Eric Adams wants you to ‘cancel’ him, but how would that even work?

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election to a second term, Mayor Eric Adams has focused on the most important aspect of what a Trump presidency could mean for New York City: what it means for Eric Adams. The mayor has spent weeks complaining that he’s the real victim of America’s broken justice system, all because he’s lived under a cloud of suspicion related to being in the pocket of Big Turkey (the country not the bird) and a handful of possible straw donor schemes that earned gobs of public money for his campaign. 

And while the mayor is smart enough to not go on TV and say “I dare a jury to convict me,” he has dared the court of public opinion to do just that, using multiple press appearances to demand people cancel him because he wants to deport the bad immigrants, the ones accused of crimes, and because he’s “for America.”

“Cancel me because I'm going to protect the people of the city,” Adams said last Tuesday at his weekly press conference. “If you come into this country in this city and think you're going to harm innocent New Yorkers and innocent migrants and asylum seekers, this is not the mayor you want to be in the city under.”

He kept at it with another challenge on Friday during an interview on PIX11.

“My focus is the American people and the people of New York City. And those who don't like it, they would cancel me. And I say, cancel me. I'm for America,” the mayor told his invisible cancelers.

The new tactic raises some questions, chief among them should a 64-year-old man be telling people to cancel him? Is this the kind of thing that should spur a wellness check? Does the mayor think cancellation looks like a phone call where a mysterious voice tells him, “You’re canceled and that’s it chief”? 

“Mayor Adams says a lot of things that don’t make sense but egging people on to ‘cancel’ him when he’s pissed off a bunch of people with budget cuts and is being investigated for corruption and misuse of public funds seems like a challenge a lot of folks are ready to take on,” said Zara Nasir, a spokesperson for The People’s Plan, a coalition of left-wing organizations that has challenged Adams’ budget proposals.

You’d also have to consider what canceling the mayor would look like in a practical sense. People would have to hide their copy of Healthy at Last from their friends and potential dates, and the mayor’s weekly press conferences would need to move to a free speech zone like the America First Warehouse, conveniently located in Ronkonkoma’s finest office park. He would still get to go on Morning Joe probably, because those people will suck up to anyone.

But most importantly, if we do want to take the mayor up on his challenge, how does one cancel a mayor?

The legal process
In a stunning oversight, the New York City Charter doesn’t say anything about how to cancel a mayor. The closest the charter comes to dealing with deplatforming the mayor are the ways to remove them from office. That power is left to either the governor, who can remove the mayor after bringing charges of malfeasance against the them, or a something called the “committee on mayoral inability,” made up of the city comptroller, speaker of the City Council, the longest-serving borough president, the corporation counsel and a deputy mayor of the mayor’s choosing. But the charter doesn’t suggest what would happen if someone, somewhere said “Eric Adams is canceled.”

The state Constitution and penal code are also silent on this issue, which again seems like a troubling oversight.

What does history say
No mayor in New York City history has been canceled either. Even vile Copperhead Fernando Wood, who tried to align New York City with the Confederacy during the Civil War, got elected to Congress in New York after trying to join the city’s forces with the traitorous South. Maybe the closest we’ve come to canceling a mayor is 1932, when then-Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the full weight of his office to get wildly corrupt playboy mayor Jimmy Walker (who Adams has invited comparisons to) to resign before Roosevelt could remove him. However, If we consider cancellation to also bring with it exile from public life, Walker was not canceled, because he was feted with a strangely laudatory biopic, the 1957 Bob Hope vehicle Beau James.

What can be done?
If even the most odious of the city’s mayors have avoided being canceled, how can anyone ever hope to cancel Eric Adams? 

There is one possibility out there that could serve as a form of soft cancellation, if you’re the type of person who considers the consequences of your actions to be a historical injustice. Earlier this week, the Campaign Finance Board disqualified half of the mayor’s most recent fundraising haul from the city’s lucrative matching funds program. While the CFB’s stated reason involved a series of easily-avoidable paperwork issues and not because Adams is “for America,” it still cost Adams almost a quarter of a million dollars. 

And Adams may lose even more than that next week. On Monday, the Campaign Finance Board votes on how much money to allocate each candidate in the first round of matching funds, and could decline to give the mayor any money at all because of suspicions about where his donations have been coming from. Which again, has less to do with the question of whether Adams is pro-Israel or against crimes by non-citizens and has more to do with trying to tamp down on corruption. 

Money is speech in America — very literally, per the Supreme Court — and making it harder for Adams to have money to pay his campaign staff (and to run ads featuring him and an AI version of Ed Koch saying the Pledge of Allegiance) would be a way of silencing and possibly finally cancelling the mayor. But people who think Adams isn’t entitled to the money don’t think refusing to give it to him is akin to cancelling him.

“No, it’s just what should happen when a candidate abuses our public matching funds system,” City Council Member Lincoln Restler, one of the most prominent voices asking the CFB to strip Adams of his public matching funds, told the Groove.

Other Adams critics who’ve pushed a case against his mayoralty didn’t necessarily want to get into the question of whether criticizing the mayor is canceling him, but they also weren’t impressed by the gauntlet he threw down.

“I think folks will up the ante on him after the holidays so he can assume folks are up to the challenge,” said Nasir.