Greek defence minister demands France explain sale of missiles to Turkey

So much political news over the past four years has been astonishing: Joe Biden’s disintegration on a debate stage, Donald Trump’s return to power, the possible U.S. annexation of Canada. But New York Mayor Eric Adams’s MAGA turn, by contrast, seems completely predictable.

Since the election, Adams has lunched with Trump and his son at the Trump International Golf Club in Florida. On Monday, he accepted “on behalf of New York City” what his spokesperson described as a last-minute invitation to the inauguration. And Tuesday, he sat down with the house media organ of MAGA, Tucker Carlson, for an interview.

“People often say ‘You don’t sound like a Democrat,’ and ‘You seem to have left the party,’” Adams told Carlson. “No, the party left me.”

This is a man who less than four years ago described himself as “the future of the Democratic Party.” Finding a reason for the abrupt shift isn’t all that hard, and it doesn’t involve any changes in the Democratic Party. It involves the multiple felony charges against Adams, and the pardon power that Trump has now regained. Trump said before his inauguration that he would consider pardoning Adams.

[Michael Powell: How it all went wrong for Eric Adams]

The mayor was charged in September, in an indictment that alleged florid corruption, including bribery, campaign-finance violations, and elaborately constructed travel itineraries through Istanbul (the New York City of Turkey, if you will). Adams has denied any wrongdoing, in the emphatic way only he can. So many top officials in his administration have been raided, indicted, or forced to step down that New York magazine could barely fit them all on a cover; by the time the issue hit stands, it was already out of date. Things are so bad that polls suggest he could lose reelection to Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor with his own long record of alleged misconduct, though he, too, has denied wrongdoing.

Adams is not the first Democratic politician to discover a strange new respect for Donald Trump. Rod Blagojevich followed the well-trod path from the Illinois governor’s mansion to prison, then pioneered the playbook Adams appears to be employing, culminating in a 2020 pardon.

“My fellow Democrats have not been very kind to him,” the former governor said of Trump afterward. “In fact, they’ve been very unkind to him.” He even coined a useful term: “If you’re asking me what my party affiliation is, I’m a Trumpocrat.”

Other politicians have turned Trumpocrat, or at least Trumpocrat-curious. When former Senator Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, was indicted for corruption, he echoed Trump in claiming that shadowy forces were out to get him because of his politics. Never mind that Menendez was indicted by the Biden Justice Department. He’d previously been charged by the Obama Justice Department, but he beat that rap; this time he was convicted, despite his best efforts to blame his wife. Representative Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat indicted for bribery last year, has also gone out of his way to signal openness to working with Trump. (Cuellar denies wrongdoing.) Trump appears receptive; after the indictment, he claimed on Truth Social that Cuellar was being punished for being tough on the border.

But Adams and Trump share more than felony charges and a love of New York City nightlife. Seldom have two politicians seemed so destined for alliance. Both men are masters of personality politics—naturally charismatic but also perversely watchable because of the likelihood that they’re going to blunder and cause a huge blowup. They’re also big-picture thinkers, able to tap into emotionally freighted topics—especially crime—with grand gestures, but less skilled and less interested in minutiae, leaving that to lieutenants.

Not coincidentally, both have also been Democrats and Republicans at different times in their careers. Conforming to a platform is less important to them than rallying voters around a feeling. Moreover, they are both nakedly transactional—in Adams’s case, according to federal prosecutors, to a criminal degree; in Trump’s case, his attempt to exchange aid to Ukraine for an investigation into Hunter Biden was enough to get him impeached. They share a sense that they are perpetually being persecuted by the establishment, even as one is the mayor of the nation’s largest city and the other is starting his second term as president.

[Michael Powell: The low comedy of Eric Adams’s indictment]

The possible benefits for Adams—a pardon—of cultivating Trump are clear enough. What does Trump get out of it? One can imagine a few possibilities. The first is that Trump is a New York real-estate developer, and it’s never a bad idea to be on the right side of city hall. He surely noticed that, according to prosecutors, the bribes paid to Adams helped get quick inspection approval for a building in Manhattan. Trump also remains obsessed with the idea of success and belonging in New York, even as he lives elsewhere—another thing he might share with Adams.

Politically, Trump has been working to make inroads with Black voters in blue cities and states, and Black voters open to a more conservative vision happen to be Adams’s core constituency. By embracing Adams, just as he did Cuellar, Trump is also hoping to bolster his claims of being a target of political prosecution: He contends that their indictments show how the “deep state” goes after its enemies. This doesn’t make much sense—Adams and Cuellar are both Democrats indicted by federal prosecutors in a Democratic presidential administration—but coherence has never been all that important to Trump.

Of course, all of this might be overthinking the situation. The attraction between Trump and Adams may be as simple as the two men seeing a lot of themselves in the other—game recognizing game.

Witnesses describe panic as deadly fire tore through ski resort hotel in Turkey

Some survivors did not hear a fire alarm and there are claims of failures in the hotel's fire safety.

At least 76 people are known to have died, including children and multiple family members.

Nine detained for questioning after fire at ski resort in northwest Turkey kills at least 76 people

Watch: deadly ski resort fire in Turkey captured in first images

Hamas and Israel each abandoned long-standing demands in order to secure the cease-fire that takes effect today. Both parties were responding to internal and external pressures when Israel agreed to pull its forces back from almost all of Gaza, and Hamas accepted a temporary cessation of hostilities, but not the end to war it had sought.

In Israel’s case, one source of external pressure was President-Elect Donald Trump, who pushed Benjamin Netanyahu to accept conditions he’d long rejected. The Israeli prime minister was also swayed by intense public demands to retrieve the hostages. Netanyahu’s priorities and incentives are relatively visible and easy to apprehend. Hamas’s strategy is, in this instance, more opaque.

