Everyone remembers their parents’ “back-in-the-day” references. My mother used to reminisce about Fiorello La Guardia, a legendary New York City mayor, reading the “funny papers” on the radio to the city’s children during the Great Depression. People called him “little flower”, she said, because that was what his first name meant in Italian. “Everyone loved him,” she recalled.
I have my own such moments with my two children at the dinner table these days. “When I was a kid,” I say in tender reverie, “a New York mayor under a five-count indictment for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, solicit foreign contributions and accept bribes – several of whose closest associates in city government have also either been arrested or, like the former police commissioner, forced to resign by the mayor himself – would have stepped down out of a combination of personal embarrassment and obligation to the people of his city.”
I refer to Eric Adams, New York’s indicted mayor, who refuses to leave office and intends to run for re-election this autumn. And while undoubtedly local in narrative – Adams’s misdemeanors unwind like the plot of a Sidney Lumet thriller – his case embodies a national disease, or rather a growing national immunity, to what should be a vital human emotion: shame.
In September, Adams, a former captain in the city’s police department currently in the final year of his first term as mayor, was formally charged with accepting expensive gifts and illegal campaign donations from Turkish nationals in exchange for fixing issues they faced. These included difficulties obtaining safety clearances from the Fire Department for a new building intended to house the Turkish consulate.
Adams refused to step down, instead swiftly firing old friends he had appointed to official positions in his administration who were under investigation themselves. He dug his heels in, accusing prosecutors and his critics of racism (Adams is black) and declaring he was running for a second term. Days before the inauguration, he flew down to Mar-a-Lago to meet Donald Trump. Weeks later, the mayorcut a deal with Trump’s Justice Department: according to this novel transaction, Adams would, in a reversal of the city’s long-established existence as a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants, expedite Trump’s mass deportations. In return, the Justice Department would have its prosecutors dismiss the charges against Adams “without prejudice”, meaning they could be revived again at any time. Which meant Trump would have the suspended indictment hanging over Adams’s head.
Events proceeded throughout in the country’s new tempo: Trumprestissimo. A score of local and federal prosecutors resigned rather than dismiss the charges. Just about the entire city called for Adams to step down. New York’s governor held a meeting to decide whether to fire him; she played it safe and decided to hold off. A judge held a hearing to determine whether to disallow the government to dismiss the charges; he is acting cautiously (or prudently) by planning to hold another hearing. New York’s political establishment is in freefall, much like the rest of America’s. But what is stunning, and portentous, is not only that Adams, shamed and disgraced, refuses to step aside; there is simply no political or populist will, and apparently no feasible political or legal mechanism, to force him to do so.
Trump prevailed over impeachments, criminal indictments, a criminal conviction, a stupendously onerous defeat in civil court and a cascade of accusations of behaviour ranging from sexual assault to bribery and extortion. His victory last November in the face of this storm was a turning point in American culture. You could see it coming. A long line of politicians had clung on even after the most egregious criminal indictments – in the bizarre case of the former Republican congressman George Santos, after a conviction on charges of fraud and identity theft. Biden’s refusal to step aside in the run-up to the election in the face of accelerating mental decline displayed an impudent indifference to public expectation.
I seem to sense this change in the American moral atmosphere everywhere. Last spring, my wife wrote to the mother of a girl who was cruelly bullying our daughter. In her reply, the girl’s mother never denied her daughter was bullying ours. Rather she accused my wife of bullying her own daughter by saying that her daughter was… a bully. In a culture where there are only victims – of history, of prejudice, of traumatising words, of “weaponised” law and justice – no one is held responsible for doing anything objectively wrong.
Every society seems similarly doomed to decline into some degree of illiberalism, to become illiberal in its own way. In bottom-line, hyper-capitalist America, the state is turning itself into a business. And in super-individualist America, the question of right and wrong – sometimes puerile, often profound – has devolved into whatever someone can get away with. Trump has conquered the executive and legislative branches of government, and is either dissolving or appropriating the bureaucratic state. All that remains is for him to disempower the judicial branch by refusing to obey a ruling from the Supreme Court. Having stoked Eric Adams into a brazenness to match his own, Trump will now be watching carefully as his canary flutters about in the coal mine of a disintegrating constitutional order.
[See also: The godfather of the Maga right]
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This article appears in the 26 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain in Trump’s World