New Yorkers, despite our reputation for being cantankerous, agree on many things—primarily things we dislike: rats; subway crime; our mayor, Eric Adams.

Adams’s polling was dismal well before he was indicted on federal corruption charges. A 2023 Quinnipiac University poll put his approval rating at 28 percent—the lowest result for a mayor since Quinnipiac began polling New York voters, in 1996. Adams got negative marks on every measure: the city’s handling of homelessness, education, crime, migrants, and the budget. But perhaps most notable were respondents’ views of Adams, the man. More than half of New Yorkers felt that he had poor leadership qualities, didn’t understand people like them, and wasn’t honest or trustworthy. (Less scientific, but equally telling: For the past couple of years, a meme has circulated of a “Club Promoter” Halloween-costume pack featuring a photo of Mayor Adams and the words Includes: Nothing helpful.)

Mayor Adams’s low popularity had as much to do with the chaos and swirl of corruption around his administration as it did with residents’ dissatisfaction with his management of the city. Much like our president, Adams favored putting friends and relatives in positions of power. He installed one friend as chancellor of education and made another his senior adviser on public safety and recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. After the charges against Adams were announced, a number of his associates were indicted too. Many others have since resigned. (Adams pleaded not guilty and maintained that the case was politically motivated.)

Reading the Southern District’s indictment was, for many New Yorkers, simply confirmation of what we’d long suspected: Our mayor was an arrogant egoist using his position to enhance his and his cronies’ lifestyle. It was also embarrassing. Adams’s charges—for conspiracy, bribery, wire fraud, and solicitation of illegal campaign contributions from foreign businesspeople—center on allegations that he did real-estate favors for the Turkish government in return for free travel and perks on Turkish Airlines. I can’t help but feel that a city as great as this one deserves, at the very least, corruption more sophisticated and ambitious than Adams’s alleged attempts to score flight upgrades.

[Read: What Trump is getting from Eric Adams]

Maybe the crimes go deeper. But now we may never know, because Donald Trump’s administration has ordered prosecutors to dismiss the charges against Adams. Emil Bove III, a Trump appointee in the Justice Department, has argued that the charges were politically motivated and the dismissal necessary because the prosecution interfered with the mayor’s ability to govern. It was, he wrote, a threat to “public safety, national security, and related federal immigration initiatives and policies.”

To anyone who believes Bove’s claims that the investigation into Adams was a “weaponization” of the federal government: I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. Immigration initiatives is the key phrase here—Adams has met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and in December hosted Trump’s border czar at Gracie Mansion. After that meeting, Adams said he might consider an executive order to “unravel” immigration rules that he sees as restrictive. The impression is that he has pledged to cooperate with Trump’s deportation agenda in return for his protection.

The Trump administration’s meddling is a perversion of the principles of the Department of Justice, and at least six prosecutors in New York and Washington have resigned in protest. But more than that, it is an insult to the intelligence and common sense of New Yorkers. Today, a judge will hear from Justice Department lawyers and decide whether to grant the administration’s request. If the case is dropped, the mayor’s constituents will be deprived of the opportunity to see him held accountable, and they will be saddled with a mayor who is beholden not to the will of the people but to Trump.

Trump won 30 percent of New York City voters. His national “mandate” is debatable, but in the city it doesn’t exist, in part because so many people reject Trump’s dangerous belief that a president is above the law. Now the Trump administration is telling New Yorkers to apply that logic not just to their president but to their mayor as well.

[Read: Eric Adams’s totally predictable MAGA turn]

One thing the Trump administration gets right is that Adams’s legal troubles are a distraction from doing his job. Back in 2023, when a number of his personal aides had their phones seized, Adams bailed on an important meeting with the White House and congressional leaders about New York’s migrant population. Last week, Kathryn Wylde, from the business advocacy group Partnership for New York, said that the controversies had “derailed” the execution of many policy goals.

After the indictment became public, nearly 70 percent of New Yorkers said Adams should resign. A true public servant would do that, but Adams is a mayor for our times, and seems to care less about serving the public than about serving himself. One of the protesting officials described succinctly in her own resignation letter what she saw as a “quid pro quo”: “an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case.” (Bove and Adams denied any improper quid pro quo.) Adams has not just agreed to be Trump’s puppet: He went to the administration and brought his own strings.

Regardless of what the judge decides, there is someone who can do something: Governor Kathy Hochul, who could—and should—just fire the mayor already.

