In New York, a Mayor’s Race Takes Shape That’s All About Donald Trump

The Washington Post

13:03 JST, March 2, 2025

NEW YORK – The most significant factor in the mayor’s race here may be living 240 miles away at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In a crowded field of mayoral aspirants, two Democrats with complicated relationships with President Donald Trump are poised to turn the race into a referendum on how New York voters want their city to engage with the current occupant of the White House.

Former governor Andrew M. Cuomo – who navigated a difficult relationship with Trump during his last term, often challenging him during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic – announced his run for mayor Saturday. Incumbent Eric Adams has been widely accused of cutting a deal with the president to keep himself out of prison, potentially fatally wounding his political fortunes in the deeply blue city. Adams has denied a quid pro quo.

The contest will focus on the standard issues of a mayoral election – crime, housing, jobs, immigration. But whoever eventually prevails, the New York race is also starting out as a choice between someone with a track record of fighting Trump and another who appears willing to compromise the city’s independence to help the president deport large numbers of undocumented New Yorkers.

It’s not a clean contrast, because Cuomo carries his own ethical baggage, having resigned from the governorship in 2021 amid accusations of sexual misconduct. And there are at least half a dozen other candidates, and more coming soon, who hope to gain enough attention to challenge the race’s two biggest names.

Cuomo, who served three terms as New York governor before leaving office under that cloud of controversy, announced in a taped video address released Saturday that he is entering the race. He listed several issues he plans to tackle as mayor: homelessness, housing, crime, policing and mental health. He highlighted his long experience in government and referenced his leadership during covid.

“We showed that government can actually work and get things done,” he said. “Big, hard important things.” He referenced past mistakes and said he had learned from them. About the president, he said: “I will work with anyone who wants to work for the benefit of New York. I hope President Trump remembers his hometown and works with us to make it better. But make no mistake, I will stand up and fight for New York. I have done it before and will do it again.”

So far, the race has been defined primarily by the legal troubles facing Adams. His historic indictment on corruption charges, unveiled last September, spurred a long list of New York Democrats to start fundraising to see if they could unseat him in the June 24 Democratic primary.

If Adams’s relationship to Trump is a political weakness, it is the opposite for Cuomo.

Cuomo rose to national prominence through his daily news conferences during the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, when he challenged Trump over funding and other protocols related to the virus.

“It’s now just been pushed to the top of the agenda – the ability of the next mayor to confront, contain or do combat with the White House,” said Blair Horner, senior policy adviser at New York Public Interest Research Group and longtime observer of the local government. “It is really a very, very important issue, and that wouldn’t necessarily have been the case if things had worked out differently with the current mayor.”

Cuomo has other campaign stops already scheduled over the weekend, and fundraisers planned for next week, according to the people familiar with his plans. On Wednesday, Cuomo’s allies registered a super PAC, called Fix the City, with the State Board of Elections.

The name of the super PAC hints at another major pillar of Cuomo’s expected campaign: his operational expertise and ability to get things done in a large and complicated bureaucracy.

“Competent management is the true ideology of New York City, and he’s got a ton of credibility when it comes to that,” said Errol Louis, a longtime chronicler of New York and the political anchor of Spectrum News NY1, where he hosts “Inside City Hall,” a nightly prime-time show that focuses on New York politics.

High-profile homicides in the city’s subway system spiked last year, making residents’ concerns about safety and crime another significant issue in the campaign. Trump has attacked the city as an emblem of urban decay. But the heavily Democratic enclave is also largely suspect of Trump, who won 30 percent of the vote here in November, a relatively high percentage but still a significant minority of the city.

The race holds significance for Democrats across the country. “New York is the biggest city in the country, and it’s important that Democrats demonstrate that we can govern effectively there,” said Howard Wolfson, senior political adviser to former mayor Mike Bloomberg and a former deputy mayor of the city. “If we can, it reassures the broader public, not just in the city, not just in the state, but in the country as a whole.”

Even before officially declaring, Cuomo had racked up a string of endorsements – and critiques.

After Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-New York) made public his plan to endorse Cuomo if he ran, Gustavo Rivera (D), a state senator, posted on X: “New Yorkers do NOT need a narcissistic, petty man who tried to convince us his toxically abusive management style was ‘competence’ while making PLENTY of decisions that actively hurt the city to this day.”

Cuomo left office in August 2021, a week after state Attorney General Letitia James released a report detailing a spate of sexual harassment allegations against the governor. He had lost allies in the state legislature, which was poised to impeach him, and in national politics, where even his former backer, President Joe Biden, said he thought he should resign.

Cuomo was also dogged by allegations that he had ordered thousands of people infected with covid to return to nursing homes to preserve hospital capacity when medical facilities were overrun with infected patients. It was a decision that turned out to have devastating consequences for older residents.

The decision hung over the New York governor after he received national praise, a book deal and an Emmy award for his televised coronavirus briefings. Families of nursing home residents demanded answers, and Cuomo rescinded the directive six weeks after it was issued amid public criticism.

He lost the Emmy after the sexual harassment allegations, which he has denied. His book deal about his experience during the pandemic came under investigation by a state commission that examined whether he had used state employees to help produce the book, a charge Cuomo says was politically motivated.

Adams, a former New York City police captain and the Brooklyn borough president, became the second Black mayor of the city in January 2022 with a promise that he would address crime levels that spiked during the pandemic.

When Trump’s Justice Department moved earlier this year to drop criminal charges against Adams so he could better help the Trump administration with its mass deportation plans in New York, the decision ignited a week of extraordinary open conflict between career prosecutors and Trump appointees, and led to at least eight resignations among federal prosecutors at the Justice Department and in the Southern District of New York who refused to carry out the order.

Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, told Attorney General Pam Bondi in a letter that she could not in good faith ask a judge to drop the charges against Adams, “because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged.”

Hagan Scotten, the chief prosecutor on the Adams case, worked as a clerk for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and for Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. He also served three tours in Iraq in the Army Special Forces. Scotten was even more blunt in his resignation letter, saying prosecution decisions cannot be used to influence a defendant’s policy decisions – a reference to the DOJ’s insistence that the criminal charges would keep Adams from focusing on illegal immigration in New York.

“If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” Scotten wrote. “But it was never going to be me.”

Politically, the move branded Adams as captured by Trump, torpedoed his already weakened candidacy and forced a legal crisis at the Department of Justice. It also provided the perfect on-ramp for the former governor, who has been waiting for years for his opportunity to get back into politics, to declare himself.

“The political interpretation is that this White House very specifically attempted to gain political leverage over the mayor for policy reasons and used his legal problems as a cudgel to compel policy outcomes they wanted,” Louis said. “It has become one of the most prominent issues in the race for mayor.”

The move ignited broader outrage in the legal community and signaled yet another attempted power grab from the Trump administration that has been pushing an expansionist view of the presidency that legal experts say violates basic guardrails of the separation of powers.

“What’s happening in the Adams case is a serious breach of the rule of law,” said Sam Buell, a Duke Law School professor who specializes in white-collar crime. “In general, our constitutional order gives the executive branch total discretion to pursue a charge. It’s also been understood on a bipartisan basis for a very long time that the criminal prosecution power should not be used to advance nakedly political and personal agendas.”

The federal judge overseeing the case appointed Paul Clement, a U.S. solicitor general under President George W. Bush who has typically represented conservative political causes in court, to advise him on the matter.

The case hangs over Adams. His attorneys filed a new motion to dismiss the case “with prejudice,” which would mean that the DOJ cannot renew the case in the event that Adams is not sufficiently helpful to the administration with its deportation efforts. Adams said his lawyers advised him not to attend campaign events until the judge in his case made a decision about his public corruption charges.

But Adams offered another rationale. One of the events he skipped, he said, did not include at least one candidate who was “running in the shadows.”

“We need to get everybody running,” Adams said, apparently referencing Cuomo. “No candidate should be able to stay on the sidelines and send out innuendos.”