A major concession for Hamas was to accept that many of its key cadres will now stay indefinitely in Israeli prisons. In any case, the militant Islamist group is no longer the same organization that launched the October 7, 2023, massacre. Its battalions have been smashed; all that is left is a ragtag insurgency capable only of hit-and-run tactics. The group’s arsenal is greatly depleted; its fighters have fallen back on improvised explosive devices assembled from unexploded Israeli ordnance. The top tier of Hamas’s military leadership has been eliminated, leaving two relatively inexperienced and junior commanders—Ezz al-Din Hadad in the north and Mohamed Sinwar, younger brother of the October 7 attack’s mastermind, Yahya Sinwar, in the south.

As they planned the original 2023 assault, Sinwar and his lieutenants no doubt anticipated a devastating military response from Israel. They accepted the bargain of sacrificing all of the infrastructure and quasi-state apparatus that Hamas had built in Gaza since seizing power in 2007, in return for a “permanent” guerrilla war against Israel. According to the military wing’s theory of insurgency, after drawing the Israel Defense Forces into Gaza, Hamas fighters would inflict grinding attritional losses on Israeli troops. In a marginal way, that scenario seemed slightly plausible when Israel recently lost 15 soldiers in the northern town of Beit Hanoun within a week. After 15 months of fighting, the IDF’s losses are incommensurable with Hamas’s. But Israel’s generals need clarity from its civilian government about the political goals of the war and what they can call victory.

[Read: Israel never defined its goals]

Hamas, too, may finally have had a moment of clarity. Sinwar used to mock the Hamas politburo as “the hotel guys” because few of the political leaders ensconced in comfortable digs abroad had personal experience of armed struggle. For more than a decade, the Gaza gunmen became ascendant, while these formerly commanding, civilian Hamas figures in foreign capitals were reduced to soft-power roles as diplomats and TV talking heads. They had their uses as conduits for money and arms, but as Sinwar saw it, they had no hard-power value to the movement.

All of that has changed. Sinwar is dead; in Lebanon, the great ally Hezbollah has collapsed; in Syria, Israel’s longtime adversary Bashar al-Assad is gone; a humbled Iran has been kept at bay. So Hamas has had to change course. With the reemergence of Turkey and Qatar as regional power brokers, the deal-making diplomacy of the hotel guys is now the only game in town. If Hamas is to have any way of rebuilding power inside Gaza, the politburo must get its way.

Plenty of evidence suggests that the Sinwar-directed version of Hamas has not fared well in public opinion in Gaza, where 2.2 million Palestinians suffered serial displacement, hellish misery, and mass death. The military wing calculated that its adoption of a frontal position in the so-called Axis of Resistance of Iran-backed regional militias would shift Palestinian public opinion in its favor. But the backlash potential among Gaza’s civilian population, in what was surely imagined as a years-long insurgency, must have been obvious. Even the most implacable and belligerent Hamas leaders must operate within a Palestinian political context that demands significant support for a “people’s war.”

But the decisive factor in shifting Hamas at the negotiating table is the dramatic change in the wider geopolitical landscape. The Sinwar strategy of October 7 was to provoke a multifront war against Israel, in hopes of dragging into a regional conflict the ultimate adversaries, the United States and Iran. That call went unanswered. When Hezbollah made clear that it would intensify its long-standing border conflict with Israel but essentially sit out the war in Gaza, Hamas leaders complained at first, but eventually had to accept that the Lebanese cavalry was not on its way.

Even so, Hamas assumed broader backing from its regional sponsors. Yet the devastation that Israel inflicted on Hezbollah last year, the general degradation of Iran’s militia network, and the failure of Tehran’s strategy of using Arab fighters as a forward defense against Israel and the U.S. were decisive. The collapse of the resistance proved central to Hamas’s change of course.

With the end of the Assad regime in Syria, Iran now has no overland route to resupply Hezbollah in Lebanon, let alone Hamas in Gaza. The fall of Assad has helped shift power inside Hamas away from the Qassam Brigades, which advocated “permanent war” against Israel, and toward the civilian politicians who recently relocated from Qatar to Turkey. Many of those operatives were never really on board with the strategy of ditching governance in Gaza and turning to guerrilla combat. Hamas was careful to avoid open dissension, but signs of unease among politburo members were evident.

The victory in Syria of the Turkish-backed rebels fundamentally altered Hamas’s calculations. Turkey and its close ally Qatar are now emerging as key players in the Levant. For Hamas, whatever political links to Ankara and Doha it can leverage suddenly matter far more than any ties to Tehran. Unlike Iran’s leaders, the rulers of Turkey and Qatar have no interest in prolonging an open-ended conflict in Gaza. Both countries are largely aligned with the U.S. They have an overriding interest in regional stability, not in support for an endless insurgency on Israel’s doorstep.

If Hamas is to have any hope of getting back in the business of governing Gaza, and restoring a social contract with its more than 2 million Palestinian residents, Turkey and Qatar are most likely to supply the means. That would involve, first, political and diplomatic cover, and then financing for the territory’s reconstruction, especially its shattered health and education systems.

Trump’s threats of “hell to pay” if a hostage deal did not materialize before his inauguration probably meant little to Hamas. But even if the president-elect’s principal influence was on Netanyahu, Ankara and Doha certainly felt the Trump factor enough to lean on the politburo. The Qassam Brigade fighters surviving in Gaza’s tunnels still have their guns, and at some point they may decide they’ve had enough of the cease-fire; equally, Israel will show no hesitation in playing militant whack-a-mole, and Netanyahu might judge that resuming the conflict would advance his interests. But for the moment, the politburo members who want to pull back from endless warfare and try to rebuild political power in Gaza have the momentum and the leverage. That’s why there’s a cease-fire—and why it might just last.

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