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Eric Adams is on a press tour that would make Timothée Chalamet blush, blitzing longform sit-down podcast video interviews opposite dudes. You wouldn’t call it getting out in front of things, exactly. Adams has already been indicted in one of at least five federal investigations; his legal troubles are now matched by his political troubles—his favorability ratings have hit rock bottom, and his polling is even worse. If Andrew Cuomo gets in the New York mayoral race (and there is lots of speculation he will), it looks as if it’ll be over for Adams. It might be over for Adams regardless.

In any case, the mayor has taken time out of his busy schedule of hitting the club and cutting the budget to clear the air. And what better way, for the cause of purification, than going on Tucker Carlson’s online show.

Let’s just establish this from the outset: Adams has spent much of his political life as a registered Republican. He has also been dogged by allegations of corruption for nearly as long as he’s been in politics.

He staked his unlikely political rise to the mayor’s office in 2021 on a GOP tried and true: a crime panic. Lawbreaking was out of control in NYC, at least according to the New York Post, and only a former police officer could get tough on the poor, the turnstile-hoppers, and the homeless. Conservative media cheered his position, as did some center-left pundits.

Being “tough on crime” has worked for conservative politicians for decades, and it worked for Adams too. But quickly, Adams’ actual conservative policies and resolute unseriousness about governance knocked him out of the public’s good graces.

Looking for another powerless scapegoat on which to pin the mess of his administration, and to cover up vicious and unnecessary cuts to popular social programs, Adams joined a conservative ensemble training its ire on immigrants and asylum-seekers and creating more unfounded panic, around migrant crime specifically. This, Adams believes, was the beginning of the end of his relationship with the Democratic Party, at least according to the version of events he tells Carlson. Not because his efforts were mean-spirited, cynical, unnecessary, or beset by poor leadership, but because he was engaged in such a brave act of truth-telling that it created huge political liabilities for Democrats who were captive to Big Immigrant. In Adams’ version of the tale, it was then and only then that the politicized Justice Department came knocking, and clapped the cuffs on Adams.

“I read through the indictment … I thought it was ridiculous,” is how Carlson begins the interview. “You were indicted for accepting upgraded flights.”

Of course, Adams’ Turkish Airlines account is only the funniest piece of a litany of infractions for which he was indicted. One small problem with the interview, which was branded as “Tucker Challenges Eric Adams,” is that Carlson never once, in the 51-minute sit-down, mentions the straw-donor campaign scheme for which Adams has been charged.

That would lead to some inconvenient issues regarding Adams’ version of this story. Long before he was the only Democrat brave enough to call out crime or immigrants, he was allegedly funding his campaign through an elaborate series of falsely reported donations. One of those straw donors pleaded guilty earlier this month.

Campaign-finance infractions are grave enough as is; in Adams’ case, they’re particularly offensive because of his city’s public matching program. The initiative, which matches small-dollar donations up to $250 from city residents at a rate of up to eight times the original amount, is one of the most well-intentioned, pro-democracy civic procedures in American politics, a meaningful bulwark against big money buying elections.

According to the indictment, Adams’ campaign conspired to funnel illegal donations from foreign nationals into his campaign coffers and encouraged business leaders to circumvent contribution limits by instructing their employees to donate, then reimbursing them. In doing so, Adams also availed himself of millions of dollars in public matching funds.

In short, the tough-on-crime mayor got into Gracie Mansion not just by abusing public trust but by allegedly stealing money from the public purse. Carlson does not dwell on this, perhaps because that’s not a Republican no-no. Adams claims that New York’s immigration surge was a financial drain on the city’s resources, which is true, and that the federal support was insufficient, which is also likely. What he doesn’t even try to back up is that his slashing of library hours and 3-K or the termination of outdoor dining had anything to do with this.

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Which leads to Adams’ third and (perhaps) final, well-worn Republican plaint: The Democratic Party left him. “People often say, ‘Well, you don’t sound like a Democrat,’ ” Adams confides to Carlson. “No. Well, the party left me, and it left working-class people.”

If you have a politician who talks like a Republican, governs like a Republican, and in fact was a Republican before he was a Democrat, well … he might just be angling for a pardon from a Republican president. Or maybe he wants to join Donald Trump’s Cabinet or, if worst comes to worst, to be a TV anchor in a new Republican media venture. A better question than “Did the Democratic Party leave Eric Adams?” is “Why on earth did the Democratic Party get into bed with this guy in the first place?”

Carlson posits the interview as a sign that Trump’s theory of the world has broken through, now undeniable even for Democrats; “New York Mayor Eric Adams Sounds a Lot Like a Trump Voter” is the name of the segment. What the interview actually shows, instead, is proof that there are at least two prominent Republicans from New York who will say anything to avoid consequences for their own corruption.