Stephanie Ruhle: The election day is only five days away, and one local race has captured national attention because what it could mean for the Democratic Party, who will be the next mayor of our fair city, New York City?
A large number of New Yorkers have turned out to vote early, and Zohran Mamdani continues to lead the polls in a three-way race. One person no longer running is our current mayor, Eric Adams. He dropped his bid before the election about a month ago. He joins me now for a keynote conversation. Thank you for joining me.
Mayor Eric Adams: Thank you. Great to be here.
Ruhle: I know politics is politics, but it wasn't that long ago that you thought Andrew Cuomo was a bad guy. You said he was a snake. You said he was a liar. And now you've endorsed him. Right. What has changed?
Mayor Adams: We, Andrew and I, disagree on many things, but we agree on one thing, Zohran and the DSA, which many people are disconnecting. Zohran is DSA, Democratic Socialist of America. Whatever emotions I have around Andrew, it does not compare to the fear I have around Zohran and the DSA's direction they would take this city.
Ruhle: I hear you being critical of him. You have said in the past, though, when you became mayor or when you were running, there were people who said you couldn't handle the job, it was a complex job, could a cop do this job? If he were to be mayor, do you think he deserves the grace that you wish you had?
Mayor Adams: Well, it's more than his ability to do the job. I mean, to go from being a rapper to an assemblyman and now want to be the mayor, that's different. It's the policies. Decriminalizing prostitution. That's a real problem with quality of life. Even taking the containerization that we did for garbage, you don't even see rats running around on streets anymore–
Ruhle: I'm going to tell you, I live in New York City and there are definitely rats on my street.
Mayor Adams: So we got to finish the job. There's more to do. But also, taking 3,000 prisoners out of Rikers Island and returning them to the communities that they preyed on, that's a quality of life issue. What are we doing with our police officers?
So, it's not only being inexperienced on how to run the city, but it's also having a gang of people around him that's immature of understanding the complexity of this city. Like telling millionaires, we don't want you in the city.
Well, who's going to pay 50 percent of those taxes for our police officers? Or taxing individuals based on their ethnicity. White communities should pay more. That's what we're fighting now, with black communities paying more. That is the issue. Not only his inexperience, but idealism colliding with realism of running this city.
Ruhle: When you were elected four years ago, people were very hopeful. You said you were going to bridge things, bridge the police, racial tensions. You described yourself as the future of the Democratic Party. What happened?
Mayor Adams: Well, I don't think anything happened. We had a list of items that we wanted to do, bring down crimes, return our economy, educate our children. And now go look at the list that I ran on and look at what we've done. Crime numbers decreased, almost record numbers in shooters and homicide with a great commissioner in Police Commissioner Tisch.
Our children are outpacing the state in reading math. We broke the job records 12 times. More jobs in New York City in the history of the city right now. More small businesses. We build more housing than any other mayor before. We are building, preparing for the future, 426,000. More than 12 years of Bloomberg, eight years of de Blasio combined. So the city has recovered exactly as I promised.
Ruhle: You said you were going to be the future of the Democratic Party. Do you still believe that? What are you going to do next? Could you work for President Trump?
Mayor Adams: No. What I want to do next, we're still working. I have so many offers. People looked at what we did in the city–
Ruhle: Did President Trump give you one of those offers?
Mayor Adams: You know, he has never at any time said, Eric, I want you to do A, B, and C. That was part of the undermining of my campaign, actually. When people kept lying over and over again, Eric is going to Saudi Arabia, Eric is going to HUD, Eric is meeting with the president at the Mets game. All of that hurt my ability to run a campaign. And I kept trying to be as forthright as possible, but it was just reported inappropriately.
Ruhle: When you see how the federal government is detaining immigrants in New York City today, do you have regrets that you appeared on Fox News with Tom Homan the day after the president did intervene and help with your legal situation? Do you regret that?
Mayor Adams: Not at all. There was never any quid pro quo. We were very clear on that. There was never any promises made. Remember, what I said about immigration pre-election was the same thing I said post-election. People seem to forget that.
Dangerous immigrants that come to our city, wreak havoc, create crime, shoot police officers, they don't deserve the right to be in our country. And I've been clear on that from the beginning.
Ruhle: Most people would agree. But do you think–
Mayor Adams: 86 percent of New Yorkers agree on that position.
Ruhle: But would 86 percent of New Yorkers agree that we should open an ICE facility on Rikers Island? Because you were open to that.
Mayor Adams: Yes, and I still believe we should. First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro is looking at that. Why shouldn't we have our federal agencies, FBI, ICE, HSI, all on Rikers Island to coordinate on those dangerous gang members?
Rikers Island is not for the immigrants and undocumented who are following the law. The people on there are on there because they broke the law. And it makes no sense to me when a judge ruled that immigrants would be afraid because federal agents are on Rikers Island. What are you talking about?
Tren de Aragua, they were preying on innocent immigrants. They were forcing women into prostitution. They were selling drugs. They were shooting guns. We've lost our way to understand every day working class people want to be safe. And so all of these far left philosophies, they're not in alignment with working class people of this city and this country.
Ruhle: I want to ask you about a piece of your legacy that I care a lot about. What you've done in New York City in terms of children with dyslexia, 20 percent of our population has it. You piloted a program to specifically address kids with dyslexia, see, with kids in our public schools, but even new reading programs for kids in our schools. Tell us how it's gone and where does it go from here?
Mayor Adams: I love that. And because you're right, because I walked into a classroom as a child, third grader, and I was just laughed at every day. I used to pray, God, please don't make me read because they bullied me the whole day. And we're doing K through 12 focus on dyslexia. Even adults. We're doing screening for dyslexia.
30 percent of our prison population nationwide are dyslexic. And what we must do is prevent the failure. And that is why we're doing screening and it's going extremely well. And I hear it all the time. Those of us who are dyslexic, we know what it is to struggle and believe you're dumb instead of just knowing that you learn differently. But that's one of our legacy projects, imagine–
Ruhle: That's why it's not a surprise when you hear that 30 percent of the prison population, because they felt they were stupid. They were told they were stupid. School didn't work for them and they fell out of the system.
Mayor Adams: Right. Well said. And that's how I felt. I felt, why am I even going to school? And you know, mommy used to tell me, baby, hang in there. And I can still hear her today saying, oh, you got this, you know, and so many parents, they feel when their children are going through this. And I knew we had to go and target those areas that had a pathway to people.
Ruhle: Why does it remain so difficult to solve problems like this that we know so many people have?
Mayor Adams: I love that. It's unbelievable, the special interests in this city. You know, Archbishop Desmond Tutu state, we spent a lifetime pulling people out of the river instead of preventing them from falling in in the first place.
We have special interests in this city that they just hang out downstream and they profit from pulling people out of the river. And every time you try to stop it, they fight you over and over again. They fought us on homelessness. They fought us on mental health. They fought us on revamping our educational system. You're seeing special interests that have hijacked the needs of the people. But I'm not going to give up. I'm going to fight them even more when I get out of government.
Ruhle: Then this is probably your last appearance on our air as mayor of New York. What's your message to people?
Mayor Adams: I love the city.
Ruhle: Me too.
Mayor Adams: I put that bulletproof vest on for 22 years and I protected the children, families of the city. And I think history is going to reflect on my administration and how I took a city that was experiencing COVID, that was experienced migrants and asylum seekers and all of those things. I never gave up. And I am like an everyday New Yorker. I'm just a New Yorker, nothing complicated about me. I'm perfectly imperfect, but I'm dedicated to the greatest city on the globe.
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