To many non–New Yorkers, this scandal might seem an abstraction—the way the Los Angeles fires might feel if you’re in Nebraska, or how a Texas school shooting might feel when you’re all the way in Maine. But what’s happening in New York should matter to all Americans, because it is yet another example of the president imposing his own agenda over the law and public consensus. He pardoned the January 6 rioters, renamed Mount McKinley, turned an astonishing proportion of the government over to Elon Musk—and now there’s Eric Adams. In each instance, Trump is sending a message: I’m in charge, whether you like it or not

A criminal case is not a chit. It’s not something you trade in exchange for political favors.

Perhaps the always-transactional President Donald Trump does not understand the importance of keeping the Department of Justice independent from partisan politics. But Attorney General Pam Bondi and Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove should.

Seven lawyers have now resigned rather than comply with Bove’s order to file a motion to dismiss the indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was charged in September in a public-corruption case. The Trump administration’s handpicked interim U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, quit rather than file the motion. According to a memo from Bove, Sassoon was directed to dismiss the case, not because of the merits of the case, but on the grounds that the charges were politically motivated and that they would interfere with Adams’s abilities to enforce violent-crime and immigration laws. A particularly galling detail of the directive was that the case be dismissed “without prejudice,” meaning that it could be filed again—a detail that created at least the impression that the Trump administration would be keeping Adams on a short leash to ensure his compliance with its wishes. Threatening prosecution for political gain is a violation of legal ethics.

[Quinta Jurecic: What will happen if the Trump administration defies a court order?]

According to Sassoon’s own account, she appealed to the attorney general, to no avail, and resigned yesterday. In a letter to Bondi, Sassoon wrote that her duty to administer the law impartially included “prosecuting a validly returned indictment regardless of whether its dismissal would be politically advantageous, either for the defendant or those who appointed me.” Her firm stance triggered a cascade of resignations throughout the Department of Justice, from five lawyers at DOJ’s Public Integrity Section who similarly refused to file the motion to dismiss. Bove suspended the two assistant U.S. attorneys working on the case with Sassoon.

On Friday, one of those prosecutors, Hagan Scotten, resigned in a scathing letter to Bove. He called the accusation about political motivation for the indictment “so weak as to be transparently pretextual.” He said the other purported reason for the dismissal was even worse, blasting Bove’s use of criminal charges “to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” which he called “a violation of our laws and traditions.” He closed: “If no lawyer within earshot of the president is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion, but it was never going to be me.”

Ultimately, a senior lawyer at the Public Integrity Section filed the motion, in an apparent effort to spare others from losing their jobs. It is easy to say all of the lawyers in the section should have resigned, but like many Americans, government lawyers have mortgages, child care, tuition, and other bills to pay. Moreover, if all 30 lawyers in the Public Integrity Section were to resign, they would in all likelihood be replaced with Trump loyalists, who would no doubt bear very little resemblance to the title of the section where they would work. One hopes that the judge assigned to the case will hold a hearing before granting the motion to dismiss, putting Bove under oath to explain his efforts, which so clearly seem to undermine the department’s integrity.

Lest anyone believe that Sassoon and Scotten are some sort of Democratic Party operatives, both have sterling conservative credentials. Sassoon is a former law clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia and an active member of the Federalist Society. Scotten is a military veteran, two-time Bronze Star recipient, and former law clerk to then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Supreme Court Chief Justice John R. Roberts Jr. This is not about party politics. It is about the Department of Justice’s responsibility to uphold the law.

I know from my 20 years as a federal prosecutor that DOJ lawyers take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not to carry out the president’s political agenda. While they may be expected to honor the president’s enforcement priorities, they are—or, at least, were—insulated from direct political control over any particular case in order to ensure the fair administration of justice and the public trust. The Department’s Principles of Federal Prosecution specifically state that prosecutors may not consider “political association, activities, or beliefs” when making charging decisions. In addition, for the past 40 years, attorneys general have restricted communications between the White House and DOJ attorneys to protect their decisions from political influence.

[Read: Another edgelord comes to power]

Imagine a world where a president could use the threat of criminal charges or the promise to dismiss them as a way of coercing a public official to advance his policy agenda. Rather than serving the voters who elected that official in good faith, such a person would be beholden to the president, doing his bidding for fear of the criminal consequences. A governor or a mayor who agreed to such terms could even break laws with impunity so long as he went along with the president’s agenda. That kind of arrangement would violate the rule of law—the concept that the law applies equally to everyone. Moreover, it could have disastrous consequences for countless people living in that official’s jurisdiction.

