Earlier this October, a week after dropping out of the New York City mayoral race and less than a month before Election Day, current Mayor Eric Adams made a strange and quite inexplicable trip to the Balkan nation of Albania. Speaking to reporters, Adams stated, “New York is the Albania of America.” Catchy, simple and diplomatic.
To those unacquainted with the antics of the 110th mayor of New York City, this phrase resembles the kind of non-statement common to political rhetoric. However, to those familiar with Adams, this structure of sentiment has become a staple of the soon-to-be ex-mayor.
“New York is the Islamabad of America,” he said during a flag-raising in New York with the Pakistani consul. In Israel: “New York is the Tel Aviv of America.” On the topic of Mexico: “New York is the Mexico City of America,” and so on.
This stock phrase does not even begin to scratch the surface of Adams’ chronic absurdity. Over the past four years, his eccentric use of language has garnered many questions and much criticism.
Adams’ continual use of these comically senseless phrases and comparisons reflects a novel and puzzling new pattern in American political discourse
Rhetoric such as Adams’ meaningless off-kilter ramblings serves to offset and diminish the gravity of his lies. The more a politician like Adams becomes unserious and enigmatic, the more permissible their deceit becomes.
In 2023, Adams said, “This is a place where every day you wake up, you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our trade center to a person who’s celebrating a new business that’s open.”
Adams was also quoted as saying, “I am the pilot, folks, and you are all passengers. Stop praying for me to crash the plane. Pray for me to land the plane because there’s no parachutes on this plane.”
Adams’ continual use of these comically senseless phrases and comparisons reflects a novel and puzzling new pattern in American political discourse: That is, the devaluation of the speech used by figures of authority to the point of absurdity and meaninglessness. This trend toward a cheap, inconsistent style in American politics reflects an assertion of authority over truth itself, as well as encouraging the public to view politicians through a cynical lens of perception.
In this political standard, the “truth” as propounded by figures of authority is more an order than a fact. As such, truth to Adams has never exactly resembled reality.
These values and shifts have manifested in Adams, a mayor who is more interested in self-aggrandizement and deceit than in the issues facing the New Yorkers who voted him into office.
Adams was elected on a platform of law and order, rooted in his 22 years as a police officer in the NYPD. Throughout his tenure as mayor, he has invested considerable time in improving and reorganizing the NYPD to become a tool of social change and influence. In the 2024 fiscal year under Adams, the NYPD had its highest budget in history, as per the Independent Budget Office.
During his campaign, Adams stood in direct, explicit defiance of the increased support for defunding the police following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. As such, it was clear from the beginning of his campaign that Adams found a great utility in policing.
His gravitation toward the police department — and the dynamic of officer-over-citizen as a paradigm for political reasoning — is telling. In organizations such as the NYPD, power is asserted from agents of the state directly down toward the people, and the validity of information is asserted in the same top-down social order.
In this political standard, the “truth” as propounded by figures of authority is more an order than a fact. As such, truth to Adams has never exactly resembled reality. Inconvenient realities have lost their importance and have become obstacles to Adams’ administration.
In the first month of the Adams administration, two police officers were killed in a shooting in Harlem. During a press conference that followed, Adams removed an old black-and-white photo from his wallet, lamenting the 1987 shooting death of his alleged friend in the police force, Robert Venable. The photo, he claimed, had been in his wallet for decades. However, in 2023, the New York Times reported that the photo was printed and artificially aged by members of Adams’ staff. Adams knew full well he had not been carrying this photo in his wallet for decades, but insisted on the obvious lie anyway.
Adams also publicly identified as a vegan during his campaign and pushed related health policies in New York public schools, until he was discovered eating fish in public and, when pressed, admitted to not adhering to veganism.
More recently, early last August, Gothamist reported that many of the signatures gathered for the petition to keep Adams on the ballot as an independent candidate in the 2025 mayoral race were forged, with multiple signatures even belonging to deceased New Yorkers. When confronted over this blatant and widespread strategy of fabricating and falsifying records, Adams simply diminished the severity of the findings, insisting on political sabotage as the cause.
