How angry is Joe Biden with New York City Mayor Eric Adams? Adams has been bad-mouthing the leader of his party for months on several issues, especially when it comes to crime and illegal immigration. And it’s gotten so bad that the Re-Elect Biden campaign removed Adams from its 2024 campaign advisory board before it was announced last week.
But Adams is only echoing what many of his big-city colleagues have been saying quietly for months. Biden’s efforts to downplay the crisis at the border have resulted in a lack of financial support for big cities that are dealing with the crush of illegals who are filling up their shelters and straining their resources. Adams has been particularly vocal, calling out Biden by name for the failings of the White House.
Adams has bluntly criticized the White House’s handling of the recent surge of migrants crossing the U.S. border. Thousands of migrants — including many bussed in from border states by Republican governors — have arrived in New York City, which guarantees services to migrants that many other cities do not.
“The president and the White House have failed this city,” Adams said in April, a line many Republicans and conservatives have used to attack the Biden administration.
Migration is exacerbating a budget crunch in New York, affecting hotel vacancies and bringing unwelcome headlines for Adams. One New York Post headline last week from Orange County, outside the city, read: “Homeless vets are being booted from NY hotels to make room for migrants.”
The White House is limited in what it can do without backing from the divided Congress, and the administration has had little engagement with the GOP on immigration changes.
Biden has tried to keep a lid on the border crisis by employing many of the same tactics Trump used to control illegal immigration. Of course, he refuses to give Trump any credit, but even most of the news media recognizes that Biden’s desperation has forced him to go “Back to the Future” in using Trump’s ideas if not his exact methods.
What makes the Adams-Biden split even more problematic is that there was a plan afoot to replace Vice President Kamala Harris with Adams — a plan now in abeyance given Adams’s mouthing off about the administration. It’s unclear how serious it was but it appears to have been considered at one point.
Even before he won the general election in New York in 2021, Adams declared himself the new “face of the Democratic Party.”
One close Adams ally, Jeff Rodus, recently told some Albany Democrats that Biden might replace Vice President Kamala Harris with Adams on the 2024 ticket.
Rodus, who recently left his job as chief of staff to Adams’ first deputy mayor, told Axios that he wasn’t saying that the swap would happen but said, “There were some thoughts about it.” He declined to comment further.
After Axios contacted the mayor’s office about his quote days later, Rodus wrote to Axios: “I have no connection to the president’s campaign, have no inside knowledge of their thinking, and the suggestion I would be making those kinds of statements is absurd.”
The White House says no one but Harris has ever been considered for the vice presidency.
Be that as it may, how serious is this feud? Both men are politicians through and through and will probably not let a kerfluffle like this derail the party. They will patch things up and appear on the stage at the Democratic convention hugging each other.
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