New York
Overtures to Trump Put Mayor Adams on a Political Tightrope
When Mayor Eric Adams descended into Palm Beach Thursday night to meet with President-elect Donald J. Trump, he said he just wanted to advance New York City’s interests.
But the context was impossible to ignore: Mr. Adams, facing a federal corruption trial in April and the possibility of prison time, was going to visit the one person in the United States who was capable of pardoning him and who had indicated a potential interest in doing so.
The taxpayer-funded journey to Florida came with substantial political intrigue. For Mr. Trump, a Republican, the meeting could give him leverage in New York City, a place that is typically hostile to him and his party. For the mayor, a Democrat, the visit carried more peril.
Mr. Adams’s poll numbers are in the tank. He is facing several credible primary challengers. And his overtures to Mr. Trump risk damaging whatever hopes the mayor still has of winning a second term in City Hall this year.
“The politics are clearly unhelpful,” said Howard Wolfson, a political strategist for Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor. “But the politics are not driving the trip. The politics are clearly subsidiary to the desire to stay out of jail.”
In effect, Mr. Adams is stymied by an apparent conflict of interest that voters have no easy to way to disentangle.
In September, Mr. Adams was indicted on five federal charges of corruption, including bribery, wire fraud and solicitation of contributions from foreign nationals. He pleaded not guilty and has consistently argued, without evidence, that he is the victim of a Biden administration conspiracy to punish him for criticizing the outgoing president’s immigration policies.
In recent weeks, a federal grand jury has heard additional evidence against him, which could signal new charges are coming.
He is scheduled to go on trial in April, just weeks before the Democratic primary for mayor. If a jury finds Mr. Adams guilty, he faces prison time. In 2021, the City Council overwhelmingly passed a law that bars anyone with a felony conviction for public corruption from holding office. The law is being challenged in court.
This fall, Mr. Trump, who was convicted of 34 felonies in May, indicated he felt a kinship with Mr. Adams: “We were persecuted, Eric,” Mr. Trump said at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner.
Starting on Monday, after he is sworn in, Mr. Trump will have the power to pardon the mayor. Mr. Adams has said he may even attend the inaugural festivities in Washington, though his team had not confirmed any plans to travel.
New York City and its 8.3 million residents also have a lot at stake. The federal government sends billions of dollars to New York City every year for education, housing, child care and hospitals. More than 400,000 undocumented immigrants call the city home. As the mayor of America’s largest metropolis, Mr. Adams has a natural interest in developing a working relationship with the man poised to govern the nation.
In a statement Friday evening, Mr. Adams said he and the president-elect had discussed issues of importance to New Yorkers, including manufacturing jobs in the Bronx and the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas.
“To be clear, we did not discuss my legal case, and those who suggest the mayor of the largest city in the nation shouldn’t meet with the incoming president to discuss our city’s priorities because of inaccurate speculation or because we’re from different parties clearly care more about politics than people,” Mr. Adams said.
The political problem for the mayor is that voters have no way of knowing if he is in Palm Beach to advocate for the city or for himself, said Basil Smikle, a professor at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies and a Democratic political strategist.
No city officials traveled with Mr. Adams. Voters, Mr. Smikle continued, might reasonably ask: “What did he promise to Donald Trump to get pardoned? Did he sell the city out politically or policy wise?”
There was little political risk for Mr. Trump in the meeting. Following an election in which he made some of his biggest gains among Black and Latino voters, a prominent Black ally like Mr. Adams could help bolster the president-elect’s support in communities where he still remains broadly unpopular.
There could, however, be some risk in giving Mr. Adams a pardon. The mayor’s political fortunes seem troubled regardless of whether Mr. Trump intervenes, and his popularity in New York City may not be strong enough for Mr. Trump to benefit from helping him.
Some of Mr. Trump’s Republican supporters are upset by the nature of the corruption charges against Mr. Adams, and as the president-elect prepares to grant pardons to an untold number of his supporters who participated in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, giving one to Mr. Adams may be a bridge too far.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But advisers to the president-elect have previously said they see Mr. Adams’s situation as reinforcing Mr. Trump’s own narrative that he was a victim of the so-called deep state.
