believed Trump was a fascist. “My answer is no. I know what Hitler has done, and I know what a fascist regime looks like,” he said.
After Trump’s rally, which was widely condemned over racist and crude remarks made by various speakers, Adams issued a statement calling the rhetoric “completely unacceptable” while notably making no mention of Trump himself. “No matter who says it, hate is hate and there is no place for it in our city. As Americans, we always should stand up against racism, antisemitism, and misogyny,” he said.
Earlier this month, Trump joked about Adams’s pending legal troubles during his remarks at the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in Manhattan, quipping that he’d never met a vegan who liked Turkey so much. But he also seemed sympathetic to Adams, suggesting they were both targeted by the Biden administration. “I’d like to poke some fun at Eric, but I’m going to be nice. I just want to be nice because I know what it’s like to be persecuted by the DoJ for speaking out against open borders,” Trump said. “We were persecuted, Eric. I was persecuted, and so were you, Eric.”
And in late September, following the news that federal prosecutors had indicted the mayor on corruption charges, Trump implied that the indictments stemmed from Adams’s past criticism of the White House over its handling of the migrant crisis. “I watched about a year ago when he talked about how the illegal migrants are hurting our city and the federal government should pay us and we shouldn’t have to take them,” Trump told reporters in Trump Tower. “I said, ‘You know what? He’ll be indicted within a year.’ And I was exactly right because that’s what we have.”
Adams has been asked multiple times whether he’d disavow Trump’s comments about him, but the mayor declined to engage with the subject. “New Yorkers need to hear the issues, and I’m just not going to get back and forth on comments that are made on both sides,” he said last week during his weekly press availability.
Adams has maintained his innocence since the corruption charges against him were unveiled. Though the mayor has yet to go as far as Trump in alleging a grudge from the Biden administration, Adams previously suggested that he was being targeted in a pretaped statement to New Yorkers released ahead of the indictment’s release. “I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would be a target — and a target I became,” he said in the clip.
The mayor often stressed his ties to the national party and previously called himself the “face of the Democratic Party” and the “Biden of Brooklyn” shortly after being elected in 2021. But in recent years, his relationship with the party has come under intense strain after the mayor’s direct criticism of the White House over immigration as well as the investigations swirling throughout his administration. Adams did go to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but he was not given a speaker slot. The mayor downplayed the snub, saying, “This is not the Eric show.” The New York Post issued a report floating the idea that Adams could be open to a potential legal reprieve from a future President Trump, citing unnamed sources in his camp. In the past, Trump has shown an openness for pardoning Democratic politicians accused of wrongdoing, including former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich and former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who had their prison sentences commuted during his tenure.
Still, Adams has said he supports Kamala Harris, not Trump, in the presidential race. “I’ve made clear who I’m supporting, and I’m focused on that,” he said. He chalked up questions about Trump’s comments to the waning days of the political calendar. “This is the season when the silliness comes into politics,” he said.