DOJ lawyers pride themselves on working for an organization that is unique among federal agencies in its independence from politics. The heroes of the department are the attorneys general throughout history who stood up for the rule of law—Robert Jackson, who also worked as a Nuremberg prosecutor; Elliot Richardson, who resigned rather than fire the independent counsel during the Nixon administration; and Edward Levi, who implemented the post-Watergate norms and principles that guide federal prosecutors to this day. In more recent times, Sally Yates accepted termination in 2017 rather than implement the first iteration of Trump’s clearly unconstitutional travel ban from Muslim-majority countries. It had to be amended twice before it was upheld by the Supreme Court.

And now add the Valentine’s Day Seven to that pantheon of DOJ heroes.

* Source Images: John Lamparski / Getty; Erik McGregor / LightRocket / Getty; Yuki Iwamura / Bloomberg / Getty; Mikroman6 / Getty.

The founding generation’s fear of demagogues is well known. Alexander Hamilton insisted on the problem in Federalist No. 1: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” The Founders’ concern was really two fears combined: fear of an unscrupulous leader and fear of an unreflective people. What is less well known is that they also feared a third source of power that could damage their grand experiment in popular government: extraordinarily rich Americans whose aims did not align with democracy. With America’s most prominent billionaires lining up to pay homage to Donald Trump at his inauguration, and in particular with the power granted to Elon Musk to make the government more “efficient,” the country is witnessing these three fears come together: a demagogue who unites the self-interested rich with the politically ignorant.

As a first step to protect against this sort of alliance, America’s republican political institutions rejected the built-in privileges of aristocracy. Thomas Jefferson, then a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, wrote legislation that abolished primogeniture and entail—property laws inherited from monarchical and aristocratic England that advantaged “an aristocracy founded on wealth and birth,” entrenching a sense of social and political privilege.

Similarly, Gouverneur Morris, the Founder who drafted the actual text of the Constitution, worried at the Constitutional Convention that “the schemes of the rich” would take advantage of the passions of the people, resulting in “a violent aristocracy, or a more violent despotism.” Morris insisted that the “rich will strive to establish their dominion,” and even considered designing a Senate populated by the established and propertied to balance the more democratic and popular House. The two classes, he reasoned, reflected in two different institutions, would contain each other. Although the Constitution did not embrace institutional class divisions, it did formally prohibit the granting of titles of nobility as a hedge against rule by the few. Yet even in a wholly republican and popular government, fears that concentrated wealth would enable the rich to have a predominant position in political life persisted.

[Read: The tech oligarchy arrives]

The remedy, many Founders believed, was a broad economic distribution among the middle class, avoiding established classes of both rich and poor and the conflict that inescapably came along with it. Defending the Constitution in “Federalist No. 10,” Madison acknowledged that “the various and unequal distribution of property” is the most durable source of political conflict, but argued that a large republic would inevitably include a great diversity of property and economic interests. Conflict within a dynamic political economy would be between different and diverse property interests, which would fluctuate and change based on different issues, making a permanent wealthy class less likely. Noah Webster echoed this thinking in a lesser-known defense of the Constitution and the logic it rested on. A political and educational thinker famous for his monumental American Dictionary of the English Language, Webster wrote forcefully on his belief that democracy depended on the middle class and could not survive highly concentrated wealth: “an equality of property … constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic.” Webster observed that, historically speaking, “the power of the people has increased in an exact proportion to their acquisitions of property,” but when wealthy people centralize power, “liberty expires” and republican government tends toward oligarchy.

If the problem of wealth in politics has been present from the beginning, it has been particularly acute since the Supreme Court’s opinion in Citizens United in 2010, which unleashed an unprecedented flood of money into our politics, to both parties. Yet the generic problem of money in elections doesn’t capture what is happening right now: The country faces an alliance of self-interested would-be oligarchs and a president who has little commitment to constitutional democracy. Their interests are not the public’s, and their power is immense.

