Mayor Eric Adams won his office four years ago promising to protect New Yorkers from chaos and calamities—a former law enforcement officer trusted to manage a defiantly disorderly city.

It hasn’t happened that way.

Through nearly 100 interviews with aides, allies, and adversaries from Adams’s life and career, The Times Magazine discovered a mayor and a city unhinged, their destinies intertwined irrespective of what the residents desire. Long before his indictment for federal corruption charges, Adams became the symbol of New York’s daily chaos—a volatile leader mirroring and contributing to the turbulent times.

His chosen way out of his personal crisis, many of which have been previously unreported, entailed forming a close bond with a new president who is opposed by most of Adams’s constituents—while presenting those constituents as human collateral to the Trump White House, as federal prosecutors claim.

Here are five insights from our report:

Adams (and Trump) have played the long game

President Trump and Adams, both hailing from Queens, seemed to instantly understand each other. In October, before the presidential election, Trump privately embraced Adams at a charity dinner. Adams’s close friend, former Gov. David Paterson, observed that Adams was quiet for the remainder of the evening. “It was as if he was contemplating it,” Paterson remarked. “As if thinking, ‘Is this possible? Boy.’”

Trump encouraged Adams to “stick in there” before suggesting publicly that both men were being pursued by the Biden Justice Department. Adams, a Democrat who had criticized Trump’s behavior as president, has since remained silent about him. By January, he was traveling to Florida to dine with Trump before the inauguration. Thus, Trump gained a useful ally in his hometown: a mayor striving to maintain both his office and freedom.

Adams is a political shape-shifter

Adams has always been an adaptable politician, comfortably switching between the two major parties with the changing wind directions. He switched from being a Democrat to a Republican in the 90s, then back to a Democrat. He even contemplated running as a Republican in 2021 and considered it again in 2025.

In an interview, Tucker Carlson suggested Adams had previously been “intimidated into supporting things he doesn’t believe in,” and stated he and the mayor “have a lot of gut-level agreements.” Adams considered attending Trump’s October campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, according to Carlson, before ultimately deciding against it.

“Eric always was more right-leaning,” Reverend Al Sharpton commented. “He wasn’t one of us.”

The migrant crisis was Adams’s first significant test as mayor, significantly impacting his relationship with two presidents. “Joe Biden is trying to hang me out to dry,” the mayor said during a meeting with members of Congress at City Hall in 2023, as per an attendee. By 2025, the Trump administration, which sought to dismiss Adams’s corruption charges, contended that the mayor needed unrestricted freedom to assist the new White House’s deportation efforts.

But Adams’s views on immigration are more complex than is widely understood. He has personally welcomed asylum seekers upon arrival in New York and slept on a cot in a tent shelter. He also foretold, before his indictment, that the issue would “destroy” the city, amplifying fears about migrants committing both minor and violent crimes.

Adams is often loyal to a fault

“I’m going to make sure my people are taken care of,” Adams privately said shortly after winning the primary, noting that the white mayors before him did the same.

Consequently, rather than choosing a cabinet solely on merit, he established a City Hall divided into technocrats and cronies.

The fallout has devastated City Hall and left it leaderless. By his fourth year in office, nearly all of Adams’s most trusted aides had departed amid investigations and scandal, including his chief adviser, police commissioner, interim police commissioner, first deputy mayor, and schools chancellor. Bill Bratton, a police commissioner under two previous mayors, assessed the situation: “Too many friends with too many problems in too many high places.”

Adams has long linked his story to the city’s

Adams often tells his audience, “I am you.” At his most effective, he has woven his life story—the life of a defiant youth turned officer turned mayor—into the fabric of New York’s own tumultuous and resilient history.

“The mayor must embody the city’s characteristics,” Adams remarked last year. He does, especially now: self-focused, sleepless, quick on his feet, and burdened with complicated crime issues. His legal troubles have developed against the backdrop of a city that often feels like it’s losing its collective mind, agitated by a sequence of semi-surreal scenes from the subways to the streets that New Yorkers experience daily.

Perhaps Adams is New York. But New York might not remain his for much longer.