Nick Adams’ rise from Ashfield Council to White House favourite
Who is Nick Adams, a former Ashfield councillor now on the cusp of becoming the US Ambassador to Malaysia? The Sunday Telegraph tracked his unique journey to the Trump inner circle.
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Born in Australia, rebirthed in America. Nick Adams is the kid from Croydon in Sydney’s inner west who has been hugged to the bosom of President Donald Trump and stands poised for appointment as the next US Ambassador to Malaysia.
Adams is a controversial author and public speaker, the creator of a right wing alpha male creed with 45 ‘commandments’ including “teach your boys to be men before the world teaches them to be women”.
Never married, with no children, he lives in a Florida mansion and has built a profile and fortune around his forthright views, including on Hollywood “hypocrisy”.
“Matt Damon can say with a straight face that he wants America to ban guns while reaping millions of dollars from films in which he’s killing people with … guns,” Mr Adams writes in The Case Against The Establishment, published in 2017.
“Leonardo DiCaprio talks about the importance of environmental responsibility. The man flies in private jets with carbon footprints bigger than Sean Penn’s ego.”
Providing forewords for two of Mr Adams’ books based around his conservative beliefs, Mr Trump and the President’s new secretary of defence Pete Hegseth have lavished praise on the Aussie who immigrated to the US in 2012.
But there are others that remember the 40-year-old from his time serving on the now defunct Ashfield Council who raise eyebrows at, or deride rather than applaud, an astonishing rise to the White House inner circle and political prominence.
Described by the New York Times as “the President’s favourite author”, Mr Adams was elected to Ashfield Council in 2004 from a Liberal Party base. He was still a teenager, fresh out of Trinity College and studying law at Sydney University. A year later he was deputy mayor.
He stayed eight years on council but throughout his tenure was a walking headline, surrounded by controversy and bizarre campaigns.
Julie Passas, a former Ashfield councillor, recruited Adams to run in the 2004 local government elections after he was recommended to her by a Young Liberal.
At their first meeting she recalled Mr Adams saying: “I hope to be Prime Minister of Australia one day”.
“He got very cocky (after being elected), it went to his head,” Ms Passas told The Sunday Telegraph. “But he doesn’t stop. He’s very smart.”
Long standing Liberal Party member Tony Raciti, an inner-west restaurant owner and businessman whose wife Vittoria is the only Liberal on the current Inner West Council, said: “I’ve got no words to describe him. He believes in his own mind that he’s as big as God.”
In his 2023 tome Alpha Male, Mr Adams wrote: “I embrace my natural masculinity without apology. I radiate confidence and charisma, inspiring others to embrace their own strength and strive for excellence.”
He said of Mr Trump in the introduction “…the greatest President of my lifetime, and the most alpha world leader since Winston Churchill”.
In the foreword to that book, Mr Trump penned: “I trust and admire Nick so much … He’s the kind of person I would always look to hire at my many businesses … Great work, Nick. You’re a true patriot.”
Two weeks ago the President went further, nominating Mr Adams for a diplomatic post which has triggered protests in Malaysia.
Inner West Mayor Darcy Byrne took to social media the same day: “Former Ashfield Liberal Councillor Nick Adams, whose primary achievement was proposing the extinction of all pigeons in Ashfield, has been appointed by President Trump as the US Ambassador to Malaysia.
“What a world we live in.”
Dr Marc Rerceretnam was a Greens councillor at Ashfield when Adams first landed in local government.
“I found him quite self-serving, overly impulsive,” Dr Rerceretnam told this masthead. “Most importantly, he sought attention.”
He cited the time in 2006 that Adams wanted the speed limit in Ashfield reduced from 50km/h to 30km/h.
“He seemed reasonably well intentioned when he brought this motion to council and we did discuss it for a full hour,” Dr Rerceretnam said. “We had people making submissions, representatives were coming in to speak.
“Eventually we said ‘what is this based on’ and he said in Britain the speed limit in all residential areas is 30. But in Britain the limit is 30m/ph, they haven’t moved to the metric system. So that one fell flat on its face.”
There was also Adams’ infamous pigeon extermination suggestion.
