Eric Adams has been tarnished by his indictment on charges of bribery, wire fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations, but in the view of Catherine Rampell, he should have been "a national laughingstock" well before the indictment—indeed, before he was elected mayor of New York City. "If there were any justice in the world, he would have been indicted long ago—for criminal levels of incompetence," Rampell writes at the Washington Post. "The real Eric Adams scandal is that, in a city of 8.3 million people, this clown was somehow the best we had to offer." (Adams pleaded not guilty on Friday, per the AP.)
"Perhaps there are just too many weirdos on the national political scene these days crowding out clown coverage," but "the fact that Adams wasn't already a national laughingstock is rather embarrassing," Rampell continues, pointing to recent conversations in which the mayor asked if prostate cancer affects women, repeatedly referred to India as Pakistan, and claimed one of his strengths "is my ability to sexualize and stay focused." That's just in the past few weeks. Earlier this year, Adams hailed a "revolution" in waste disposal, the result of millions of dollars in study, only to reveal a basic wheeled trash can.
During Adams' mayoral run, when critics claimed he lived in New Jersey, the candidate gave reporters a tour of a Brooklyn apartment that Rampell strongly suggests was actually his son's. For one thing, it lacked a bathtub, which Adams claimed to frequently use. During the same campaign, Adams was spotted driving on a sidewalk to get around a traffic jam, Rampell notes. Mike Bedigan at the Independent similarly rounds up some of the mayor's weirder moments, including when he tried to make a "heart hands" sign with an armless robot and claimed his favorite concert was the 1990 show in which lighting equipment fell on musician Curtis Mayfield, leaving him paralyzed, before he'd even begun to play. (Read the full Rampell column.)
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