An indicted mayor, an indicted former president and the parallels between

It was not long after Eric Adams became mayor of New York City in 2022 that the comparisons with Donald Trump started.

Adams called himself the Biden of Brooklyn, but his style was far more similar to the man President Joe Biden defeated in the 2020 election.

Like Trump, Adams has repeatedly bashed the press coverage he has received since he took office. “We have to tell our news publications: Enough, enough, enough,” said Adams, who is a former police officer and the city’s second Black mayor and who created his own newsletter to circumvent the local media covering him, in late 2022.

Both try to demonstrate what Adams has called “swagger,” a macho patina of toughness. Both have projected law-and-order strength while surrounding themselves with people under legal scrutiny of their own.

And both have insisted they’re victims of political efforts to prosecute them for their stances on issues, prosecutions that they insist are the real corruption, not their own actions.

Adams will now test how far he can take the Trump playbook in seeking to remain in office. It remains to be seen whether the forces of political gravity that usually come with an indictment will drag him down. Trump will face a similar test in less than six weeks of whether his criminal travails will prevent him from winning the presidential election despite broad support within his party.

Trump was raised in the Queens borough of New York City but nurtured on the Brooklyn political-machine relationships that his father, a successful real estate developer, had forged to help make building projects happen. Adams came through a different iteration of the Brooklyn machine, one that formed from an emerging Black political power base.

In both cases, the two men have been shape-shifters. Trump is a Republican-turned-Democrat-turned-independent-turned-Republican who once favored universal health care and was later slow to disavow support from white supremacist David Duke. Adams is a Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-Democrat who had been under investigation previously and who admired Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, who has promoted antisemitism.

Both have been avatars of transactional politics, willing to assume different positions from what they held before, letting business elites and political centrists see them as bulwarks against what those elites viewed as creeping progressivism.

One Democratic strategist working in New York politics, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the circumstances surrounding both men, asked sarcastically which was more worrisome to their backers: progressivism or corruption?

Trump on Thursday gave himself a platform on the Adams case, inadvertently or not. The indictment against the mayor was announced shortly before Trump, himself convicted of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal and indicted three other times, held a news conference in Trump Tower.

For Adams, election to New York City’s highest office – a powerful role often described as the second-toughest job in America, rivaling the presidency – came a year after the city was an epicenter of the coronavirus, of Black Lives Matter protests that sometimes erupted into violence and of crime spikes amid pandemic shutdowns.

The Democratic Party was pitted against itself with candidates who had staked out deeply liberal positions on a range of issues, particularly policing, and Adams was seen by centrists, some Republicans and the city’s business interests as an antidote. It took until the end of his first year in office for the mayor’s image as the new face of the Democratic Party to start to fray.

For his part, Trump left office after his efforts to cling to power culminated in an attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. His popularity among the Republican base in the aftermath never eroded to the extent that many in Washington hoped it would. The four times Trump was indicted in 2023, in the span of a few months, merely made him politically stronger within his party.

This week, Trump’s advisers were privately delighted that there was another public official facing a corruption indictment, creating a news story about legal travails that didn’t involve the former president and giving him an opportunity to claim that the system was corrupt.

That the Justice Department is going after him for political reasons has been a constant refrain of Trump’s for more than two years. Adams has said versions of the same thing, suggesting that the investigative focus on him is racist.

And while there have been some calls for Adams to resign, many Democrats are either averting their gazes or offering muted criticisms. It is not the full-throated defense that Trump has received from elected officials in his own party, but it is still different from what might have existed years ago for a scandal-tainted mayor.

One of the most vocal defenses of Adams came, not surprisingly, from Trump.

Trump defended Adams at his own news conference Thursday, baselessly insisting that the mayor was indicted because he blasted the Biden administration over the migrant crisis that had strained city services, another refrain similar to Trump’s own political messaging. But Trump also conceded that he didn’t really know what the mayor had done and refused to acknowledge a question repeatedly asked by reporters about whether he would pardon the mayor if he returned to the White House.

“I will say this: I watched, about a year ago, when he talked about how the illegal migrants are hurting our city and the federal government should pay us, and we shouldn’t have to take them,” he said. “And I said, ‘You know what? He’ll be indicted within a year.’ And I was exactly right, because that’s what we have. I said that he will be indicted because he did that. You take a look, that’s what they do. These are dirty players. These are bad people. They cheat and they do anything necessary. These are bad people.”

“I wish him luck,” Trump added.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.