Senator John Fetterman, Pennsylvania's MAGA Democrat

About a decade ago, Blue America was eager to see the mayor of Braddock, PA elected to the U.S. Senate, when he endorsed Bernie against Hillary, when he denounced Debbie Wasserman Schultz. But he came in third in the Democratic primary, against some Schumer and EMILY’s List GOP-lite shit who lost to the Republican. Two years later Fetterman ran, successfully, for Lieutenant Governor. He had already started to change— and not in a good way— and Blue America sat that race out… and sat out out his 2022 Senate election as well. By then, we already know knew he was no good. But he beat Dr. Oz, went to the Senate and has gotten worse and worse with each passing week. Some call him the Senate’s MAGA-Democrat.

Point: he didn’t turn into a crappy Democrat after his stroke or bout with clinical depression; he already was one before that. People just didn’t want to see it. Yesterday Ben Terris dissected his whole miserable de-evolution for New York Magazine. His chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, quickly went from being proud of Fetterman for seeking help for depression in early 2023 to being alarmed by his behavior a year later, so alarmed that he resigned. Terris wrote that in May 2024, Jentelson wrote “an urgent letter to David Williamson, the medical director of the traumatic-brain-injury and neuropsychiatry unit at Walter Reed, who had overseen Fetterman’s care at the hospital. ‘I think John is on a bad trajectory and I’m really worried about him,’ the email began. If things didn’t change, Jentleson continued, he was concerned Fetterman ‘won’t be with us for much longer.’ His 1,600-word email came with the subject line ‘concerns,’ and it contained a list of them, from the seemingly mundane (‘He eats fast food multiple times a day’) to the scary (‘We do not know if he is taking his meds and his behavior frequently suggests he is not’). ‘We often see the kind of warning signs we discussed,’ Jentleson wrote. ‘Conspiratorial thinking; megalomania (for example, he claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news— he declines most briefings and never reads memos); high highs and low lows; long, rambling, repetitive and self centered monologues; lying in ways that are painfully, awkwardly obvious to everyone in the room.’”

That e-mail to Dr. Williamson was ominous. “Fetterman was, according to Jentleson, avoiding the regular checkups advised by his doctors. He was preoccupied with the social-media platform Twitter, which he’d previously admitted had been a major “accelerant” of his depression. He drove his car so ‘recklessly,’ Jentleson said, that staff refused to ride with him. He had also bought a gun. ‘He says he has a biometric safe and takes all the necessary precautions, and living where he does I understand the desire for personal protection,’ Jentleson wrote, referring to Fetterman’s rough-and-tumble town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. ‘But this is one of the things you said to flag, so I am flagging.’ Another red flag, Jentleson added: ‘Every person who was supposed to help him stay on his recovery plan has been pushed out.’ Fetterman was isolated, had ‘damaged personal relationships,’ and was shedding staff. The turmoil in his office continued over the following year. Since winning election in 2022, he has lost his closest advisers, including three of his top spokespeople, his legislative director, and Jentleson. His circle of trust has shrunk, and people I spoke with made it clear that they expect more staffers to depart.”

“Part of the tragedy here is that this is a man who could be leading Democrats out of the wilderness,” Jentleson said. “But I also think he’s struggling in a way that shouldn’t be hidden from the public.”

… [Jentelson’s] not the only one who is uneasy. Former and current staffers paint a picture of an erratic senator who has become almost impossible to work for and whose mental-health situation is more serious and complicated than previously reported. No one is saying every controversial position (for example, his respectful relationship with Trump) stems from his mental health— but it’s become harder for them to tell which ones do. When I spoke with Fetterman in April and shared those concerns, he denied anything was amiss. He told me that he felt like the “best version” of himself and later texted that the staff turnover at his office was typical of Washington. “Why is this a story?” he asked.

Many of the staffers I spoke with are angry. They are troubled. And they are sad. These were some of Fetterman’s truest believers, and they now question his fitness to be a senator. They worry he may present a risk to the Democratic Party and maybe even to himself.