Elon Musk is the most obvious instance of this. He has been appointed by Trump to head the Department of Government Efficiency, where he aims to cut $500 billion in government spending and reorganize the federal bureaucracy. DOGE’s remit is to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies. Government can always be made more efficient. Yet Musk, whose companies have billions of dollars in government subsidies and contracts, seems to be engaged in “a bureaucratic coup.” He gained access to the Treasury’s payment system and halted operations at USAID; he is reportedly behind the attempted “buyout” of government employees, and his team has perhaps unlawfully accessed government employees’ private information. And despite the enormous conflicts of interest posed by his other businesses, he has not relinquished them even while wielding extraordinary governmental power (very much like Trump). The setup could allow Musk, again like Trump, to profit from his connections and potentially steer the government toward his financial interests and away from competitors’.

Beyond Musk, Trump has named a number of ultra-wealthy allies to his Cabinet, including the secretaries of the Treasury, commerce, and education. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have also signaled their support, with their respective companies donating to Trump’s inauguration and making business accommodations that seem aimed to please Trump. At the top of Trump’s agenda in the new Congress is extending his 2017 tax cuts, which will largely benefit the very well-off.

Trump openly rejected the basic rules of the constitutional order by refusing to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 presidential election, scheming to remain in office, pardoning those who aided him in his effort to overturn the Constitution, and promising political retribution on those who tried to hold him accountable. His wealthy backers are either indifferent to this threat or eager to indulge it, thinking they are beyond rules.

[Read: The unique danger of a Trumpist oligarchy]

This combination is the embodiment of Hamilton’s warning in “Federalist No. 71” that the people are continually beset by “the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it.” A demagogue with contempt for the Constitution, colluding with many of the wealthiest Americans on the promise that their wealth will be translated into political power and favors is just the sort of alliance that the Founders warned would corrupt popular government: that “the people,” in Madison’s phrase, “would be misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men.”

Writing to Jefferson, John Adams foresaw many of today’s problems: The people would inevitably confuse the rich and well-born for the wise and virtuous. If Jefferson contemplated the rise of a “natural aristocracy,” Adams reminded him that mankind had long admired the rich simply because they were rich, confusing their wealth for wisdom. Yet wealth is no guarantor of wisdom or virtue. A combination of the rich and the ignorant, Adams noted, could empower a demagogue at the expense of democracy.

Americans too often think they are exceptional, that history somehow does not apply to them. Adams disabused us of this notion from the beginning. There “is no special providence for Americans”; we are no different than other nations. We, too, might end our republican experiment by trusting in a demagogue urged on by our emerging oligarchs.

Amid the flurry of changes to the face of American government—the president may or may not have the right to unilaterally eliminate agencies; engaging in insurrection has been decriminalized while prosecuting it has become grounds for termination; wars of conquest are now on the table—you could be forgiven for missing the news that bribery is basically legal now, as long as you support, or are, Donald Trump.

Consider the Trump administration’s actions yesterday alone: The president officially pardoned Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor who served eight years in prison for corruption, and his Department of Justice suspended its prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams for allegedly soliciting bribes from Turkey, despite extremely compelling evidence. (Adams has denied the allegations.) Trump fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics, the chief official making sure government employees comply with ethics requirements, including those concerning conflicts of interest. And he directed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prevents American businesses from bribing foreign officials.

Not bad for a day’s work—but Trump wasn’t done. Today, the administration told The New York Times that Elon Musk’s financial disclosures would not be made public, allowing the shadow president to direct vast swaths of government policy with enormous stakes for his personal fortune without the public knowing the precise areas of overlap.

A running joke in the first Trump term was “Infrastructure Week,” a recurring attempt by the administration to focus media attention on a subject (passing an infrastructure bill) that had no real policy meat to it. This time around, Trump has quietly put together a policy theme—call it “Corruption Week”—for which he has actually delivered the goods. Whether Trump did this intentionally or just had numerous pro-corruption initiatives coincidentally stacked up on his desk is hard to say. What seems clear, however, is that Trump genuinely believes in corruption as a normal and acceptable way to do business.

When he first ran for president, in 2016, Trump cast himself as a master of the system who had strategically donated to public officials in exchange for favors that would advance his business career. This was not mere bluster. Trump’s breakthrough experience in business came by working the corrupt nexis between real estate and politics in New York City. The late journalist Wayne Barrett, writing in The Village Voice, exhaustively detailed Trump’s wheeling and dealing to obtain a subsidized permit to develop a prized spot of land: the Commodore Hotel deal, which put Trump on the map and seeded his reputation as a symbol of capitalism.

[David A. Graham: Eric Adams’s totally predictable MAGA turn]

Trump recognized that design and construction had little to do with success in this project. The whole trick was to gain influence among the political brokers who controlled land permitting and could dole out lucrative tax abatements.