Where the obfuscation of the first administration could largely be attributed to incompetence and poor judgment, the second administration has initiated a perplexing, obviously intentional strategy of perpetually pushing misinformation and falsehoods.
These scandals have been effectively swept under the rug through Adams’ eccentricities. When the mayor is always engaged in a form of unprofessional, headline-worthy conduct, the public can only focus on so much.
Why is Eric Adams like this? Why does he lie so frequently about strange things? In order to understand his motives, one must look at the Trump administration, which contributed to the now commonplace nature of absurd politics.
From 2017 to 2021, the White House consistently pushed incoherent misinformation and constantly misled the public.
President Donald Trump famously altered and made up data regarding Hurricane Dorian’s projected landfall in 2019, insisting that it would pass through Florida and hit Alabama. This was supplemented by a map depicting the hurricane’s projected path that was seemingly hand-altered with a black Sharpie to include Alabama. No credible meteorology service concurred with the president, and Hurricane Dorian did not hit Alabama.
The Hurricane Dorian incident reflects the absolute nonsense of Trump’s first-term lies, where the misinformation spread by the White House served no apparent political end. The primary effect instead was confusion, alarm and a loss of credibility behind the words of the president.
Where the obfuscation of the first administration could largely be attributed to incompetence and poor judgment, the second administration has initiated a perplexing, obviously intentional strategy of perpetually pushing misinformation and falsehoods.
American political discourse has been progressively disfigured by this oppression of truth over the past decade, and Adams is both a product and a perpetrator of this disfiguration.
In August, in the wake of negative revisions to a job report published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — a nonpartisan entity concerned with monitoring and reporting trends in economic data — Trump fired the head of the organization. On the ironically named Truth Social, the president falsely claimed, “Today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
The firing of the commissioner of an independent statistics agency is extremely concerning. The very instruments relied upon by government and non-government entities alike for accurate data have been stripped of their independence and commitment to truth.
Most alarming has been the assertion of soaring rates of violent crime in major American cities, which the administration has used as a pretext for deploying the National Guard. From Washington, D.C. to Chicago, violent crime rates have been falling, contrary to the narrative pushed by the White House. Yet, the Trump administration continues to employ misinformation to crack down on dissent and political opposition.
Political strategist and Trump ally Steve Bannon described Trump’s second-term tactic as “muzzle velocity,” in which political orders and partisan litigation occur too fast for both journalists and courts to consistently report and rule on their movements.
There is no word that most aptly describes this tactic than sinister. The discrepancy between modes of conduct during the first and second administrations is tremendously useful for understanding Adams. Does his lying and fraudulence more closely resemble a deficiency of logical reasoning or a sinister attempt to overwhelm and mislead the public?
Unfortunately for Adams, it seems to be a mistake to assign a logical strategy to his mayhem. Yet his bizarre white lies have still been blatantly corrupt attempts to infiltrate the office of mayor with personal indulgences and embellishments.
From his intentional unreliability to his farcical quips, Adams’s speech has become entirely worthless. In essence, this movement toward meaninglessness and absurdity has enabled, if not encouraged, Adams to utilize deceit to enrich and aggrandize himself.
What is truly tragic, what is really sacrificed through this constant obfuscation, is the trust and honesty needed in American politics today. Adams and other politicians of this same inane style cannot be held accountable for the beliefs that form the basis of their actions, because their speech consistently demonstrates that they do not really believe in anything. These politicians have been reduced by their deceit to empty symbols and buzzwords.
The commitment to truth that should define their speech has been replaced by a cynical downward exercise of power, where truth withers into a mindless order.
In effect, American political discourse has been progressively disfigured by this oppression of truth over the past decade, and Adams is both a product and a perpetrator of this disfiguration.
So, as Election Day draws near and the Adams administration winds down over the next two months, it is increasingly important to recognize that Americans deserve more than nonsensical ramblings and duplicitous politicians. Americans deserve better than figures like Adams and Trump. Americans deserve politicians who will commit themselves to honestly and transparently serving the public who put them in office.