NYC Mayor Eric Adams is eyeing up a 2024 White House bid as an anti-woke Democrat if Joe Biden decides not to run for a second term, it is claimed.  

Adams, 61, – who once referred to himself as the ‘Biden of Brooklyn’ – has ‘repeatedly’ told confidantes that he is considering running for the highest office and thinks he could ‘win,’ sources told the New York Post. 

‘Eric has told me repeatedly that he thinks that he has a platform to run for national office, for president in 2024,’ a source close to the mayor told the Post. ‘He thinks New York is a national platform [and] he thinks the national party has gotten too far to the left and he thinks he has a platform to win.’ 

A Brooklyn Democratic official, who was not identified, told the Post Adam’s advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin was ‘running point’ on the matter and he’d only stake his claim on the presidency if Biden, 79, declined to run again. 

There have been conflicting reports about whether Biden will seek a second term. He is already the oldest president to ever hold office, and his year-and-a-half in office has been marred with what critics claim are cognitive slips.

Ahead of the 2020 election, Biden himself had reportedly conceded he’d be a single-term president who hoped to reunite the US in the wake of Donald Trump’s divisive presidency.

But there is no obvious Democrat candidate to succeed him, with Vice President Kamala Harris’s personal approval ratings stubbornly low, and Biden is now said to be touting a 2024 run. 

While only five months into his first term in office, Adams has pleased many centrist Democrats – and conservatives – by avoiding progressive or extreme stances on economic and social issues.  

However, Adam’s advisor Evan Thies dismissed rumors, saying: ‘The mayor has not had any conversations with anyone about running for president. He is 100 percent focused on lowering crime and improving the economy in New York, and bringing this city back.’

The mayor does seem to have some backing, though, as CEO of Tusk Strategies Chris Coffey told the New York Post: ‘He is one of the best-known black elected officials in the country. The play works if Adams makes progress on crime and the president decides not to run. I think he would be crazy not to consider it.’ 

Even a GOP lawmaker told the Post he thought the Big Apple mayor could have a chance if he solved the crime riddling the City That Never Sleeps.  

The unidentified lawmaker said: ‘I said you really have to consider that you are young enough where you will have a life after the mayoralty and if you solve the crime problem there would be a lot of interest in a big city Democrat, African American with progressive values but who mediated the crime problem in a major city.’ 

Adams had been faced with rising crime rates as the city plunges into a wave of violence, leaving citizens on edge. 

Although crime rates are starting to slow down, overall violent crime is still up 40 percent across all five boroughs. Shootings, stabbings, and gun violence has run rampant through the streets – even prompting Adams to wear an ‘end gun violence’ suit jacket to the Met Gala earlier this month. 

He has blamed many of the problems he faces on former Mayor Bill de Blasio, condemned as the city’s wokest-ever leader.  

With Adams and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s lax bail reform, career criminals have been running the streets, breaking into businesses, and terrorizing citizens. 

Despite Adams’ confidence, New Yorkers have declining faith him, new polls are showing. Crime is 49 percent of citizens’ biggest concerns, followed by affordable housing and homelessness. 

The Bronx and Staten Island citizens rated him the worst at 61 and 71 percent, respectively. And his overall approval in the city sits at 43 percent approving and 37 percent disapproving, the New York Post reported. 

In addition, 86 percent of New Yorkers want more transit police in the subway system, but despite the promise of adding more officers to the system, most stations go empty. The former transit cop, himself, even encouraged citizens to send his office pictures of officers who are too busy on their phones or chatting with coworkers to keep a vigilant eye out for crime. 

If Adams does stake his bid for presidency, he will be following in the footsteps of his predecessors, such as Bill de Blasio, Michael Bloomberg, and Rudy Giuliani.

However, no NYC mayor has ever made it into the White House. 

But it seems the current mayor has already been making moves to be viewed as a national leader, as he’s been seen making his way across the country at events. 

He’s recently been seen Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California earlier this month and at a cryptocurrency conference in Miami and side-by-side with Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot to protest gun violence in March.  

 HISTORY 

Great And Horrible News 

by Blessin Adams (William Collins £18.99, 304pp) (William Collins £18.99, 304pp) 

Summer 1657: two apprentices, John Knight and Nathaniel Butler, shared a bedroom in a house in Milk Street, London. 

The premises belonged to John’s master, who was away, so John had invited his friend over because he disliked being alone. This proved a terrible mistake.

Nathaniel had his thieving eye on the money kept downstairs and only John stood in his way. In the night, Nathaniel ‘plunged a knife into John’s face and slashed his cheek open from his mouth all the way to his ear’. He held John down until he died. Then, Nathaniel severed his tongue, ‘for no other reason,’ he later confessed, ‘than to please the devil’.

Arrested, tried and sentenced to death, Nathaniel became a repentant sinner. ‘Now I am launching into the ocean of eternity,’ he proclaimed on the scaffold. ‘Lord Jesus receive my soul!’

In the opening chapter of her grimly fascinating book, Adams draws upon the popular literature of the day to tell the story in vivid detail.

People in the past enjoyed learning about true crime as much as we do — and the bloodier the better. We have podcasts and gritty TV dramas; they had lurid broadside ballads and cheap pamphlets.

One thing that has changed over the centuries, thankfully, is the nature of punishment. 

For example, we no longer take such a harsh view of sex outside marriage. Adams quotes the case of Henry Wharton and Elizabeth Mason who were condemned for the ‘crime’ of begetting a ‘base born childe’. Stripped naked to the waist, they were paraded through the streets of their Middlesex village and flogged repeatedly.

The most horrendous punishment of all was reserved for treason. Adams describes the process of hanging, drawing and quartering with excruciating precision. Little wonder that a gentleman named Miles Sindercombe was prepared to commit suicide to avoid it. 

Sindercombe had been hired to kill England’s Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, but he proved an incompetent assassin, botching the job several times before being captured.

In prison, facing the horrors of ‘drawing’ (having his intestines removed while he was still alive), he took poison. ‘I do take this course,’ he wrote, ‘because I would not have all the open shame of the world executed upon my body.’

Even after his death, however, the authorities were intent on humiliating him. His body was hauled to a scaffold at Tower Hill. Beneath the scaffold was a hole into which his corpse was thrown, and a huge iron stake was driven through it.

This was a version of the punishment liable to be inflicted on any successful suicide.

Adams recounts the tale from 1619 of Francis Marshall, a 70-year-old Essex farmer who killed himself in a fit of melancholy. Determined to make suicide look like murder, family members mutilated his body, beating and slashing it to persuade the local coroner’s jury that he had been done to death by robbers.

Then, as now, the crimes that aroused particular public outrage were those involving children. The story of Margret Vincent, a Catholic convert in Acton, London, in 1616, who strangled her small sons in the belief that she was saving their souls, now seems a case of tragically misplaced religious fervour and mental illness.

To the pamphleteers of the time, she was ‘more cruell than the viper, the invenomd serpent . . . or any beast whatsoever’.

‘The early moderns were obsessed by stories of death, crime and justice,’ Adams states in her introduction. Her book, which covers the two centuries between 1500 and 1700, proves her point with a succession of grisly but engrossing cases.