Mr. Trump has also never stopped being fixated on his hometown. And he has not always made conventional political choices.
Some New York City voters are unlikely to look kindly upon a trip to visit Mr. Trump in Florida that was only added to the mayor’s public schedule after The New York Times reported that it was happening. The mayor’s opponents quickly cast it as an obvious act of obeisance that could be damaging to Mr. Adams’s political brand.
When he was elected, Mr. Adams frequently referred to his own “swagger,” a characteristic that he said would help propel New York out of the pandemic’s doldrums. With his taste for nightlife, he sought to send the message that his town was back because he was in charge.
A short flight to Florida could undermine that.
“No New Yorker wants to see their mayor kiss the ring,” Mr. Smikle said. “We’re not that kind of city. We’re the greatest city in the world. People come to us. We don’t go to them. If you’re going down to Mar a Lago to kiss the ring, what happened to that swagger that you talked about?”
Even with record low poll numbers, Mr. Adams still has support among his base of Black voters, some of whom question whether he is being treated fairly by federal prosecutors. A New York Times/Siena College poll in late October found that while only 26 percent of New York City voters approved of the mayor’s job performance, that number rose to 41 percent among Black voters.
An adviser to the mayor argued that a pardon would not necessarily prove to be Mr. Adams’s political death knell, provided it occurred relatively quickly, and that Mr. Adams could spend the months before the primary reminding voters why they elected him the first time.
Even if Mr. Adams were to lose some voters because of their distaste for Mr. Trump, the adviser said, he stood to pick up votes from the Latino, Asian and Orthodox Jewish communities, where Mr. Trump has some support.
If Mr. Adams is putting his status as the Democratic mayor of New York City at risk, he has other options.
For a period of time in the 1990s, Mr. Adams was a registered Republican. He could theoretically run as a Republican again. But there is no guarantee he would win in a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by six to one. Some New York Republicans have thrown cold water on the idea that they would welcome Mr. Adams into their fold, and he has maintained that he will run for re-election as a Democrat.
Still, like most things in modern Republican politics, Mr. Trump could single-handedly scramble those positions.
Mr. Adams could also abandon the mayoralty altogether and chart a new political destiny for himself as a Black MAGA Republican.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, a prominent ally of the mayor’s who has stood by him despite his indictment and a flurry of resignations from his administration, recently warned Mr. Adams, in an interview with Politico, that a pardon could seriously damage his political career.
Before Mr. Adams met with Mr. Trump, he had a text exchange with Mr. Sharpton, the reverend said. Mr. Sharpton said he warned the mayor that Mr. Trump would try to manipulate him for his own purposes.
“I told him I’m concerned that he could misuse you to cover some of his biased policies,” Mr. Sharpton said.
“With his base, he could explain a lot of things,” Mr. Sharpton continued, referring to Mr. Adams. “What he can’t control is what Trump is going to do. And if he’s identified with that, how do you disassociate with that?”
Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.
New York
Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein
Film
‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937), directed by Leo McCarey
The log line: After the bank forecloses on their home, an elderly couple must separate, each living with a different one of their adult children.
The pitch: “It’s a film that Orson Welles famously said ‘would make a stone cry,’” says Sachs, 60, about McCarey’s movie, singling out a long sequence at the end that depicts “a date through certain lobbies and bars of New York City that offers a snapshot of Midtown in the ’30s.”
‘The World of Henry Orient’ (1964), directed by George Roy Hill
The log line: A wily 14-year-old girl and her best friend follow a ridiculous concert pianist, on whom they have a crush, around the city.
The pitch: Hill’s 1960s romp inspired Sachs’s film “Little Men” (2016), which is about boys around the same age as these protagonists. “It’s an extraordinarily sweet film that also seems, to me, very honest,” he says.