Trump’s winning bid for the coveted land “had nothing going for it but connections,” Barrett wrote. On top of being born rich, Trump displayed a genuine talent for finding and exploiting the soft spots in the system. He not only donated to the necessary public officials; he put the governor’s top fundraiser on his own payroll. Trump sought to influence Barrett’s reporting with a mix of threats, promises of some ongoing future relationship between them, and what sounded like a bribe. After discovering that Barrett lived in Brownsville, Trump proposed, “I could get you an apartment, you know. That must be an awfully tough neighborhood.”

As a politician, Trump positioned himself as standing above the corruption of the system. That pose was also a way of defining corruption as so endemic that it could not be identified as a discrete form of behavior. Trump calls everything he opposes “corrupt”: political opposition, news reports, judicial rulings, election results, and so on.

That tactic has worked. In part because the word has grown so ubiquitous during the period when Trump has dominated news coverage, it barely registers anymore. Trump was able to continue owning a private business during his first term while refusing to disclose his tax returns, at the time a stunning violation of anti-corruption norms. Early in his second term, he not only continued those practices but opened up a lucrative new business selling a crypto memecoin that serves both to exploit his own fans and to allow anyone anywhere in the world to enrich him directly.

The chance that any corrupt behavior on behalf of Trump, Musk, or any other member of his administration will be exposed is significantly dampened by Trump’s decision to fire inspectors general en masse. If, by chance, some corruption scandal still comes to light, Trump has stacked the Justice Department with loyalists who will almost certainly look the other way.

You can call this hypocritical, but a more realistic description is that it follows Trump’s understanding of how power works: The people running the system operate it for their own benefit. Smart people figure out how to get in on the corruption and get rich themselves. The people who get left out are suckers.

Trump’s cynical model of the world is not purely a matter of self-interest. His suspension of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is an actual policy agenda to enable American businesses to bribe officials overseas without violating American law. Trump himself has no need to grease anybody’s palms. He therefore appears to support this reform, as it were, because he genuinely believes in it. And unlike most of his flailing efforts to advance policy objectives, his pro-corruption agenda is comprehensive and well designed. How the rest of Trump’s presidency plays out is anyone’s guess. The consequences of legalizing corruption, however, will be utterly predictable.

What a glorious time to be an ethically challenged politician. President Donald Trump began yesterday by pardoning Illinois’s eminently corrupt former Governor Rod R. Blagojevich, who’d tried to auction off a U.S. Senate seat. Last night, Trump extended his mercies to the indicted New York Mayor Eric Adams. The message is twofold and rather elemental: Prosecutors are not to be trusted. And bowing to Trump will yield rewards even for newly minted loyalists.

The Justice Department acted as the mayor’s agent of deliverance, directing the local U.S. attorney to drop the corruption case against him. Adams faced daunting and highly credible federal accusations that he’d accepted more than $100,000 in flight upgrades and airline tickets and collected contributions from wealthy foreigners who are not legally allowed to contribute to campaigns.

Adams’s reign has been plagued by many other scandals. Many in his inner circle at City Hall have come under federal, state, and city investigation and resigned in the past year. In December, his chief adviser was indicted on charges of bribe taking.

Adams has denied breaking the law. Quite remarkably, the memo from the Justice Department’s acting No. 2 official, Emil Bove III, says the agency reached its decision without even assessing the strength of the evidence against the mayor or the legal theories used in the indictment.

The motives proffered by Bove are baldly political. The federal indictment under which Adams labored had “unduly restricted” the mayor’s ability to devote his energies to the president’s policy agenda. While in private practice, Bove represented Trump in three criminal cases. Presumably, he is well practiced at keeping a straight face while advancing preposterous arguments.

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

In fact, Bove is extending a quid pro quo that was neither hidden nor subtle. He noted that the Justice Department reserves the right to reinstate charges against Adams at some future date, the suggestion being that the mayor’s behavior could determine his fate. Remain shoulder to shoulder with Trump on immigration, warn New York school principals and homeless-shelter managers against ill-considered displays of conscience such as demanding that ICE produce search warrants, and the mayor can expect to remain out of the legal dock.

