Mayor Eric Adams unloaded on former President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party during an explosive pre-taped interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that aired Tuesday evening.
Hizzoner, in the opening minutes of the interview conducted in Gracie Mansion, charged that Biden and top White House aides brushed off his repeated cries for help with the Big Apple’s migrant crisis and accused him of “not being a good Democrat.” The mayor said pleas to Biden himself and his former top advisors, Tom Perez and Julie Chavez Rodriguez, for more financial and logistical support with the crisis fell on deaf ears.
“One of his aides told me that ‘Listen, this is like a gallstone, it’ll pass,'” Adams told Carlson in the interview, aired on the Tucker Carlson Network. “It’ll hurt now, but it’ll pass.”
While the mayor has been openly critical of Biden’s migrant crisis response for nearly two years, he has never made such sharp accusations of the prior administration before.
The mayor alleged that he was being ignored because Biden, and ultimately Vice President Kamala Harris, did not want to touch immigration due to their re-election efforts.
“It appears to me that there was a bigger focus on the national election and not what [the migrant crisis] was doing to cities,” he said.
Adams also repeated his unsubstantiated claim that his indictment on federal corruption charges was punishment from the White House for speaking out about the influx of hundreds of thousands of newcomers to the city over the past few years. The mayor also agreed with Carlson belittling the indictment, in which he is accused of reaping travel benefits from Turkish nationals in exchange for favors, as “flimsy” and “crazy.”
Carlson said, “this indictment was punishment for complaining,” about the migrant crisis. To which Adams responded “that is clearly my belief, based on several aspects of it that I can’t go into detail, but there are other aspects of it that shows me, that I was targeted because of that.”
Adams has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which include bribery and wire fraud, and is set to stand trial in April.
Throughout the interview, Adams also often did not push back on Carlson’s alarmist descriptions of the city he runs.
The conservative firebrand casted the city’s subways as “scary” and filled with “crazy people” and streets as smelling “like a slum,” due to the odor from people smoking cannabis, which is legal in New York State. Yet, while Adams touted what he sees as his successes in improving the city, he did little to argue with the picture Carlson painted of the five boroughs.
The interview came a day after Adams attended Republican President Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington DC and hours after he revealed Tuesday that he will no longer criticize Trump publicly.
Those moves follow months of Adams, a former registered Republican, warming up to Trump in public and distancing himself from the Democratic Party establishment.
“People often say, ‘Well, you know, you don’t sound like a Democrat’ and ‘you seem to have left the party,’” he told Carlson. “No, the party left me, and it left working-class people.”
Although Adams has said he is still running for re-election as a Democrat, his actions have sparked speculation that he may switch back to the GOP in his quest for a second term. There is also widespread conjecture that Adams’ actions are motivated by his desire to earn a pardon from Trump if he gets convicted in his federal case.
The interview has already sparked backlash from the City Council’s Progressive Caucus, whose leaders issued a statement Thursday simply saying “good riddance” to Adams.
Kcassman