‘Coming Apart’ (1969), directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg
The log line: Rip Torn plays an obsessive psychiatrist who secretly films all the women passing through his home office, inadvertently capturing his own mental breakdown.
The pitch: Shot in one room with a fixed camera, Ginsberg’s film “really feels of a time,” says Sachs. It’s also “very sexual and very free,” reminding him of what’s possible when it comes to making movies.
‘Deadly Hero’ (1975), directed by Ivan Nagy
The log line: A disturbed, racist cop saves a cellist from a crook, only to become her tormentor.
The pitch: Harry, 80, and Stein, 76, were extras in Nagy’s film, which stars Don Murray, Diahn Williams and James Earl Jones as the cop, the cellist and the crook, respectively. The pair call the movie “[expletive] weird,” but also say that their day rate — $300 — “was the most money we’d ever made on anything” up to that point.
‘News From Home’ (1976), directed by Chantal Akerman
The log line: An experimental documentary by Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who moved to New York in her early 20s, the film features long takes of the city and voice-over in which the director reads letters from her mother.
The pitch: “I’m intrigued by how beauty contains sadness in the city,” says Sachs. Not only is her film a “beautiful record of the city” but it captures “what it is to be alone here, to have left some sort of community and, in particular for Chantal, separated from her mother.”
‘Wolfen’ (1981), directed by Michael Wadleigh
The log line: Albert Finney stars as a former N.Y.P.D. detective who returns to the job to solve a violent and bizarre string of murders.
The pitch: Wadleigh’s film is not only a vehicle for Finney, says Stein, it also “has a lot of footage from the South Bronx when it was still completely destroyed” by widespread arson in the 1970s.
‘Losing Ground’ (1982), directed by Kathleen Collins
The log line: Collins’s film — the first feature-length drama for a major studio directed by an African American woman — observes a rocky relationship between a college professor and her painter husband.
The pitch: Sachs calls “Losing Ground” “a revelation.” The characters are “so human and fascinating and extremely modern,” he says, adding that he loves a movie that “exists in some very complete version of the local.”
‘After Hours’ (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese
The log line: In Scorsese’s black comedy, an office worker (Griffin Dunne) has a surreal and bizarre evening of misadventure while trying to get back uptown from a woman’s apartment in SoHo.
The pitch: Harry and Stein recommend this zany tale and borderline “nightmare” for the way it captures a bygone era of New York. “It’s this great image of [Lower Manhattan] when it was still raw, you know, Wild West territory,” Stein says.
‘Downtown 81’ (shot in 1980-81, released in 2000), directed by Edo Bertoglio
The log line: Bertoglio’s film is a striking portrait of a young artist who needs to raise money so he can return to the apartment from which he’s been evicted.
The pitch: Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as the artist in this snapshot of life in New York during the ’80s. Despite all the drama surrounding it — postproduction wasn’t completed until 20 years after filming, and for many years the movie was considered lost — the film is notable, says Stein, because “it’s got all the characters and all our buddies in it.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
More in Film
See the rest of the issue
Theater
Quincy Tyler Bernstine
A master of active stillness, the 52-year-old Bernstine (imposing in the 2024 revival of John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” above) has that great actorly gift of making thought visible. A natural leader onstage, she compels audiences to follow her.
Victoria Clark
One of the theater’s best singing actors, with Tonys for Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s “The Light in the Piazza” (2005) and David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s “Kimberly Akimbo” (above, 2022), Clark, 66, performs not on top of the notes but through them, delivering complicated characterization and gorgeous sound in each breath.
Susannah Flood
Flood, 43, is a true expert at confusion, a good thing because she often plays characters like the twisted-in-knots Lizzie in Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” (above, 2025). What makes that confusion thrilling is how she grounds it not in a lack of information or purpose but, just like real life, in an excess of both.
Jonathan Groff
The rare musical theater man with the unstoppable drive of a diva, Groff, 41, sweats charisma, as audience members in ringside seats at Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s Broadway musical “Just in Time” (above, 2025) recently discovered. Giving you everything, he makes you want more.
