Plucking, Primping, and Politicking

These are dangerous days for America’s biggest city. A smiling, thirty-three-year-old former rapper is poised to unleash full-blown communism across the five boroughs via free bus travel. Andrew Cuomo, desperate to avenge his humiliation in the Democratic primary, has resorted to actually appearing on the streets of New York, an indignity no resident of Westchester should ever have to suffer. And the summer heat is so intense that Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s frontal tan line is now under threat for the first time in decades. Many New Yorkers will naturally be concerned about the state of the incumbent mayor’s health as he rallies the forces of capital, common sense, and pest control to his once-unlikely bid for reelection. Fortunately, while the attention of the city has been on Trump 2.0’s fascist theatrics and the excitement of Zohran Mamdani’s bolt to the Democratic mayoral nomination, Eric Adams has been focusing on what matters most: himself.

All political campaigns are an exercise in exaggeration: whatever image Adams projects of himself between now and November’s election will inevitably be a caricature. The real Adams—Eric uncut—was on display over the first six months of this year, when most people had given the mayor up for dead. In the obscurity of this strange interregnum, between the suspension and eventual dismissal of federal corruption charges against him and the launch of his reelection bid, Adams was free to be himself, unburdened by close scrutiny or the leaden reality of his historically low approval ratings. And what did he do during this time? He made sure he emerged into the glare of an election campaign soaped, sanded, powdered, and polished. The Gandhi of New York is running toward polling day refreshed and ready for anything.

By this late stage in his rotten mayoralty, everyone has their favorite Eric Adams moment: it could be the unforgettable video of him searching a child’s bedroom for concealed firearms and drugs, any one of his many references to New York as “the [insert foreign capital here] of America,” or the time he was asked to summarize the year 2023 in one word and replied, “New York.” (This last answer was also when Adams observed that “this is a place where every day you wake up, you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center to a person who’s celebrating a new business that’s open.”) Each of these texts unquestionably belongs in the canon, but I’d like to suggest that the move that best captures Adams’s mayorship in all its slime and comedy is his penchant for inviting cameras to record him receiving treatments in spas and salons throughout the city.

Not only has Adams, over his nearly four years in City Hall, frequently combined mayoral business with personal grooming; in many ways personal grooming is mayoral business under his administration, the highest priority of government. All the mayor’s obsessions with urban hygiene—the homeless sweeps, the crackdowns on street vendors, the janky attempts at trash containerization, the over-policing of the subway platforms, the gassing of the tree beds—are pale externalizations of the real work of this administration, which is to keep the big man’s dome marbled, scalp relaxed, nails buffed, eyebrows plucked, nasal hairs in check, corns under control, and facial tension tight. Adams’s body is not only a sentient vault of Turkish Airlines frequent flyer points. It is also his temple, and our salvation—the very soul of the city. No leader in American political history has spent more time engaging with the press and public from the beautician’s chair. This is a man who loves being worked on.

Since his election in 2021, Adams’s social media accounts have featured footage and pictures of pedicures, haircuts, scalp massages, and eyebrow treatments the mayor has undergone while performing official duties; just this year Adams conducted two separate press conferences from different spas around the city, one while having his eyebrows threaded and the other while undergoing laser hair removal. (When he was running for mayor in 2021, Adams said the one thing he couldn’t live without was hot bubble baths with warm roses inside.) These displays of vulnerability and narcissism offer a fascinating insight into a troubled mayoralty, inviting New Yorkers to think of Adams as a figure at once at the mercy of his constituents, willingly submitting to the barber’s scissors or the beautician’s laser; supremely confident in his ability to escape these moments of self-exposure unharmed; and militantly committed to the cause of self-preservation. Adams, who is widely understood to have struck a deal with the Trump administration on immigration enforcement to have his federal corruption charges suspended, seems like a man who will do anything to save his own skin: and you better believe that skin will stay moisturized and professionally cleansed through whatever ordeals confront him over the remaining months of his term.

Adams spent the final few weeks of the recent Democratic primary campaign half-heartedly trying to match Mamdani’s ferocious online charisma. The Democratic mayoral nominee built an unstoppable citywide movement by walking the length of Manhattan, filming campaign videos in seemingly every language spoken throughout the five boroughs, and generally having the time of his life. For Adams, by contrast, doing “online” has meant posting a “get ready with me” video of him ironing a dress shirt in pants seemingly thrifted from the 2003 NBA draft, preparing a plant-based lunch from a mayoral “kitchen” set up for some reason in a distressingly cluttered window sill, and mixing together a series of morning smoothies that all seem to feature some ungodly combination of avocado, cacao powder, and carrot. (Roughage is a major theme of Adams’s late-term digital output; the man quite honestly seems one more bad poll away from doing a “come take a shit with me” reel.)

The mayor, these videos implicitly argue, doesn’t need any of this, however much an unfeeling New York public may have soured on him. He could be anything, really: a wellness bro, a men’s rights guy, a Republican. (Though let’s be honest: he’s basically all of these things already.) But even as Adams thrashes up another vile concoction in the Nutribullet, you can tell that in his mind he’s already back in the salon, eyes closed, lips at rest, hands clasped over his thorax. The kitchen may be where he gets his energy, but it’s in recline that he finds peace.

