Eric Adams hit back at Andy Cohen’s drunken New Year’s CNN rant about him, urging the TV host to “seek help” on the same day he was replaced as New York mayor by Zohran Mamdani.
Cohen, 57, appeared to go off script into politics just after midnight during the network’s Times Square celebration, which he described as the final moments of Adams’ “chaotic” tenure, as co-host Anderson Cooper, 58, repeatedly tried to shut him down.
In a New Year’s Day X post on Thursday, Adams—who was succeeded at midnight by Mamdani, 34—escalated the fallout with a cutting and personal retort.
“My response to @Andy: AA,” he wrote in the post, calling it “another sloppy drunken rant.”
The politician, 65, wrote: “If anyone actually cares about him, they’ll tell him to get help. New Yorkers aren’t laughing with him. They are concerned about him.
“Public intoxication is a disease. He should seek help. He was safe in Times Square because we did our job. Again. Seek help.”
Adams signed off his post, which at the time of publication had been viewed one million times: “AAA: Andy’s Alcohol Anonymous.”
Adams’ retort to Cohen came on the same day Adams attended the swearing-in ceremony of his replacement.
Mamdani used his first-day City Hall speech to promise a “new era” and vow to “reinvent” New York, arguing that moments like this are rare—and rarer still when “the people themselves” have their hands on “the levers of change.”
The democratic socialist, once a little-known state assemblyman, said advisers urged him to lower expectations. “I will do no such thing,” he replied, pledging to “govern expansively and audaciously,” even if his administration does not always succeed.
He said he was elected as a democratic socialist and would govern that way, refusing to drop his principles “for fear of being called radical.”
Mamdani is the city’s first Muslim mayor, first of South Asian descent, and first Africa-born leader, he noted.
Introduced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and sworn in by Sen. Bernie Sanders as his wife held the Quran, Mamdani closed with a simple promise: “The work has only just begun.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Cohen for comment.
