Throughout the George Floyd protests, de Blasio has praised police performance, repeatedly calling his law-enforcement officers “extraordinary.” He has said that a “violent element” of protesters that engaged in property damage and violence “created a very complex situation.” In a frequent refrain, he has cited the crowd-control tools that he has spared the city: there has been no National Guard, no rubber bullets, no tear gas, and no police on horseback. Pressed about instances in which cops used force on peaceful protesters, de Blasio has often pleaded ignorance but promised to investigate.
On May 30th, a video surfaced showing a pair of police S.U.V.s driving into a crowd of protesters, who had showered them with plastic water bottles and garbage. The Mayor initially defended the police actions. “It’s clear that a different element has come into play here who are trying to hurt police officers and trying to damage their vehicles,” he said. “And, if a police officer is in that situation, they have to get out of that situation.”

Lander, whose district borders the block where the incident took place, was appalled. He had recently helped pass a city law curbing reckless drivers. “What does it take to drive eyes open into a crowd of pedestrians?” he asked. “You have to want to injure. It’s really impossible to square what the Mayor says with reality.”

The same disconnect was noted by some of the Mayor’s former closest advisers....Neal Kwatra, a consultant who worked on several political campaigns for de Blasio, said he was struck by how isolated the Mayor had become. Listening to a mayoral press conference on June 2nd, he heard de Blasio issue a plaintive plea for support, from civil leaders and members of the clergy. “It was almost as if he was talking to strangers. The Bill de Blasio I knew would have had them with him, showing solidarity,” Kwatra said. “It frankly looked pathetic. It looked like he had no friends.”

Many of those allies are no longer there for him, and some of those defections must be especially painful. Richard Buery, a former deputy mayor who helped create de Blasio’s much lauded pre-K program, has repeatedly denounced the N.Y.P.D.’s conduct on Twitter. Last week, in a clear reference to the Mayor, he posted Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s famous warning about “the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice.”

Monica Klein and Elana Leopold, key aides on de Blasio’s mayoral campaigns, posted a joint statement on social media this week about the man they helped elect. “We have been sickened by the Mayor’s unwavering support of racist police brutality,” they wrote.

De Blasio faces mammoth challenges in his remaining nineteen months in office—perhaps the biggest being the city’s recovery from the coronavirus. The mayor initially resisted warnings from health advisers that the city needed to begin shutting down in order to avoid contagion. On March 15th, he ordered schools and restaurants to close and the city’s health department issued a warning to New Yorkers to stay home. The next morning, the mayor went back to the gym. His delay in ordering the closings may well have been costly. “Days earlier & so many deaths could have been prevented,” Tom Frieden, the former city health-department chief who also led the Centers for Disease Control, tweeted.

The coronavirus has killed an estimated twenty-two thousand people in the city, sent more than fifty-three thousand people to the hospital, and blown an estimated $9.5 billion hole in his budget over this year and next, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office.

Meanwhile, in a scene that New York had never witnessed, several hundred people who have worked in the de Blasio administration held a rally outside City Hall to voice their anger with the Mayor. Previously, six hundred current and former city employees, including many of the staff of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, had signed an open letter to de Blasio, condemning his refusal to confront the police department. “We could not remain silent while the Administration we served allows the NYPD to turn our City into an occupied territory,” they wrote. “This is not how we thought this movie would end,” Jonathan Rosen said.

Leaders need to be either loved or feared, Machiavelli said. Bill de Blasio was never much loved, and he is clearly not feared. The city that he led has left him well behind. “Does he come back from this? The answer is no,” Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran political consultant who has worked on many city elections, said.