On November 3, 2023, New York Mayor Eric Adams was on his way to Washington DC to discuss the border crisis with the Biden administration when he suddenly had to turn around and head back to Gotham because the FBI had raided the home of a prominent fundraiser.
In retrospect, this may well have been the moment that opened the door for socialist Zohran Mamdani to become mayor of the country’s largest and most important city.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and incumbent Mayor Eric Adams. (Stephanie Keith/Getty Images; Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Prior to the rise of the survey, Adams had consistently received approval ratings in the high 30s to low 40s, not bad for a mayor of a major city. But a month after his trip to DC, that wasn’t the case, he dropped to 25% and would never recover.
The investigation and eventual indictment against Adams centered on the rather ridiculous issue of donor flight upgrades, but it was strongly suspected that the real reason Hizzoner got the deal was because he had started challenging President Biden on the issue of the border crisis.
ERIC ADAMS DROP OUT OF THE NEW YORK CITY MAYORAL RACE
At the time, New York City was completely overrun by migrants arriving by the busload day in and day out, straining hotel capacity and forcing Bidenvilles to pop up across the five boroughs to provide enough beds for the tens of thousands of arrivals.
In September 2023, Adams publicly feuded with the White House over the flow of people coming to New York, sometimes on secret flights. He even headlined rallies criticizing the government.
Two months later, Adams was under federal indictment and his political career was in tatters. The following year, Democrat-Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., called on him to resign.
Senator Bernie Sanders, Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pose for a photo in Astoria, Queens, September 6, 2025. (@ZohranKMamdani via X)
It was the opening the socialists needed. An injured Adams was their path to Gracie Mansion.
What’s so frustrating about the Biden administration’s ousting of Adams at the time is that he did quite well as mayor, much better than his predecessor and Mamdani prototype, socialist Bill de Blasio.
When de Blasio left office in 2022, Midtown was not only overrun with vagrants and addicts, but also with cardboard boxes on every corner with scales in which guys sold bags of weed. To his credit, Adams did a lot to remedy this quite quickly.
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I’m not saying we should name an airport after Eric Adams, but it was good, stable, solid leadership for the first time in eight years.
That didn’t matter to the Biden administration. Adams was a thorn in his side who would not shut up and deal with the border crisis. He made Scranton Joe look bad, and he had to be steamrolled.
Now that President Donald Trump has seen the southern border secured, even many elected Democrats are admitting that Biden has done a terrible job on illegal immigration.
One wonders if the Biden world had taken the opportunity of Adams’ criticism to change course at the border and stem the flow of migrants, instead of crushing him like an insect, might their election chances in 2024 have been different?
That is something we can never know. What we do know is that the charges against Adams, which were eventually dropped, paved the way for a new liberal star named Zohran Mamdani.
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The indictment against Adams is just one of many ways the Democratic Party has created the socialist Frankenstein monster they now have no control over, from passing election laws that benefit the far left to refusing to outright condemn socialism itself.
‘NEW YORK DESERVES BETTER:’ MAMDANI REACTS TO ERIC ADAMS LEAVING FROM MAYORAL RACE
Now Zany Zohran seems like a genie that the former party of Jefferson and Jackson can’t put back in the bottle. He is packing stadiums, just as socialists Ocasio Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders I-VT have been doing across the country all year.
The meeting that never happened, the meeting Adams was supposed to have with White House officials across the border in November 2023, changed the course of history, and not for the better.
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Today, the Democrats have virtually become the Democratic Socialists, with even House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries reluctantly supporting Marxism. If Mamdani has his way, the Big Apple will be on the brink of something akin to outright communism.
The question for both the Democratic Party and New York City is whether either will ever fully recover.
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