NYC Mayor Adams claims there’s a ‘coordinated’ effort by unnamed people to keep him to one term

Mayor Adams declared Wednesday that there’s a coordinated effort to relegate him to one-term mayor status, but he declined to specify exactly who he believes is involved in that push.

Adams was responding to questions about remarks he made Sunday at a Father’s Day church service where he said unnamed forces that have aligned against him “cannot allow this mayor to do two terms” and that those forces are “coordinated.”

“There’s a body of people who were pleased with 30 years without having a mayor that looked like me,” Adams said Wednesday at an unrelated press conference. “I upset a lot of people with my appointments, with my initiatives, with my challenges — and just who I am. We can’t pretend as though, to some in the city, I don’t fit the mold of what a mayor should be.”

Over the weekend, Adams, the second Black mayor in city history, spoke at the Lenox Road Baptist Church in Brooklyn where he told worshipers that God told him 30 years ago that “you are going to be the mayor Jan. 21st, 2022.”

He then touched on a more recent divine message he says he received — that “God said talk about God” — and he said following that command led to a backlash on “all the front pages” and “the national stories.”

On Wednesday, Adams ticked down a list of the racially diverse appointments he’s made since taking office and said his political enemies view him as a “disrupter” for making them.

“When you start to look at what I’m doing, there’s some discomfort,” he said. “I’m a disrupter. And anytime you disrupt something, there are those who sit back and say, you know, this guy is messing with our stuff.”

Adams framed this tension not in political terms, but through the lens of race — and with a reference to the miniseries “Roots,” which detailed the story of the slave Kunta Kinte, who refused to take his captor’s assigned name, Toby.

“There are those in society that still long to see me stop saying Kunta Kinte, and they want me to say Toby,” he said. “It’s uncomfortable for them. So you can whip me as much as you want, but when you take off my shirt, you’ll see the scars are already there. I’ve gotten beaten enough that I can’t be beaten again.”