“Today in Eric Adams” — the T.E.A. — brings you the best of the day in Eric Adams.
This afternoon’s hotly anticipated conference on illegal gun trafficking served as a debut not just for a spicy duo but for a liberal (okay, centrist) throuple bubbling up between President Joe Biden, New York governor Kathy Hochul, and New York City mayor Eric Adams. Their bond over being tough on crime was documented at NYPD headquarters today in heaps of bootlickery in their statements — Adams began with “Mr. President, Eric Adams is reporting for duty and ready to serve.” But it’s also nicely encapsulated in this very intense photo from Press Secretary Fabien Levy.
You won’t see a deeper level of longing for a troubling connection this side of Euphoria.
Their partnership — which stands in alignment with the president’s call to Congress for half a billion in anti-gun-crime strategies — codifies an alignment between federal, state, and local agencies working together to curb illegal firearms and their accompanying violence.
The plan sounds quite a bit like the final report from Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which placed emphasis on police living where they work, using “community organizers” to bridge the gaps between officers and the public, and clamping down on illegal activities (like illegal gun trafficking!) by encouraging more frequent searches of travelers commuting between Baltimore, New York, and up and down the East Coast.
That plan also recommended summer programming for young people intended to keep them off those evil, dangerous streets that New York’s mayor has now declared war on. So this Biden-Adams-Hochul approach feels, as most things do with these particular administrations, heavy-handed, pro-prosecution, and pro-police — which may yet endear them to the Republicans they’re aching to impress — but also stale. Political, polyamorous PDA has never felt so boring.