“He was going on and on about pigeons being rats with wings,” Dr Rerceretnam recalled. “This was when the bird flu issue was big. So he was like ‘let’s kill the pigeons’.
“We said to him ‘pigeons don’t recognise council boundaries’. So you may try to eradicate them in Ashfield but they’re still going to come from Burwood or Strathfield or Leichhardt.”
Dr Rerceretnam declined to comment on a report from the Inner West Weekly in 2007 which read in part: “Liberal Councillor Nick Adams mimicked the accent of Greens Councillor Marc Rerceretnam and told him to ‘go back to Singapore’.
“Cr Adams also had several jabs at the Greens, calling them ‘communists’ and ‘reds under the beds’.”
Two years earlier the same newspaper reported that “Cr Adams allegedly told fellow Liberal councillor Karin Cheung ‘I will destroy you’ at the September 13 mayoral election meeting”.
The pair had been nominated for the deputy mayor’s position.
The Inner West Weekly quoted Cr Cheung saying: “The tone when the statement was made was very, very threatening”.
Mr Adams said in response: “I formally, on the record, deny having said anything. This is simply a case of sour grapes.”
In 2006, an Inner West Weekly article said Cr Adams was “censured” after “racking up thousands of dollars’ worth of phone calls and Cabcharges for personal benefit”.
The story continued: “In the 2004-05 financial year Cr Adams ran up a $2400.47 bill on his phone and $2251.56 in Cabcharges. Having claimed the expenses were council-related, Cr Adams subsequently repaid the money to the council.”
Mr Adams was also keen to enter Federal politics through the former seat of Lowe in the 2007 election that saw Kevin Rudd topple John Howard as Prime Minister.
A year before the election, Mr Adams opened an office on Burwood Road putting himself forward as a Liberal candidate.
Liberal Party bosses ordered he remove logos and references saying he was not endorsed. The office remained for a time with generic “Nick Adams for Lowe” branding, including photos of him alongside Mr Howard. In the end, Mr Adams decided not to contest the election.
After he verbally abused a television reporter in 2009, the Liberal Party moved to suspend Mr Adams for six months. He remained on council as an independent.
Amid the brickbats, Burwood Mayor John Faker offers another viewpoint on the man of Greek heritage who anglicised his name from Nicholas Adamopoulos and took up US citizenship in 2021.
Mr Faker was approached by Mr Adams almost two decades ago, asking him to look into a driveway application on behalf of his parents - his father was a maths teacher and his mother a carer at a retirement home, They lived in Mr Faker’s council area.
“It was always known Nick was very ambitious politically,” Mr Faker said. “He had very conservative views but all my dealings with him were very cordial and he was always very warm and polite. The times I would bump into him he was always very open, never dismissive.”
A high-ranking local government figure who requested anonymity added: “There was no doubt he was a very right wing thinker but he’s a lot more intelligent than what people give him credit for. He would play on issues that would deliver media attention and give him a platform … the spotlight.”
In his 2016 book Retaking America, Mr Adams referenced his formative years in Australia.
“I regularly butted heads with teachers at high school and staff at university,” he wrote. “I wasn’t a bad kid but I was bold and self-confident and I didn’t mind challenging them.
“I was raised by parents, within a nuclear family, with old fashioned values. I was taught to stand up for myself, to speak directly, and not to be afraid to tell people what I thought of them, if it was warranted.”
Mr Adams claimed he was “never once invited back” to Trinity despite his achievements, and after submitting an entry for an old boys business directory, was overlooked.
“Why?” he asked in Retaking America. “I never got a direct response but I know I was excluded because of my conservative politics … and probably that a few teachers still had their noses out of joint from a few run-ins with me.”
When he became a published author, he tells of offering to donate copies to Sydney University’s Fisher Library. The offer was declined.
“Incredible, Hitler’s Mein Kampf is there,” he wrote. “But my little book (now The American Boomerang) on American exceptionalism? Sorry, no can do. Don’t want it.”
He sent a copy to the Library of Congress in Washington DC – the “biggest library in the world” – and received a reply saying they “would be ‘honoured’ to hold my book.”
Mr Adams did not respond to a request for interview.
Originally published as Nick Adams’ rise from Ashfield Council to White House favourite
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