Trump Saved Eric Adams’s Bacon—and Put the Country Up for Sale

Given that Adams is hardly guaranteed reelection as New York mayor, his likelihood of someday ascending to the presidency seems a stretch. But you can see the logic of Adams’s Turkish contacts at play: For pennies on the dollar, they could pocket a rising political star, getting in on the ground floor with someone who, by all appearances, did not care one bit that he was crossing the reddest of red lines for American politicians.

The better question is why Adams himself allegedly went along with—and even personally steered—these foreign funding operations. Part of it was surely related to the lack of prosecutions in this space; before Adams, no mayor in America had ever been indicted on federal charges of foreign funding. But then again, maybe the answer is obvious. As Adams told a supporter, “You win the race by raising money.… Have to raise money. Everything else is fluff.”

In that sense, the Adams case isn’t just about foreign regimes suddenly eyeing new ways to flood American campaigns with cash—it’s about the fact that American campaigns can be flooded with cash, period. Perhaps this was always inevitable. Given the Citizens United decision of 2010, which effectively lifted spending caps on American elections, perhaps it was always just a matter of time before candidates and foreign officials alike realized there were even more campaign dollars to be tapped abroad, instead of just among deep-pocketed Americans.