…[After Fetterman was admitted to Walter Reed on February 15, 2023, Those first days in the hospital were rough. Fetterman was experiencing delusions. He thought that if he took a bed at the hospital, he would be arrested. He told doctors that he believed members of his family were wearing wires to secretly record him. In one chaotic moment, Fetterman grew convinced that a political rally was being held in the hospital’s lobby and that he needed to break out of his room to attend. David Williamson, Fetterman’s doctor, told me that the main causes of the delusions were the lingering effects of the stroke, dehydration, and depression and that the original medication for the depression could also have been a factor. According to paperwork from Walter Reed, doctors then stopped all antidepressants and put him on other drugs. (Williamson declined to comment on the specifics of the medication plan.)

The new medication worked, and over the next few weeks, Fetterman’s “mood steadily improved,” according to a public discharge briefing from Williamson. He started sleeping and eating better. He was staying hydrated. He’d come into the hospital burdened by thoughts of self-harm and an indifference about whether he lived or died. “If the doctor said, ‘Oh, by the way, you have six months left,’ I would have been like, ‘Okay, whatever,’” he later told Time magazine. Now, with the new treatment plan, Williamson said Fetterman quickly “evidenced better mood, brighter affect, and improved motivation, self-attitude and engagement with others.”

… After six weeks in the hospital, the doctors determined his mental-health issues were in remission. Williamson said, “He expressed a firm commitment to treatment over the long term.”

Doctors provided Fetterman with a multi-faceted treatment approach. He needed to stay on his medication and to get his blood checked regularly. It was also important that he stay hydrated, so staff made sure his office fridge remained stocked with Gatorade. He needed to eat healthy and get regular exercise (this was both for his mental health and for the underlying heart problems that had led to his stroke). It was also strongly suggested that he stay off social media, which exacerbated his mental-health challenges. “I’ve never noticed anyone to believe that their mental health has been supported by spending any kind of time on social media,” he said in 2023.

Fetterman seemed to be a changed man, and he was changing Congress, too. The sergeant at arms installed monitors on Fetterman’s Senate-floor desk and on the dais to facilitate the audio-to-text transcription he needed to follow proceedings. He wore his hoodie and shorts to work, later saying it was difficult to find any suits that could fit his “chopstick legs” and accommodate the fact that he had “no ass.” Fetterman’s willingness to be open about his issues seemed to mark a new era in how the public discussed the mental health of politicians. “The benighted days of secrets and shaming are gone,” Jennifer Senior wrote in The Atlantic. 

Fetterman threw himself into the work. He chaired his first subcommittee meeting, which focused on the benefits of food stamps. He flew out to western Pennsylvania to meet with farmers dealing with the toxic effects of a train derailment in nearby East Palestine, Ohio. He co-sponsored a bill to ban stock trading in Congress. And in September, after federal prosecutors accused New Jersey senator Bob Menendez of taking bribes, Fetterman became the first senator to call for him to resign.

A few other Democrats joined the chorus calling for Menendez to step down, but Fetterman was disappointed at how many kept their mouths shut. There was an issue, however, on which Congress moved swiftly and in unison: Fetterman’s sartorial choices. The resolution came from Democratic West Virginia senator  Joe Manchin and Utah Republican Mitt Romney. They called it the Show Our Respect to the Senate Act— SHORTS for short. It required male senators to wear a coat, tie, and slacks (or other long pants) whenever they were on the Senate floor, and it passed by unanimous consent.

Outwardly, Fetterman played it cool, offering as his official statement a photograph of actor Kevin James smiling sheepishly. But behind the scenes, he stewed. “He was absolutely irate,” said a former staffer. “I think it’s what soured him on the Democratic caucus.” (Fetterman denies this.) It was, perhaps, a trivial matter for the Senate to spend its time on. But there was hardly a moment to dwell on it. A few weeks later, Hamas staged a large-scale terrorist attack against Israel, killing more than a thousand people and kidnapping 250 others.

In the days after the October 7 attack, Israel declared war and retaliated with brute force, killing Hamas forces as well as thousands of civilians. In the U.S., progressives began calling for a cease-fire to at least pause the carnage. Fetterman felt differently. “Now is not the time to talk about a cease-fire,” he posted on October 18. “We must support Israel in efforts to eliminate the Hamas terrorists who slaughtered innocent men, women, and children.”

