MAGA Defends Eric Adams

What it means that half the political spectrum is now automatically pro-corruption

At 9:18 ET last night, shortly after news came down that Eric Adams was being indicted, I asked whether MAGA would soon jump to his defense. I had followed the Adams saga a little bit, but, like the rest of the public, I did not know what he would be charged with or what evidence the government had against him. Nonetheless, based on this very limited set of facts, I could predict that there was a good chance MAGA would take the side of Adams and call his indictment a deep state conspiracy.

Within a few hours, I was able to start putting together a thread of prominent Trump supporters doing just this. I couldn’t be sure what angle they would take, but they apparently believe that this is in response to Adams having butted heads with the Biden administration over immigration policy. Each tweet I found seemed to add another layer to the conspiracy and hyperbolic nature of the charges against the Biden administration. Jack Posobiec, who has 2.7 million followers and serves as a kind of node for the MAGA influencer space, compared Biden to Xi Jinping in making his opponents disappear.

Note that it’s not like there was some long running narrative that Biden and Adams were enemies in the first place. When people were calling on Biden to step aside after his disastrous debate with Trump, Adams continued to reaffirm his support for the president. After Biden announced he would not be running again, Adams as a good party man endorsed Harris. It’s true that there has been a dispute between the administration and the mayor over immigration policy. But if Biden was calling the FBI to tell them to lock up political opponents, Adams would be pretty far down on that list. Nonetheless, sensing that this could be a way to build sympathy, and eventually get a pardon, last night Adams leaned into the idea that he was being prosecuted for his position on immigration as MAGAs leapt to his defense. Here’s the current cover of the New York Post.

Now, for all I know Eric Adams is innocent. I have not read the indictment yet, and he deserves his day in court. But it’s one thing to have a presumption of innocence, and another to start spinning conspiracy theories about political persecution the moment someone is charged with a crime.

Why did this happen? And how was I able to predict that the mayor of New York City being indicted would be enough to rally MAGA to his defense?