Andy Cohen didn’t mince words about outgoing New York City Mayor Eric Adams on New Year’s Eve as he pounded down shots with co-host Anderson Cooper to ring in 2026 on CNN’s live broadcast.
No sooner had the ball dropped in Times Square, and even as Zohran Mamdani was being sworn into office by Attorney General Letitia James in an abandoned subway station underneath City Hall, Cohen said the quiet part out loud. Very, very loud.
“I gotta say, watching the final moments of Mayor Adams’ chaotic — ” a grinning Cohen’s rant began as Cooper, apparently knowing what was coming, broke in with, “Don’t. Don’t.”
“He got his pardons,” Cohen said, undeterred, as actor B.J. Novak of “The Office” joked, “We’re gonna have to cut you off.”
“I just wanna say, goodbye Mayor Adams,” Cohen continued. “You got your pardons. Now go off into the sunset. Go dance away. We’ll see you at all the parties. You partied your way through four years, we’ll see you at all the clubs.”
Adams wasn’t pardoned, because he was never convicted. But soon after President Trump took office last year, the U.S. Department of Justice dismissed federal corruption charges that Adams was mired in.
Cohen did give the now-former mayor a single prop, while bulldozing Cooper’s futile fact-checking attempts.
“But I will say this. I think he may have dented the rat population,” Cohen said. “I gotta say, I think he got rid of some of the rats. But isn’t that a metaphor of sorts.”
Unable to completely rein him in, Cohen and Novak tried to at least guide Cohen’s assessment.
“Let’s call it as it is. Honestly,” Cohen said. “Guess what. It is 2026, and there are less rats.”
“Fewer,” Novak corrected. “Fewer rats.”
The morning after, Cohen allowed he may have been a tad tipsy.
“What a wild ride!” he wrote in a New Year’s Day Instagram post. “Thanks to my pal Anderson Cooper for having me back, and for having my back always. We had a ball, and yes, I’d venture to say we were a tad overserved (by me).”
Mayor-bashing may become a tradition for Cohen, who lambasted outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2021 going into 2022. Then, as now, he trotted out the “overserved” excuse the next day.