In the treatment chair Adams alternates between shocks of assaultive laughter and an extreme, almost cadaverous stillness. During a threading and scalp massage at Manat beauty salon in Jackson Heights last winter, Adams found such serenity he eventually stopped responding to reporters’ questions altogether, slipping into a stupefied sequence of grunts and mmmms. One poster on X noted that Adams, wearing a pair of oversized sunglasses in the spa recliner at a recent laser hair removal treatment, looked “embalmed,” and I sense Adams does in fact want us to picture him in a dance with death, or at least danger, when he shows himself getting preened and primped: it is perhaps fitting that a man who has spent much of his mayoralty at a figurative razor’s edge has made his comfort with proximity to the literal blade so clear. Superficially moments of weakness, Adams’s stints at the mercy of the city’s coiffeurs and cosmetologists are in fact displays of strength, representing the transformation of “treat yourself” from a slogan of self-care into a principle of power: his is a politics of plunder and gua sha at the same time.

Adams is often accused of using his time in office to accept bribes from the Turkish government, commit campaign finance fraud, pad his staff with jobs for his family and friends, sell migrants out to the Trump administration in exchange for personal gain, party at downtown members-only club Zero Bond, and desperately attempt to worm his way in with the reactionary influencer set. All of which is true, of course, whatever the tortuous circumstances by which the criminal case against him was eventually dismissed, but he’s also made time to meet his constituents where they are. And where they are, in the Adams worldview, is at his feet, taking a big cheese grater to his desiccated heels. American public life is filled with flutey idealizations of “public service;” Adams is the rare political innovator who’s taken that idea and turned it into something the public should perform for him. He’s a mayor for the little people—the ones down there, working on his calluses.

There’s a contrast of real importance here. Whereas Mamdani and the other rising political stars in his progressive orbit—such as city council members Chi Ossé and Shahana Hanif—engage with New Yorkers as equals, on the street, Adams—under the otherwise admirable guise of “supporting local business”—interacts with them in places of commerce, through his toes, fingers, eyebrows, and nostrils. Everything under this administration is a transaction; the only mayoral dialogue with the voters that matters is one that tells them how hard to go on his lumbago. What, exactly, is a mayor to do when the city he runs stubbornly refuses to become more affordable? Adams doesn’t know, but his leadership is founded on the unusual conviction that a quick scalp treatment and eyebrow touchup might be part of the answer.

Adams is not the first leader in American political life to get a haircut, of course, but it’s telling that his closest peers as a performer of public grooming are overseas strongmen. Former Philippines leader Rodrigo Duterte was fond of submitting to the scissors and the camera simultaneously, while Brazilian ex-president Jair Bolsonaro filmed himself getting the chop almost as often as he got Covid-19. Even diplomacy, during Bolsonaro’s presidency, took a back seat to the demands of personal care: the Brazilian once canceled a meeting with the French foreign minister so he could livestream from the barber’s seat. However powerful these associations and however dark they suggest the Trump-less future might have been for Adams—Bolsonaro spent a portion of his post-presidency in exile, while Duterte is currently in the custody of the International Criminal Court, awaiting trial for crimes against humanity—the strongest analogue here comes perhaps not from real life but from film.

Adams’s submission to the city’s beautifiers evokes the rich cinematic history of mafia bosses conducting their affairs from the barber’s seat, offering the perfect visual metaphor for the mobification of public office in America today. No doubt Adams imagines himself pulling off these feats of controlled defenselessness with the panache of Al Capone in The Untouchables, whose opening tableau shows old Scarface charming Chicago beat reporters while exposing his carotid arteries to the existential jeopardy of a wet shave. But if the polls are any indication, Adams’s political career is more likely to end, if only figuratively, with something closer to the climax of 1962 Italian classic Mafioso, which shows a mob boss, smoking a cigar and swaddled in white towels, expiring under a hail of bullets in a barber’s chair, a scene that was itself inspired by the 1957 slaying of Murder, Inc. supremo Albert Anastasia in Manhattan’s Park Sheraton Hotel.

Load up, brave Eric, the finish is near. In contrast to the crusaders against crime, drones for upzoning, and milquetoast Park Slope dads who came before him, Adams has brought something radically different to City Hall. Call it “swagger,” the putrid vibes of a midtown Manhattan cigar lounge at 6:00 p.m. on a Friday, undiluted lust for self-enrichment, or a commitment to advanced cuticle care: whatever it is, it’s unlike anything the city has seen before, or will probably see again. At last, after years of starchy public servants filling the top job, New York has found a mayor with the self-confidence to approach public office like it’s a bottomless brunch. And now that miraculous run is almost certainly coming to an end.

With all the energy among progressives behind Mamdani, and Sliwa and Cuomo both determined to stay in the race, splitting the conservative vote, Adams’s hopes of reelection in November seem faint at best, however much pity money the Bill Ackmans and Dan Loebs of the world throw at him. Adams is toast, which makes it all the more important to appreciate this future right-wing podcast regular, and his superlative contribution to the history of American political conduct, while we still can. The election is still four months away, but Adams’s legacy is assured, his epitaph already written: he escaped federal corruption charges; he partied at Zero Bond; he got his eyebrows done.