Zohran Mamdani, a quick learner, has joined a long list of New York mayors who took the oath of office and promptly began slamming their predecessor for leaving the city’s finances in shambles.

At the White House, in a tradition started by Ronald Reagan, departing presidents have left a personal handwritten note on the Resolute Desk for their successor to discover upon entering the Oval Office after the inauguration. Here in Gotham, newly minted mayors stride into City Hall and find a thick stack of unpaid bills.

“What’s so hard to come to terms with is that we had not seen any indications from the prior administration that they were looking at this,” Mamdani told me, describing the city’s budget gap of $12 billion. “This was something that they kept pushing off until it wasn’t their problem.”

Mamdani says Eric Adams is to blame. “This crisis has a name and a chief architect. In the words of the Jackson 5, it’s as easy as A-B-C. This is the Adams budget crisis,” Mamdani told reporters at a press conference. “In 2025, under the banner of what he called the ‘best budget ever,’ former mayor Eric Adams handed the next administration a poisoned chalice. He systematically underbudgeted services that New Yorkers rely on every single day.”

It all sounds familiar to New Yorkers of a certain age. In the same building where Mamdani railed against Adams, Mayor John Lindsay blamed his predecessor, Robert Wagner, for leaving him a budget deficit in 1966. The next mayor, Abe Beame, attacked Lindsay for running up the city’s debt in ways that led to its near-bankruptcy in 1975. Two years later, Ed Koch defeated Beame and a crowded field of challengers by promising to clean up Beame’s mess. And so on down the line, with Bill de Blasio leaving a........

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