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Eric Adams isn’t giving up without a fight.
The mayor vowed to save New York City from socialist Zohran Mamdani Wednesday — slamming the socialist City Hall hopeful as a “snake oil salesman” who will devastate the Big Apple.
A feisty Adams pointed to The Post’s Wednesday front page headline — “NYC SOS: Who will save city after radical socialist batters Cuomo in Dem mayoral primary?” — and argued he was the one to take up the challenge.
“I’m going to take this SOS. Who will save city … ‘Eric,” Hizzoner said during a sitdown with The Post’s editorial board.
It came after Mamdani stunningly defeated Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary — with the disgraced ex-governor conceding the race Tuesday night.
Adams — who is expected to officially launch his re-election bid on the steps of City Hall Thursday — did credit Mamdani for skillfully focusing on and exploiting the affordability issue, calling it a real concern.
But he accused Mamdani, a two-term 33-year-old state Assemblyman from Queens, of selling New Yorkers a rotten bill of goods.
“Affordability is a real issue. You can feed that … by just being a snake oil salesman and say, ‘I’m going to give you everything for free. I’m going to give you a free supermarket. I’ll give you no rent. I’ll give you free buses.’
“His whole campaign is saying, ‘I’m going to give you everything free.'”
Adams slammed Mamdani’s ambitious proposals to jack up taxes on the top 1% of income earners and businesses by $10 billion to pay for free bus service, housing expansion and government-run supermarkets as pie in the sky.
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“What he’s created is going to devastate the progress in the city,” he said.
Hizzoner pointed out that the mayor can’t raise city income or corporate taxes without approval from the state Legislature and governor.
He noted Mamdani’s pipe dream proposals — such as expanding free bus service — have gone nowhere in the state Assembly.
It’s also the progressive Democrats in Albany who approved laws that have undermined New York City public safety, Adams said, citing the unpopular cashless bail law signed by Cuomo and raising the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18.
Adams also zinged Cuomo for running a lackluster campaign, thinking he could win over voters by campaigning in a few churches instead of hitting the city streets non-stop, as Mamdani did.
“New Yorkers have five fingers. They love the middle one the most,” he said.
“I knew Cuomo wouldn’t beat this guy.”
Adams, a Democrat, skipped the party’s primary this year after winning the nomination and general election in 2021.
He is instead running in the November general election on an independent line to be called either “End AntiSemitism” or “Safe and Affordable.”
The mayor and his administration have been mired in scandal during his term, sinking his popularity among voters.
While his federal corruption indictment was dismissed by President Trump’s Justice Department, others in his administration also have been charged with corruption crimes, including his former longtime top aide Ingrid Lewis-Martin and former city Building Commissioner Eric Ulrich.
Adams, in a rare mea culpa, admitted to making mistakes in some of his City Hall hirings and said he would work to “rebuild the public trust I had.”
“There are people I trusted that broke my heart. They did things that were wrong,” he said.
He also said he also took the brunt of the blame of the blame for the migrant crisis that was a national issue.
“I have to rebuild the trust I had,” Adams said. “I have enough time to do that.”
Many political analyst said Adams’ re-election bid is a longshot. But he noted then-Mayor John Lindsay won re-election on the minor Liberal Party ballot line in 1969.
Despite being tarnished by scandal, he boasts a record he believes compares favorably to Mamdani’s promises — record low number of murders and violent shootings, a growing post COVID-19 pandemic economic and jobs recovery, and an increase in pre-k and 3-k seats in public schools.
“Here is someone talking about disbanding the police and demonizing our police. We say no to that. We built better relationships with you and your police department,” Adams said.
He said it will be easy to compare his vision of the future with Mamdani’s and show how the Big Apple has fared under his watch versus cities that have or had been run by more leftist mayors, such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and Portland.
Adams said he will run a smart campaign on social media and in the streets and bring out new voters in the general election, as Mamdani did in the primary.
He said there will be a big turnout of Jewish voters in the general election, who don’t look kindly on Mamdani’s anti-Israel views, which some critics argue crosses into antisemitism.
The mayor said he will also tap into emerging immigrant communities whose families escaped real communism and socialism in other parts of the world and despite creeping socialism here.
“Being everywhere is not Mamdani’s trademark,” Adams said, “it’s my trademark.”
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