If his base was surprised by this, perhaps they hadn’t been paying enough attention. While Israel had not been a prominent issue in his various campaigns, Fetterman had been talking about his support for the country for years. “I’m not really a progressive in that sense,” he said while campaigning in 2022. “There is no daylight between myself and these kinds of unwavering commitments to Israel’s security.” Still, it wasn’t until October 7 that it became clear Fetterman was the most outspoken Israel hawk in his party, offering constant and unconditional support for the military action in Gaza. Early on in the conflict, 16 of his former campaign staffers wrote a letter— anonymously— saying they found his full-throated support for Israel to be a “gutting betrayal.” Jentleson had taken to defending Fetterman on Twitter from such criticisms, posting, “The thing about being a staffer is that no one elected you to represent them.”

But it wasn’t just staffers who were upset. There was also Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, who had become something of a political celebrity in her own right: She is a kindhearted philanthropist (the proprietor of a “free store” in Braddock that gave away goods and clothing), a formerly undocumented immigrant from Brazil, and a vocal progressive. In early November, just weeks after the attack, Gisele arrived at her husband’s Senate office and, according to a staffer present, they got into a heated argument.

“They are bombing refugee camps. How can you support this?” the staffer recalled her saying with tears in her eyes.

“That’s all propaganda,” Fetterman replied.

Later, a still visibly upset Gisele pulled the staffer aside. She asked him if members of Fetterman’s team were pushing him to take these stances for political reasons. The staffer told her that the opposite was true: Many of them were as upset as she was. “If you’re pushing back on this, there’s no hope,” the staffer recalled her saying. “This is horrible news.”

A few days later, Gisele texted a different staffer: “I am at breaking point and I can’t co-sign this any longer. I’d love some help in language to separate myself from this. Can anyone help me?”

Gisele might have disliked what her husband was up to, but his father loved it. Karl Fetterman, an insurance executive, was way more conservative than his son. He used to have a magnet on his refrigerator that warned that his dog bites Democrats, and he watched Fox News constantly. When Fox would air segments about Fetterman’s strong stances on Israel or invite him on as a guest, the senator’s father would, according to former staff, almost always call to say how proud he was.

The war in Gaza was also luring Fetterman back to Twitter. He had handed over his social-media passwords to his staff as part of his recovery plan, but when he saw in December that Pennsylvania protesters had stuck BOYCOTT ISRAELI GOODS stickers on hummus containers, he approved a post for staff to send. The message adhered to a classic meme format featuring two photos of Drake: one in which the rapper appeared disgusted by text that read PROTEST THE RAPE OF ISRAELI WOMEN + GIRLS and another in which he nodded approvingly to PROTEST HUMMUS.

The post roiled his staff. According to one former aide, a group of women who worked in the office argued that the message could be read as hurtful to sexual-assault survivors. Members of Fetterman’s senior team spent hours urging him to take the post down. The point he was trying to make— that protesters didn’t care about the atrocities committed by Hamas— was being lost in the controversy. According to one of them, Fetterman’s response was that he didn’t want to give in to the “woke mob” and that anyone upset was welcome to resign. Eventually he took it down.

The endless fights over Israel, which saw Fetterman draw further into himself, coincided with setbacks in his recovery regimen. At that point, Fetterman hadn’t gotten his blood drawn for months, despite bloodwork being a crucial component of the plan. In the final weeks of 2023, a Senate physician called the office, according to a staffer, to say that he had seen Fetterman “acting bizarrely” near the underground trolleys that shuttle people between the Capitol and nearby office buildings. He had witnessed Fetterman, seemingly unaware of his surroundings, walk directly into a group of people, nearly bowling them over.

“I just got off with the docs,” a staffer wrote to Gisele in a text. “They said they’d call you to debrief.” The staffer went on to say that others shared his worries about Fetterman’s behavior and that at least two top aides were likely to quit soon because of it: “I don’t want to sound defensive, but I want to be clear that this isn’t just me. Everyone here is feeling alarmed.”

“I don’t think for a second that it’s you,” Gisele responded. “Will he find out tonight that they are leaving? My fear is something is off and it won’t register.”

Gisele then texted that she had told her husband that his staff and doctor were worried about him but that he told her “that’s not true and I guess I am not talking to you today” before hanging up. The doctor had also “said that he was fighting to get access of the Twitter account,” she went on. “Please promise me that he’ll never have access.”