Adams expressed no qualms about this deal, as he so rarely displays any hint of embarrassment at his self-serving behavior. Adams’s defenders argue that this was just penny-ante grubbing about for small-time benefits and merited a slap on the wrist rather than an indictment. That ignores the fact that his alleged corruption of the campaign-finance system helped him obtain fraudulent millions of dollars in matching funds. Safety may have been at stake: Prosecutors said that Adams obtained some of his upgrades and hotel rooms in exchange for pressuring the fire department to stifle concerns about building violations and speed approval of a new office building for a Turkish consulate.

Adams pursued the dropping of charges with single-minded energy. He traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump and worked to snare an invitation to his inauguration. He appeared on an online show hosted by Tucker Carlson, the Trump ally and former Fox News personality who is sailing ever faster toward the kookier ports of the far right. When asked of late to criticize the president, Adams has kept silent. “If I do disagree,” the mayor told the press, “I will communicate with him directly.”

[Read: Eric Adams’s totally predictable MAGA turn]

His knee remains artfully bent now. He recently told the city’s law office to instruct city employees to cooperate wherever possible with federal immigration officials.

Adams learned of the dropping of charges while enjoying a meal with the Republican billionaire John Catsimatidis at Gallaghers, a high-priced steakhouse. The billionaire is said to have proved helpful in this matter. Did he pick up the mayor’s tab? A shrug is perhaps the best response. Because at this point, who would bother to investigate?

The BBC's diplomatic correspondent looks at what is behind Hamas announcing a delay to new hostage releases.

In a Massachusetts cellar in 1873, Lydia Pinkham first brewed the elixir that would make her famous. The dirt-brown liquid, made from herbs including black cohosh and pleurisy root, contained somewhere between 18 and 22 percent alcohol—meant as a preservative, of course. Within a couple of years, Pinkham was selling her tonic at $1 a bottle to treat “women’s weaknesses.” Got the blues? How about inflammation, falling of the womb, or painful menstruation? Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was the solution. Pinkham’s matronly smile, printed on labels and advertisements, became as well known as Mona Lisa’s.

Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was one of thousands of popular and lucrative patent medicines—health concoctions dreamed up by chemists, housewives, and entrepreneurs—that took the United States by storm in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These products promised to treat virtually any ailment and didn’t have to reveal their recipes. Many contained alcohol, cocaine, morphine, or other active ingredients that ranged from dubious to dangerous. Dr. Guild’s Green Mountain Asthmatic Compound was available in cigarette form and included the poisonous plant belladonna. Early versions of Wampole’s Vaginal Cones, sold as a vaginal antiseptic and deodorizer, contained picric acid, a toxic compound used as an explosive during World War I. Patent-medicine advertisements were unavoidable; by the 1870s, 25 percent of all advertising was for patent medicines.

After the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, the newly created Food and Drug Administration cracked down on miracle elixirs. But one American industry is still keeping the spirit of patent medicine alive: dietary supplements. In the U.S., vitamins, botanicals, and other supplements are minimally regulated. Some can improve people’s health or address specific conditions, but many, like the medicines of old, contain untested or dangerous ingredients. Nevertheless, three-quarters of Americans take at least one. Some take far more. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the longtime conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist who’s awaiting Senate confirmation to run the Department of Health and Human Services, has said he takes a “fistful” of vitamins each day. Kennedy has in recent years championed dietary supplements and decried their “suppression” by the FDA—an agency he would oversee as health secretary. Now he’s poised to bring America’s ever-growing supplement enthusiasm to the White House and supercharge the patent-medicine revival.  

The newly created FDA eventually required all pharmaceutical drugs—substances intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease—to be demonstrably safe and effective before they could be sold. But dietary supplements, as we call them now, were never subject to that degree of scrutiny. Vitamins were sold with little interference until the “megadosing” trend of the late 1970s and ’80s, which began after the chemist Linus Pauling started claiming that large amounts of vitamin C could stave off cancer and other diseases. The FDA announced its intention to regulate vitamins, but the public (and the supplement industry) revolted. Mel Gibson starred in a television ad in which he was arrested at home for having a bottle of Vitamin C, and more than 2.5 million people participated in a “Save Our Supplements” letter-writing campaign. Congress stepped in, passing the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which officially exempted dietary supplements from the regulations that medications are subject to.

Since then, the FDA has generally not been responsible for any premarket review of dietary supplements, and manufacturers have not usually had to reveal their ingredients. “It’s basically an honor system where manufacturers need to declare that their products are safe,” says S. Bryn Austin, a social epidemiologist and behavioral scientist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. The agency will get involved only if something goes wrong after the supplement starts being sold. As long as they disclose that the FDA hasn’t evaluated their claims, and that those claims don’t involve disease, supplement makers can say that their product will do anything to the structure or function of the body. You can say that a supplement improves cognition, for example, but not that it treats ADHD. These claims don’t have to be supported with any evidence in humans, animals, or petri dishes.