William Jackson Harper
Unmoored characters are often unsympathetic. But whether playing a confused doctor in the 2024 revival of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” or a delusional bookstore clerk in Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust” (above, 2023), Harper, 46, makes vulnerability look easy, and hurt hard.
Joshua Henry
There are singers who blow the roof off theaters, but the 41-year-old Henry’s voice is so huge and deeply connected to universal feelings that he seems to be singing inside you. Currently starring in the Broadway revival of “Ragtime” (above, by Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Terrence McNally), he blows the roof off your head.
Mia Katigbak
Superb and acidic in almost any role — in distress (Annie Baker’s 2023 “Infinite Life,” above) or in command (2024’s “Uncle Vanya”) — Katigbak, 71, finds the sweet spot in even the sourest truths of the human condition.
Judy Kuhn
With detailed intelligence and specific intention informing everything she sings, Kuhn, 67, is (among other things) a Stephen Sondheim specialist — her take on Fosca in “Passion” (above, 2012) was almost literally wrenching. It requires intellectual stamina to keep up with the master word for word.
Laurie Metcalf
The fierce, sharp persona you may know from her years on “Roseanne” (1988-97) is about a tenth of the blistering commitment Metcalf, 70, offers onstage in works like Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road” (above, 2025). She goes there, no matter the destination.
Deirdre O’Connell
For 40 years an Off Broadway treasure, O’Connell, 72, handles the most daring, out-there material — including, recently, a 12-minute monologue of cataclysmic gibberish in Caryl Churchill’s “Kill” (above, 2025) — as if it were as ordinary as barroom gossip.
Conrad Ricamora
Revealing the Buddy Holly in Benigno Aquino Jr. (in the 2023 Broadway production of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love”) or the queer wolf in Abraham Lincoln (in Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” above, last year), Ricamora, 47, is uniquely capable of great dignity and great silliness — and, wonderfully, both together.
Andrew Scott
It’s a tough competition, but Scott, 49, may have the thinnest skin of any actor. Whether he’s onstage (playing all the characters in Simon Stephens’s Off Broadway “Vanya,” above, in 2025) or on film, every emotion — especially rue — reads right through his translucence.
Michael Patrick Thornton
Some actors are hedgehogs, projecting one idea blazingly. Thornton, 47, is a fox, carefully hoarding ideas and motivations. Keeping you guessing as Jessica Chastain’s benefactor in the 2023 revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” or as a pathetic lackey in last year’s production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (above, center), he holds you in his thrall.
More in Theater
See the rest of the issue
How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Here’s one way to make New York more affordable: triple your income. After moving from Baton Rouge, La., in 2016 to attend graduate school, Daniel Babin lived mostly on red beans and rice or homemade “slop pots,” renting rooms in what he called a “cult house” and a building on a block his girlfriend was afraid to visit.
Then, in January, he got a job as a geologist with a mineral exploration company, with a salary of $200,000, plus a $15,000 signing bonus. A new city suddenly opened up to him. “I can take a woman out on a $300 dinner date and not look at the check and not feel bad about it,” he said. He also now has health insurance.
Mr. Babin, 32, a marine geologist who also leads an acoustic string band, now navigates two economic worlds, one shaped to his postdoctoral income of $70,000 a year — when his idea of a date was a walk in Central Park — and the other reflecting his new income. In this world, he is shopping for a vintage Martin Dreadnought guitar, for which he will gladly drop $4,000.
Finding a New Base Line
On a recent morning at Mr. Babin’s home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he shares a 6,800-square-foot cohousing space with 17 roommates, he was still figuring out how to manage this split.
“I’m feeling less inclined to just let it rip than I was a few months ago,” he said of his spending habits. He socks away $1,500 from each paycheck, and has not moved to replace his 2003 Toyota Corolla, an “absolute dump” given to him by his father. “Hopefully, I’m returning a little bit to some kind of base-line lifestyle that I’ve established for myself over the last five years,” he continued. “Because the fear is lifestyle inflation. You don’t want to just make more money to spend more money. That’s not the point, right?”