The staffer said that Fetterman was asking for the passwords but that he would not give them up.

“I told him I don’t want to talk to him until his blood is tested,” Gisele wrote.

One former staffer recalled overhearing Gisele on speakerphone that December saying to Fetterman, “Who did I marry? Where is the man I married?”

… Going off meds is a common temptation for people with mental-health diagnoses once they start to believe they are well, and it often results in regression. Two aides told me they frequently heard him talk about how he felt so great that he didn’t “need” medication. One person told me Fetterman said he “didn’t like the way” his medication “made” him feel— made, past tense.

…In some ways, Fetterman was being the guy voters sent to Congress. He keeps to himself? He cancels fundraising events last minute? He thinks a lot of his colleagues are morons? Make him president already! He was never a particularly easy person to work with— he’d had that reputation throughout his entire political career. So sometimes the staff would debate whether a fundamental change had occurred or they were just imagining things, particularly since there were stretches of time when he was lucid and together. “It got hard to know which way was up,” Jentleson told me. “Was he acting crazy, or were we overreacting? I asked myself that a lot.”…

... One staffer told me there would be entire days when they couldn’t let anyone outside the office be around him because he was in “some sort of state” and might say “really fucked-up shit to constituents.” Sometimes he would just “shut down,” according to one former staffer. He was saying “unhinged shit,” according to one text, and spending more time on social media… Another staffer chimed in to say the boss had picked a fight in the Senate cloakroom when an attendant wouldn’t let him bring a friend in. “He said something to the effect of, ‘you let all these imbeciles in here but you won’t let me bring in my friend?’”

Bobby Maggio, a longtime aide who often defended his boss, thought that people might be overreacting to the cloakroom incident. He replied that this could just be an example of Fetterman being “gruff” and frustrated by a “stupid rule.”

In February 2024, Jentleson announced he was stepping down as chief of staff while remaining on the payroll as an adviser. For months afterward, he debated whether to contact Fetterman’s doctor. When he was still working for Fetterman, he had been explicitly told not to, and when he did so anyway, there were massive fights. According to Fetterman, “In December 2023, Adam Jentleson took action that jeopardized the privacy/sanctity of my confidential medical records. I subsequently directed my doctors to sever any access Adam could have to my medical information.”

In May 2024, Jentleson decided it would be best to lay everything out there. “I wanted to do what I could think of to try and get him help,” he said. “That’s why I sent the letter.” He also said he worried that Fetterman could end up inadvertently hurting someone else. “He engages in risky behavior,” he wrote in the letter. “He drives recklessly: he FaceTimes, texts and reads entire news articles while driving— and I don’t mean while stopped at a light or something, he reads and FaceTimes while driving at high speeds.”

Less than a month later, Fetterman caught a red-eye flight back from Los Angeles after taping an episode of Bill Maher’s show. His staff urged him to have someone pick him up from the airport and drive him home, but he refused. Just before 8 a.m., according to a police report, Fetterman was traveling at “well over” the 70-mph speed limit on I-70 when he smashed his Chevy Traverse into the back of a 62-year-old woman’s Impala, totaling both cars. Gisele, who had been in the back seat, suffered a pulmonary contusion and spinal fractures. Fetterman, calling from the side of the road, told a staffer he had fallen asleep at the wheel and handed the phone to a police officer.

“It’s a miracle no one died,” the officer said.

After Donald Trump won the election, Fetterman did something no other Democratic senator dared to do: He went to Mar-a-Lago. “I didn’t bend any knee; they reached out and invited me,” Fetterman told me. “And if you’re a senator from a critical state and the president would like to have a conversation, that’s part of our responsibility.” 

… While many Democrats were shell-shocked by Trump’s victory, Fetterman seemed unfazed. He understood the Trump phenomenon better than most of his party and, having won a state that went for Trump in 2024, shared more voters with him, too. And so it made sense, in his mind, that he could find ways to work with the incoming president. The Mar-a-Lago pilgrimage was a start, but Fetterman went further. He was the only Democrat to vote for Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi. He posed for a thumbs-up photo with Elise Stefanik, then the nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. And he came close to supporting Pete Hegseth, the nominee for secretary of Defense who had been dogged by reports of excessive drinking, financial mismanagement, and sexual misconduct.