In 1994, the dietary-supplement industry was valued at $4 billion. By 2020, it had ballooned to $40 billion. Patent-medicine creators once toured their products in traveling medicine shows and made trading cards that people collected, exchanged, and pasted into scrapbooks; today, supplement companies sponsor popular podcasts, Instagram stories are overrun with supplement ads, and influencers make millions selling their own branded supplements. The combination of modern wellness culture with lax regulations has left Americans with 19th-century-like problems: Pieter Cohen, an associate professor of medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance, has found a methamphetamine analogue in a workout supplement, and omberacetam, a Russian drug for traumatic brain injuries and mood disorders, in a product marketed to help with memory.

Last year, Kennedy accused the FDA of suppressing vitamins and other alternative health products that fall into the dietary-supplement category. But “there is no truth about the FDA being at war on supplements over the last several decades,” Cohen told me. “In fact, they have taken an extremely passive, inactive approach.” Experts have repeatedly argued that the FDA needs more authority to investigate and act on supplements, not less. And yet, Kennedy continues to champion the industry. He told the podcaster Lex Fridman that he takes so many vitamins, “I couldn’t even remember them all.” Kennedy has vocally opposed additives in food and conflicts of interest in the pharmaceutical industry, but has failed to mention the dangerous additives in dietary supplements and the profits to be made in the supplement market. (Neither Kennedy nor a representative from the MAHA PAC responded to a request for comment.)

In an already permissive environment, Kennedy’s confirmation could signal to supplement manufacturers that anything goes, Cohen said. If the little regulation that the FDA is responsible for now—surveilling supplements after they’re on the market—lapses, more adulterated and mislabeled supplements could line store shelves. And Americans might well pour even more of our money into the industry, egged on by the wellness influencer charged with protecting our health and loudly warning that most of our food and drug supply is harmful. Kennedy might even try to get in on the supplement rush himself. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that, according to documents filed to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Kennedy applied to trademark MAHA last year, which would allow him to sell, among other things, MAHA-branded supplements and vitamins. (He transferred ownership of the application to an LLC in December. Kennedy’s team did not respond to the Post.)

A truly unleashed supplement industry would have plenty of tools at its disposal with which to seduce customers. Austin studies dietary supplements that make claims related to weight loss, muscle building, “cleansing,” and detoxing, many of which are marketed to not just adults, but teenagers too. “Those types of products, in particular, play on people’s insecurities,” she told me. They also purport to ease common forms of bodily or mental distress that can’t be quickly addressed by traditional medical care. Reducing stress is hard, but ordering the latest cortisol-reducing gummy on TikTok Shop is easy. Your doctor can’t force vegetables into your diet, but a monthly subscription of powdered greens can.

Judy Z. Segal, a professor emerita at the University of British Columbia who has analyzed patent-medicine trading cards from the 19th and 20th centuries, told me that supplement-marketing strategies “have not changed that much since the patent-medicine era.” Patent medicines appealed to ambient, relatable complaints; one ad for Burdock’s Blood Bitters asserted that there were “thousands of females in America who suffer untold miseries from chronic diseases common to their sex.” And the makers of patent medicine, like many modern supplement companies, used friendly spokespeople and customer testimonials while positioning their products as preventive care; according to one ad for Hartshorn’s Sarsaparilla, “The first deviation from perfect health should receive attention.”

In 1905, the muckraker Samuel Hopkins Adams lamented that “gullible America” was so eager to “swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud.” Compounds and elixirs go by different names now—nootropics, detoxes, adaptogens—but if Adams walked down any supplement aisle or browsed Amazon, he’d still find plenty of cure-alls. He could even pick up a bottle of Lydia E. Pinkham’s Herbal Supplement, which is sold as an aid for menstruation and menopause. Pinkham’s face smiles at buyers from the label, though its advertised benefits are now accompanied by a tiny disclaimer: “This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA.”

British and Irish Lions duo Josh Adams and Liam Williams return for Wales' Six Nations opener against France, along with Dafydd Jenkins.

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.

Former Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams is in line for "a pay day from the taxpayer" under plans to repeal the Legacy Act, a report backed by several peers has stated.