Lightning Lofts, the cohousing space where Mr. Babin has lived since January 2024, bills itself as part of a “social wellness movement” and seeks to continue the ethos of Burning Man, the annual communal art and cultural festival in the Nevada desert.
For a room with an elevated loft bed and use of common areas, Mr. Babin pays $1,400 a month in rent, plus another $250 for utilities and weekly housecleaning.
He was first drawn to the organization through its events, including open mic “salons” where he played music or read from his science fiction writings. These were free or very cheap nights out, unpredictable and fascinating.
“You would see dance and tonal singing, and some dude wrote an algorithm that can auto-generate A.I. video based on what you’re saying — beautiful storytelling,” he said.
“So I just showed up every month, basically, until they let me live here.”
The room was a good deal. He had looked at a nearby building where the rent was $1,900 for a room in a basement apartment that flooded once a month. “Ridiculous,” he said.
But beyond its financial appeal, Mr. Babin liked the loft’s social life. “I used to be chronically lonely, and I just don’t feel lonely anymore,” he said. “Which is fantastic in a crazy place like New York. It’s so alive and it’s so isolating at the same time.”
Splurging on Ski Trips
Before Mr. Babin got his new job, he used to go to restaurants with friends and not eat, trying to save up $35 for a “burner” party — in the spirit of Burning Man — or Ecstatic Dance, a recurring substance-free dance party. He loved to ski but could not afford a hotel, so he would carry his old skis and beat-up boots to southern Vermont and back on the same day.
“Going on a hike is a pretty cheap hobby,” he said, recalling his money-saving measures. “Living without health insurance is a good one.”
He still appreciates a good hike, he said. But on a recent ski trip, he splurged on new $700 boots and another $300 worth of gear. “I’m like, this is something I’ve wanted for 10 years, so I deserve it,” he said.
He bought a $600 drone to take pictures for his social media accounts, and then promptly crashed it into the Caribbean (he’s now replacing the rotors in hopes of returning it to health).
He cut out the red beans and rice, he said, but his usual meal is still a modest $13 sandwich from the nearby bodega or $10 for pizza. “If I’m getting takeout and it’s less than $17, I don’t feel too bad about it,” he said.
A Future After Cohousing
A big change is that dating is much more comfortable now, and he feels more attractive as a marriage prospect. “It turns out that a lot more people pay attention to you if you offer them dinner instead of a walk in the park,” he said.
He is now thinking of leaving the cohousing space — not just because he can afford to, but because his work has kept him from joining house events, like the regular potluck dinners. “I sometimes feel like a bad roommate, because part of being here is participating,” he said. “I feel like there might be someone who would enjoy the community aspect more than I’m capable of contributing right now.”
He sounds almost wistful in discussing his former economizing. If it weren’t for the dating issue, he said, he would not need the higher income or lifestyle upgrades. “I never really felt like I was compromising on what I wanted to do,” he said.
He paused. “It’s just that what I was comfortable with has changed a little bit.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
-
New Hampshire1 minute ago‘Not cosmetic’: NH lawmaker wants state to cover GLP-1 drugs for weight loss – Concord Monitor
-
New Jersey7 minutes agoThe Maple House Is Planning To Open In Two Locations In New Jersey This Year
-
New Mexico13 minutes agoASU baseball to host New Mexico State, Baylor
-
North Carolina19 minutes agoThree Underrated UNC Football Seniors To Watch in 2026
-
North Dakota25 minutes agoFinley, North Dakota without water after watermain leak.
-
Ohio31 minutes agoBonnie Sue Reed-Tilton-Hetzel, East Liverpool, Ohio
-
Oklahoma37 minutes agoIowa State wrestling adds Brayden Thompson from transfer portal
-
Oregon43 minutes agoOregon Ducks Recruiting Target Darius Johnson Announces Finalists