Mayor Eric Adams insisted on Tuesday that his friendlier approach to President Trump is what persuaded the commander-in-chief to lift a federal pause on a major wind farm project off the coast of Brooklyn on May 19.
His remarks came a day after Gov. Kathy Hochul suggested that she was able to convince the president to keep the project alive because of her more forceful approach to the president in recent conversations.
Hizzoner, during his weekly ‘off-topic’ news conference on May 20, said his strategy of working and “not war” with Trump led the president to remove a stop-work order that the US Department of the Interior placed on the Empire Wind 1 project in mid-April. Allowing the wind farm to move forward was one of the central issues Adams says he discussed with Trump in a closed-door White House meeting on May 9.
“Many of you stated that, ‘oh, you should not have a relationship with the president,'” Adams said. “That’s your belief. That’s not my belief. Because we do. We got a project that is very important to us.”
Empire Wind 1, being built by the Norwegian energy company Equinor, was already under construction and 30% completed when the Trump administration issued the stop-work order, according to published reports. The project employs over 1,500 workers and is expected to provide energy to 500,000 New York homes.
On Monday night, however, Hochul said it was her hard-charging advocacy for the wind farm that pushed Trump to reverse course. The governor has generally been far more adversarial with Trump than the mayor has since he took office.
“After countless conversations with Equinor and White House officials, bringing labor and business to the table to emphasize the importance of this project, I’m pleased that President Trump and [Interior Secretary Duuglas] Burgum have agreed to lift the stop work order and allow this project to move forward,” Hochul said in a May 19 statement.
But Adams waved away the notion that he and Hochul disagreed over how they pushed Trump to resume construction on the project.
“We don’t have a disagreement,” Adams said. “If she wants to say it was because she was strong and fought for it, hey, great governor. All I know is that when I sat down in the Oval Office, I shared with [Trump] how important this project was and what it meant. I know the letters that we sent. I know the conversations we had behind the scenes.”
Adams has maintained a friendlier posture toward Trump than most leading Democrats since even before the polarizing Republican president was re-elected last November. He has refrained from publicly criticizing Trump, saying he will only voice his concerns directly to the president in private.
The mayor has shied away from commenting on some of Trump’s most controversial actions. Those include threatening to slash billions of dollars in federal funding, engaging in an immigration crackdown that many say violates due process, and levying tariffs that nearly caused an economic meltdown.
Adams appeared to adopt his current stance toward Trump after he was indicted on federal corruption charges last fall under former President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice. Trump’s DOJ successfully got Manhattan Federal Judge Dale Ho to drop Adams’ case early last month, but seemed to agree with widespread allegations that Adams exchanged his cooperation with the president’s immigration agenda for having his case dismissed.
