Eric Adams, Global Mayor: How New York’s Chaos Became the World’s Reality TV

NEW YORK—Across the planet, mayors are usually the municipal footnotes of geopolitics—background actors who cut ribbons and pretend to care about potholes. Then along comes Eric Adams: a former police captain, vegan workout evangelist, and walking, talking New York Post headline generator whose daily gyrations now serve as a sort of Rorschach test for the wider world’s faith in democratic self-government.

From Lagos to Lisbon, people who once associated New York with Frank Sinatra and Sex and the City now refresh their feeds to see if the mayor has been indicted, appointed ambassador to the Moon, or discovered a new way to trip over his own press conference. The international fascination is partly rubber-necking—nothing quite beats watching a global metropolis narrate its own nervous breakdown in real time—but it’s also diagnostic. Adams has become a case study in how post-pandemic cities everywhere are trying to reboot while shackled to pre-pandemic budgets, social media panopticons, and electorates who want both zero crime and zero police.

Over in Berlin, bureaucrats sipping afternoon Club-Mate note that Adams’s flirtation with crypto-bros and “CityCoins” rhymes eerily with their own mayor’s doomed attempt to sell the Tempodrom as an NFT. In Seoul, officials tracking New York’s migrant shelter crisis whisper: “At least our population is shrinking naturally.” Meanwhile, French journalists covering the Seine’s Olympic bacterial bloom watch Adams blame New York’s rat problem on “global migration patterns” and feel a frisson of trans-Atlantic solidarity: nothing unites humanity like blaming foreigners for fauna.

The mayor’s wardrobe choices, of course, have achieved diplomatic significance. When Adams turned up at the Met Gala in a tuxedo jacket airbrushed with the words “End Gun Violence,” European commentators hailed it as peak American sincerity: like wearing a “Stop Climate Change” sash while flying private to Davos. The jacket now hangs in the imaginary Museum of Performative Empathy, somewhere between Bono’s sunglasses and Greta Thunberg’s train tickets.

Yet beneath the memes lies a darker global subplot. Adams’s administration sits at the intersection of two worldwide trends: the securitization of urban life and the criminalization of dissent. When NYPD teams—freshly trained by Israeli cyber units—deploy robot dogs that look like they escaped from a Black Mirror writers’ retreat, foreign activists recognize the blueprint. From Santiago to Sarajevo, city governments are quietly importing New York’s “omnipresence” doctrine: cameras on every lamppost, facial recognition at subway turnstiles, and a PR strategy that frames each new toy as a gift to “the community.” Adams simply sells it with better hashtags.

Then there’s the money. Federal prosecutors circling Adams’s 2021 campaign have unearthed a trail of allegedly straw donations from Turkish entities—an allegation the mayor denies with the practiced indignation of a man who’s been photographed at more ribbon-cuttings than most ambassadors manage in a lifetime. Abroad, the scandal is less about the cash than the choreography: the same pantomime of plausible deniability now standard from Nairobi to Naples. Donors launder influence, politicians launder language, and the global middle class gets stuck with the dry-cleaning bill.

Still, one must admire the sheer kinetic optimism of the Adams operation. In an era when most cities are managed by spreadsheet, New York retains its gift for turning governance into performance art. Every press conference is a one-act play where the mayor, flanked by commissioners who look like they’re auditioning for a Netflix procedural, promises to cure gun violence with midnight basketball and diabetes with plant-based empanadas. The world watches, half-horrified, half-envious: at least someone still believes the script might work.

Conclusion: International observers once measured New York by its skyline; now they measure it by the mayor’s daily tightrope walk between scandal and swagger. Eric Adams, in his blustering, bewildering way, has become the city’s latest export—equal parts cautionary tale and pep rally, a reminder that the global urban future will be improvised in real time, preferably in front of cameras, ideally without an indictment. If cities are humanity’s laboratory, Adams is the volatile reagent bubbling over the Bunsen burner. The rest of us—mayors, migrants, and mildly amused spectators—can only watch the smoke signals and wonder whether what rises from the beaker will be perfume or poison.