Opinion: The emperor has new clothes

Now that the dust has settled on the national elections and the daily Democratic outrage is focused on Trump’s proposed cabinet, closer to home, Mayor Eric Adams has quietly gotten his own cabinet in order (under deep duress) and is now focused on his political survival – and possible revival.

When you speak to people in the political world in New York – elected leaders, staff, lobbyists, consultants – they all refer to the mayor in the past tense. He’s finished. There’ll be a superseding indictment soon. He won’t serve out his full term. There will be a special election in early 2025. Even if he does survive the next 13 months, there’s no chance he’ll be reelected.

Maybe they are all right. But I do remember a particular ex-president whose political obituary was being written on Jan. 7, 2021, the day after an unprecedented insurrection at the U.S. Capitol shocked and outraged many in our country, including leading Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy.

To paraphrase Mark Twain: Reports of Trump’s political death were greatly exaggerated.

Which brings us to another resilient yet deeply unpopular politician, who sits in City Hall every day. Eric Adams has survived three police commissioners, two first deputy mayors and a revolving door of top officials who have dashed for the exits over the last few months, many of whom jumped off the political Titanic as it approached the impending iceberg.

But U.S. Attorney Damian Williams – the mayor’s legal nemesis – is also stepping down in less than two weeks and it’s not clear that Trump’s hand-picked successor will want to pursue the Turkish quid-pro-quo case against Adams.

Writing off anyone in politics is a fool’s errand. But I’ll admit that the mayor’s odds of earning a second term don’t look great today given the low favorability numbers he’s consistently received the past year.

In the meantime, though, the mayor has made some very wise personnel moves the last month, amidst all the chaos.

The latest: moving expert manager Jessica Tisch from Commissioner of the Sanitation Department to head of the NYPD. Tisch is just the kind of no-nonsense, no-drama manager that the mayor and the NYPD need. (She’s almost an echo of widely respected former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, who narrowly lost to Adams in the 2021 mayoral primary).

Tisch is widely hailed as a strong tactician and leader, and she even received plaudits from the greatest law enforcement official this city has seen since Teddy Roosevelt: Bill Bratton, the former NYPD commissioner who helped turn around the LAPD between two successful stints in New York in the early 1990s and 2010s.

I watched Tisch make the rounds on the Sunday morning television shows, and she was pitch-perfect. She recognizes that the perception of crime is higher than is tolerable and she plans to flood the hotspots in the city with 1,600 new graduating cops next year.

Tisch realizes something that others still haven’t latched onto in recent years: the more cops we have consistently walking the beat in tough neighborhoods and at high-crime subway stations, the more comfortable New Yorkers will start feeling.

She’s just what the mayor needs to calm things down after all tumult at One Police Plaza during the last three years. He should empower her, get out of her way and let her bring order to a demoralized and disorganized police force in the wake of the departures of two flawed commissioners and the even more controversial Deputy Mayor for Safety Phil Banks. Adams and Banks thwarted the mayor’s first NYPD commissioner, Keechant Sewell – who was off to a great start in her brief tenure before they both undermined her authority and she decided to resign rather than be set up for failure.

Two other recent promotions bode well for a productive 2025 for the Adams administration: the new First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres Springer and the new Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles Ramos.

Like Tisch, Torres Springer is an experienced and talented public official whose successful career in New York City government stretches back to the Bloomberg administration, when she worked for the extremely talented and accomplished Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff.

Springer, a self-effacing yet powerful and respected leader, succeeded Doctoroff (two decades later) as Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, and she – along with Economic Development Corporation President Andrew Kimball and City Planning Commissioner Dan Garodnick – have been the bright lights in the first three years of the Adams administration. Her “City of Yes” program is an impressive and ambitious initiative that looks like it has a good shot of making a dent in the city’s longstanding housing shortage and affordability crisis.

Having Torres Springer in the number two position in city government has gone a long way toward reassuring the business and real estate communities that whatever distractions the mayor may have in 2025, he has a very skilled and drama-free deputy running the city day-to-day.

And at Tweed Courthouse, former Schools Chancellor David Banks passed the baton to Aviles Ramos. She is a young, energetic and highly poised educator whose instincts are strong. She should be able to accomplish a lot – if she has a long enough tenure to implement her priorities and ideas.

Banks did a great job of turning around a decades-long failed reading curriculum – something that will show dramatic results in 5-10 years – but after three years of administration drama and some familial controversy (two of his brothers are being investigated for alleged corruption), he wisely decided to retire after a distinguished career to allow Ramos to succeed him and move her ideas forward.

No one knows what will happen next year in NYC politics. The list of challengers to Mayor Adams grows each week, and rumors abound that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo will enter the mayoral race by early 2025.

If that happens, Cuomo will suck all the attention away from the other seven already-declared challengers, which could accrue to the mayor’s benefit. Nothing like an inflamed media and angry voting constituencies focused on the ex-governor to take the spotlight away from the embattled mayor.

Now that we’re in the holiday season, there will be ample cocktail parties in the political world that will propagate more chatter about who will occupy Gracie Mansion on Jan. 1, 2026. Anyone who definitively tells you who that will be is someone you should look at with healthy skepticism – who had RFK Jr. running the Health and Human Services Department on their bingo card a year ago? Or Fox & Friends cohost Pete Hegseth running the Defense Department?

In politics, 11 months is a lifetime. Let’s check back on Nov. 5, 2025, after the next mayoral election. Then we’ll see which political pundits were right – and which definitive prognosticators pontificating today were way off the mark.