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.

A New York City bus driver missed a turn and crashed through a low stone wall near an overpass on Friday morning, bringing the vehicle to a stop with its front end hanging over the road below, the police said. There were no injuries.

A Fire Department spokesman said the driver had been the sole occupant.

At about 8:40 a.m., the driver of the BxM1 bus, an express commuter bus that travels between Riverdale, in the Bronx, and Midtown Manhattan, missed a turn at Independence Avenue and Kappock Street in the Spuyten Duyvil section of the Bronx. He lost control of the vehicle, which “skidded over the stone wall,” the police said. “The front portion of the bus is hanging over the road.”

The bus was traveling southbound on the west service road of the Henry Hudson Parkway, which connects the Bronx and Manhattan, the police said. Rubble from the damaged wall tumbled onto the road below the overpass, photographs from local media sites showed.

Firefighters and emergency law enforcement personnel responded to the scene, which caused a stir on a local social media site.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates public transit in New York City, rerouted buses along the route.

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll find out about restaurants that use robotic systems to make the dishes they serve. We’ll also get details on the settlement between former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the two Georgia election workers he defamed.

“Do you want to tip the robot?” my colleague Julie Creswell asked.

We were ordering salads on a touch pad at the Sweetgreen near Madison Square Garden. I had asked her to go to lunch there because she had written about restaurants that are experimenting with automation. That Sweetgreen location has been outfitted with an assembly-line-style conveyor belt and a computer-controlled system that puts the ingredients in the bowls.

Most of the ingredients, anyway. The system would mash the avocado and maul the salmon in our orders, and we ordered the miso sesame ginger dressing on the side, so workers behind the counter put the containers of dressing in after our bowls came off the conveyor belt. It had stopped beneath refrigerator-door-size units labeled “greens,” “grains,” “roasted,” “veggies,” “proteins” and “sauces.”

At each stop, ingredients dropped into the bowls — or not, if an order did not call for anything that could be dispensed there. For all the seeming uniformity of the assembly line, the units above the conveyor belt are not all alike: The last two have fans to keep the temperature down. Behind the “roasted” and “veggie” doors, there’s a heat-lamp glow.

The Sweetgreen location does not have robots with arms that can swing wide, like the ones that weld cars in automobile plants. Kernel — started by Steve Ells, who founded Chipotle in the 1990s — does, and discovered the hard way that the robot revolution has hiccups to smooth out. Ells shut down Kernel’s two Manhattan locations last month “to go to version 2.0.” The overhaul probably won’t be completed before March.

Sweetgreen’s system, called the Infinite Kitchen, harnesses automation for basic repetitive actions, like dropping the ingredients into the bowl. “Where preparation is repetitive, technology and automation are great,” Andrew Rigie, the executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, an industry group.

Restaurant robots hold the potential to reduce labor costs over time, reshaping the work force. A study of “automatable work” in New York by the Center for an Urban Future several years ago found that 84 percent of the work done by restaurant cooks could be automated. “We’re going to continue to see more and more restaurants adopt automation in their operations,” Rigie said, “but we’re a far ways off from the Jetsons.”

One reason is that automated systems are expensive. Sweetgreen expects to spend as much as $550,000 on automation in each restaurant with automation that it opens this year. It is focusing on new locations because it’s not easy to retrofit a restaurant, squeezing bulky machinery into the tight spaces in a kitchen. Sweetgreen took seven weeks to overhaul the location near Madison Square Garden with the system that made our lunches.

Employees there still cook mainstays like chicken and brussels sprouts. They also slice vegetables. They feed those ingredients into the containers in the units above the conveyor belt. The system had to be modified to rotate the salad bowls as they go down the line so that the individual ingredients would land in different parts of the bowl, avoiding what Julie called “a lava-like overflow.” Sweetgreen also had to work out how to slice hard-boiled eggs automatically — and how much kale the system could handle. (Occasionally, some varieties get stuck.)

Sweetgreen says its automated systems can turn out churn out 500 bowls in an hour, compared with a top human speed of about 300. It also says that locations using the Infinite Kitchen system are considerably more profitable than the average: One in Naperville, Ill., has a profit margin of more than 31 percent, well above the 20.7 percent average for the chain.

As for our lunches, I let Julie do the ordering. She bypassed the choices on the board behind the counter and created one of her own, choosing spring mix, baby spinach, roasted sweet potatoes, cucumbers, avocado and miso glazed salmon, with miso sesame ginger dressing.

All but the last three went into the bowls on the conveyor belt. “They still have to have some intervention,” Julie said as a worker behind the counter put the avocados, the salmon and the dressings (in little cups) in our bowls.

The tablet we used to place the order said our salads would be ready in three to five minutes. My name was called about 6 minutes 30 seconds after Julie turned on the stopwatch function on her cellphone.

And the tip? I tapped the $2 option on the tablet — not enough, I now realize. I trust that the money will go to the person who put the avocado and salmon into the bowl.

Weather

Today will be sunny and breezy, with a high near 39. Tonight, clouds increase, and the temperature holds steady around 36.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Monday (Martin Luther King’s Birthday).

The latest New York news

It seems that Rudolph Giuliani will not have to give up his 10-room apartment on the Upper East Side, his Mercedes-Benz convertible or his signed Joe DiMaggio jersey.

He reached a settlement on Thursday with two Georgia election workers he had defamed. They stand to receive compensation — neither side said how much, and Giuliani, who had said the case had drained his financial resources, did not say where he would get any money to pay them. He also promised never to defame them again.

“The past four years have been a living nightmare,” the women said in a statement. “We have fought to clear our names, restore our reputations and prove that we did nothing wrong. With the settlement agreement, they said, “We can now move forward with our lives.”

Until Thursday, it had appeared that Giuliani’s baseless claims about the workers would cost him millions of dollars in assets. He had been found liable for defaming the two women, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss; he said repeatedly that they had manipulated ballots in an effort to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump. A jury awarded Freeman and Moss $148 million in late 2023. Giuliani filed for bankruptcy and, after missing several deadlines to turn over his assets, was held in contempt of court earlier this month.

Joseph Cammarata, a lawyer for Giuliani, said that his client was satisfied with the outcome. But he declined to discuss the status of sanctions that Giuliani faced for being found in contempt in two courts tied to the defamation case.

The settlement came after a dramatic day in court in Manhattan. Giuliani had been expected to take the stand to plead for the right to keep an apartment in Florida and three World Series rings from the Yankees. But he never showed up.

His son, Andrew Giuliani, had also been expected to take the witness stand to say that the three rings should not be seized because the former mayor had given them to him. After the settlement was announced, Andrew Giuliani said that he was keeping the rings.

Dear Diary:

I’ve taken the A to work for 20 years. And for 20 years, I’ve done puzzles on the train during the ride.

I didn’t think there could be any more firsts for me on my commute after so long until a recent morning.

As I sat there working on a Sudoku puzzle, a man stood over me telling me where to put the numbers.

At first, I was inclined to tell him he was out of line. Instead, I complimented him on his ability to read backward, and we did the Sudoku together until he got off the train.

— Sandra Feldman