Eric Adams’ Brain-Melting 9/11 Quote Explains a Lot

This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.

“New York. This is a place where every day you wake up you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center through a person who’s celebrating a new business that’s open. This is a very, very complicated city, and that’s why it’s the greatest city on the globe.” —New York City Mayor Eric Adams, asked Monday to describe his 2023 in one word

Year’s end is a natural time for reflection. New York City’s New Jersey–dwelling Mayor Eric Adams’ year has been almost as perplexing as his answer to that prompt. It’s a signature Adams flourish: defiant of the rules, logically confounding, unserious and concerning in equal measure.

If 2021 announced Adams as the great hope of big business–aligned centrist and conservative Democrats who hoped to beat back the city’s activists—Adams, in fact, announced himself as the future of the Democratic Party—2023 has revealed him to be anything but. Lacking in popularity almost as desperately as he lacks in legislative ambition, Adams has managed nothing remotely akin to a signature policy accomplishment during his time at the helm of New York City.

His greatest achievement in 2023 was probably his embrace of the Republican line on immigration, a hardcore anti-migrant sentiment that Adams has adopted as cynically as the crime panic he rode to a narrow win two years back, in the contentious ranked-choice Democratic primary. His cruel and unnecessary posture toward asylum seekers has seeped into national politics more deeply, and it has served as a paper-thin excuse for Adams to deliver the policy change he is becoming best known for: bruising, unnecessary budget cuts to social services (but not and never to police budgets). When New Yorkers stroll by the newly shuttered doors of their public libraries on Sundays, they will think of their mayor, who might be on his way back from Saturday night at the club.

Profound, general mismanagement and the goring of necessary social services (parks, beaches, and schools are all getting some version of the Adams library policy) are one thing, but it’s the startling array of corruption allegations that has made Adams’ 2023 really stand out. Adams acolytes have recently pleaded guilty to straw-donor campaign finance fraud, in a scheme designed to generate illicit public matching funds for Adams’ 2021 campaign. The mayor’s chief fundraiser had her home raided by the FBI, in connection with an illegal foreign-influence investigation into the Adams campaign. Adams himself had his phone snatched by the feds as part of that ongoing operation.

All of that, expectedly, has resulted in some nightmarish polling for Adams, who is about as underwater as a mayor can get, despite maintaining relative support from the New York Post. Voters don’t trust him on migration, on budget—they don’t even trust him on the crime panic that he made up. According to a Quinnipiac poll, Adams has “the lowest job approval rating for a New York City mayor since Quinnipiac University began polling New York City registered voters in 1996.” Only 28 percent of New Yorkers approve of the job he’s doing, and he has hardly done anything. Adams’ camp has resorted to simply accusing the negative public opinion reporting of racism.

So, when Adams describes his year on an emotional spectrum between “9/11” at the low end and “Someone opened another gray-market weed store on my block” on the top, all that is just part of what’s gotten him there. Except, of course, Adams has pledged war on the gray-market weed stores, which he will surely be cracking down on just as soon as the haters clear out of his way.