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It Pays to Be a Friend of Donald Trump
New York City mayor Eric Adams at the State of the NYPD address on January 30, 2025. (Yuki Iwamura via Getty Images)
Rod Blagojevich and Eric Adams got off because they played the Trump card. Is that how justice now works in America?
By Joe Nocera
02.12.25 — U.S. Politics
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Two dodgy Democrats had a great day on Monday—thanks to our new Republican president, Donald J. Trump.

The first, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, was granted a full pardon. Back in 2009, after he’d been charged with corruption, Blagojevich got himself booked on Trump’s show, Celebrity Apprentice. (You can see his appearance in these YouTube clips. He was fired, of course.) I don’t know if Blagojevich had a premonition that Trump might someday be in a position to help him, but it sure has turned out that way. Transforming himself from a high-profile Democratic governor to a big-time Trump supporter was the single best move he could have made.

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Joe Nocera
Joe Nocera is an editor and writer at The Free Press. During his long career in journalism, he has been a columnist at The New York Times, Bloomberg, Esquire, and GQ, the editorial director of Fortune, and a writer at Newsweek, Texas Monthly and The Washington Monthly. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.
Tags:
Donald Trump
Eric Adams
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