“We are going to have massive issues internally when he votes for Hegseth,” a staffer texted in mid-January. Fetterman had been the only Democrat to meet with Hegseth late last year as the former Fox News host made the rounds on Capitol Hill trying to earn Senate support for his confirmation. Fetterman had left his meeting with Hegseth unimpressed, according to former staff, but as the decision neared, it seemed like he might actually vote for him. It would be a bad look, he told staff, if all the Democrats turned their backs on the person who would be leading the armed forces. It would make them appear weak and partisan.

Fetterman became so torn by the decision that, on the day of a procedural vote that would move Hegseth’s nomination closer to completion, he floated the idea of not voting at all. “What if I left?” he asked his staff. Instead of voting, he said, maybe he should just sneak out of Washington and hole up at his parents’ place in York, Pennsylvania. “I felt like I was looking at a six-eight 8-year-old,” the staffer said.

The back-and-forth led to what one person in his office at the time called a full-blown meltdown. According to a contemporaneous text message from this staffer sent to a colleague, Fetterman had become so distraught about the Hegseth vote, as well as chatter in the media that he might switch parties and become a Republican, that he spent part of the day locked in his office, fighting with Gisele and crying while FaceTiming with staff. “He says that they are trying to cancel him again but we don’t know who ‘they’ are,” a staffer said in a text. Fetterman ultimately voted against Hegseth’s nomination. In a statement, Fetterman said, “My no vote on Pete Hegseth speaks for itself. The rest is pure conjecture.”

Fetterman’s struggles seemed to be occurring in a vacuum of his own making. He was friends with Welch of Vermont and Republican senator Katie Britt of Alabama. The three of them dined on occasion and swapped stories about their families. But beyond that, he was isolated. He deleted himself from the Democratic-caucus group chat. He rarely, if ever, attended hearings. During the first quarter of this year he missed more votes than any other senator.

In my conversations with various Democratic Senate staffers, the view of Fetterman essentially boiled down to: He can be difficult to work with, but we’re lucky to have him in the Senate. In recent months, Senators Patty Murray of Washington and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire had what staff referred to as verbal altercations with Fetterman. But, like former senator Joe Manchin, Fetterman provides a mostly reliable vote from an unreliable state. He has what baseball statisticians might refer to as a high WAR (wins above replacement).

“One of the biggest challenges we have is to get trust from working-class Americans,” Welch said. “And I think John has a unique ability and sensibility to connect and be trusted.” Welch said he thinks Fetterman is doing well emotionally and appears to be “quite engaged with the job.” When asked if she had observed Fetterman struggling, Britt told me, “Not at all.”

Still, some of Fetterman’s behavior was leaking out into public. Last year, the Sunrise Movement posted a video of Fetterman mocking and filming one of his constituents, a climate activist who was calmly trying to ask him about his stance on pipelines. Earlier this year, a passenger on a flight to Pittsburgh filmed a video of Fetterman getting into an argument with the pilot about wearing his seat belt in a way that was visible to the crew. “If you want to go to Pittsburgh, it’s simple,” the pilot explains. “You’re going to have to follow our instructions or be asked to get off the airplane.”

… Fetterman went on to make statements that shocked people. In opposing a cease-fire, he said, “Let’s get back to killing.” A person who heard the conversation told me, “He said, ‘Kill them all.’” In a statement, Fetterman denied the account, adding, “Any reference to killing was solely about Hamas, and I do support the destruction of that organization, down to its last member.”

… Years after the stroke, Fetterman continues to struggle with auditory processing. To chat with me, he had put an iPhone on the table that transcribed my questions to him in real time. Sometimes Fetterman wouldn’t finish reading a question before answering, and other times his sentences could come out a bit garbled. After a podcast taping earlier this year with The Bulwark, the interviewer Tim Miller came away feeling like Fetterman might not be all there. “He’s struggling,” Miller said in a separate podcast taping. “He’s, like, really struggling. And I just think coming off of the Biden thing, we should not be hiding the ball on this sort of stuff.”

How the ultra-extreme right media machine likes to present Fetterman: