Is This the John Fetterman Pennsylvania Elected?

John Fetterman / Photo-illustration by Leticia R. Albano; photograph via Getty Images/The Washington Post

I’m on the phone one recent afternoon, having what had been a civilized conversation with a longtime Pennsylvania political insider, when he suddenly starts screaming.

“Do you have to be such an ASSHOLE about everything?” he bellows, his voice so loud that I’m tempted to hold the phone away from my ear. “I mean, why do you have to SPIKE THE BALL all the time?”

I should note, before we go any further, that the person being called names in this exchange is not, thank goodness, me. It’s the person I’ve asked about — the junior Senator from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the former lieutenant governor of our fair state, the six-foot-eight-inch, bald-headed, shorts-and-hoodie-wearing onetime mayor of Braddock, PA, John K. Fetterman. Fetterman, in the estimation of this particular insider — and many other political traditionalists — can be a little, shall we say, over-the-top when making a point, and our insider isn’t such a fan.

For instance. Since last fall, Fetterman has gone hard after Senator Bob Menendez, saying that the New Jerseyan — a fellow Democrat, mind you — should resign his seat after being indicted on federal bribery charges. Fetterman has not only issued statements calling on Menendez to step down; he’s trolled him constantly on social media — including by hiring disgraced (though shameless) ex-New York Congressman George Santos to do a short video on the platform Cameo offering a mock pep talk for Menendez.

“Hey, Bobby!” Santos said in the video, which was released in December. “Look, I don’t think I need to tell you, but: These people that want to make you get in trouble and want to kick you out and make you run away — you make them put up or shut up. You stand your ground, sir, and don’t get bogged down by all the haters out there. Stay strong! Merry Christmas!”

Fetterman’s many social followers ate it up — the video has gotten more than 7.4 million views — but it’s the kind of thing that makes more establishment political people cringe. “I worry about the guy,” our insider says of Fetterman. “I think there’s something wrong with him.”

I should clarify here that the insider just quoted isn’t a progressive, though you’d be forgiven if you thought he was. Since last fall, Fetterman has also royally torqued off the left wing of his party — long considered his base — by taking heterodox positions on two important issues: immigration, where he remains pro-migrant but says the country needs tighter border controls, and Gaza, on which he’s been defiantly, even militantly pro-Israel. Particularly on the latter issue, Fetterman has, well, spiked the ball when expressing his opinion, including by wrapping himself in the Israeli flag at a rally last fall and waving an Israeli flag at protesters from the roof of his house. Meanwhile, he’s further enflamed relations with lefties by telling reporters he’s not actually a progressive. Predictably, onetime supporters on the left aren’t taking the “new Fetterman” lying down, with some going after him in especially personal and brutal ways. As someone tweeted at Fetterman recently, “I really am rooting for the stroke next time.”

So, yes, Fetterman’s stroke. The past couple of years have been, as you might have noticed, eventful for him — which is saying something, given that Fetterman, 54, had already lived a pretty eventful life. Two years ago this month, just four days before the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Fetterman suffered a stroke that nearly took his life. He survived it (obviously) and went on to win both the primary and the general election that fall, but just six weeks into his Senate term, he checked himself into Walter Reed Medical Center in suburban D.C., where he was diagnosed with major depression. The twin health setbacks have turned Fetterman into even more of a national figure — an advocate for the disabled (he still has auditory processing issues) and those who deal with depression and other mental health challenges.

When he first popped up on the political and cultural radar nearly 15 years ago, Fetterman was covered by the media as a curiosity, if not something of a freak. Granted, at the time, that’s kind of what he was: a young white Harvard graduate who’d quixotically decided to try and revive Braddock, a decimated steel community nine miles southeast of Pittsburgh whose population was two-thirds Black. He covered his forearms with tattoos dedicated to Braddock. He showed up practically everywhere wearing not the politician’s blue suit and red tie, but the workingman’s shorts and hoodie. In time, he began espousing lefty ­positions — $15 minimum wage, Medicare-for-all, marriage equality, legal weed.

Senator Bernie Sanders endorsing Fetterman for lieutenant governor in 2018 / Photograph by Rachael Warriner/Alamy Stock Photo

Today? The onetime oddity, however unexpectedly, finds himself smack in the middle of America’s political and cultural mainstream. Many of the positions he staked out are now actually supported by most Americans. His brash social media persona, while still anathema to political fuddy-duddies, is pretty much how the game is played, at least if you want anyone to pay attention to you. His wardrobe choices, while still controversial, somehow seem not so strange when so many of us wear shorts and sweatshirts to our home offices. His health woes, which a generation ago likely would have disqualified him from elected office — 1972 VP nominee Thomas Eagleton was bounced off the ticket after it was revealed he’d been treated for depression — have arguably become his biggest strength, turning Fetterman into a walking symbol of a depressed, broken nation.

About the best analogy I can think of for Fetterman is that of an underground band from the 1980s that somehow finds itself scoring hit singles and Grammy nods a decade later. And not because the band changed — because the culture did.

Fetterman, in short, is R.E.M.

He’s reached this point in part because the media is endlessly fascinated by him. And they’re fascinated because nearly everything about him — his wardrobe, his looks, his backstory, his positions, and now his health challenges — cuts against conventional wisdom regarding what’s supposed to “work” in mainstream politics. In fact, all those things have been his superpower, allowing him to connect with a segment of the citizenry that long ago stopped trusting typical politicians. Fetterman absolutely loathes Donald Trump, but his populist appeal isn’t all that dissimilar.

“People see in him what they want to see,” says Philadelphia public-affairs executive Larry Ceisler, a longtime player in Pennsylvania politics.

Which brings us back to Gaza. Progressives feel burned by Fetterman’s stance on Israel because this is not the Fetterman they thought they knew. Then again, maybe they misunderstood John Fetterman all along.

One day in mid-March, I’m led into Fetterman’s office in the Russell Building in D.C., across the street from the Capitol. It’s dark and cavernous inside, and Fetterman — wearing his hoodie — is seated behind a large desk. “I’m John,” he says, reaching across it to shake my hand. As I start to talk, Fetterman looks down at an iPad that’s propped in front of him, turning my speech into words on his screen. It’s how he deals with the processing issues created by his stroke, and he’s compared it to a nearsighted person wearing glasses — just a helpful tool.

His health, he says when I ask, is excellent. He’s made big strides both mentally and physically. He tells me about a couple of videos he shot earlier in the day — one for the Pennsylvania Medical Marijuana Advisory Board, the other for a New Jersey mental health organization. He’s proud that he nailed them in one take each. “I’m not saying both are the Gettysburg Address,” he says, “but they’re — ” He stops. “I remember right after the stroke, in the campaign in the summer of ’22, it would be common to have 10 or 15 takes just to get things right.”

Fetterman has few close friends, at least in the world of politics. As I made calls for this profile, I asked sources about whom he’s tight with. People said they didn’t know or thought the only person he really confides in and takes advice from is his wife of 16 years, Gisele.

John and Gisele Fetterman in Philadelphia in November 2022 / Photograph via Getty Images

One reason for this, I was told, is his shyness. Fetterman has been described as an introvert, even antisocial, and in our interview, he doesn’t often make eye contact. But his standoffishness, at least among the power crowd, also potentially stems from something else. “He got into politics because he doesn’t think politics works for a lot of people,” says a person who’s worked with Fetterman. Why become part of the club if you think the club is part of the problem?

If Fetterman doesn’t have a lot of political buddies, he’s long had a desire to have his voice heard — and he’s good at doing that. Back in his early days as mayor of Braddock — he was first elected in 2005 and served through 2018 — ­Fetterman was a frequent writer of letters to the editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. One letter I read stated his opposition to an expressway extension that would have gone through the middle of Braddock; Fetterman called it “environmental racism.” Another expressed his outrage that local health-care provider UPMC was closing a facility in Braddock, leaving residents, many of whom lived in poverty, with few options when dealing with medical emergencies. The most interesting missive I came across was about a $1,000 reward the organization Pennsylvania Crime Stoppers had put up for any leads about the murder of a 22-year-old Braddock man named Riyaad Partlow. A week or so after the reward was offered, someone else put up the same size award — $1,000 — for information about the maiming of a dog. “What does it say about us as a society,” Fetterman wrote, “when the bounty for information about a nonlethal act of animal cruelty matches that for information about the killing of a young man from Braddock?”

Because he’s a good writer — and because he’s darkly funny — Fetterman proved to be a natural for Twitter when he launched his account nearly a decade ago. He currently has nearly a million followers on the rebranded X, and he uses the platform to express, usually in stark terms, his opinions. Pinned to the top of his page recently was a post he wrote that said, “Hamas is anathema to peace for Gaza. Hamas instigated and owns this humanitarian catastrophe.”

Other posts have a slightly lighter touch. This winter, Fetterman’s feed was filled with tweets supporting South Jersey Congressman Andy Kim, who’s running for Menendez’s Senate seat. In his support of Kim, Fetterman routinely mocked both the indicted Menendez and a third candidate, Tammy Murphy, wife of New Jersey governor Phil Murphy and a onetime Republican. (She withdrew from the race in late March.) In February, Fetterman shared the results of a new poll as follows:

NEW NJ SENATE POLL!
Rep. Kim 32%
Nepo (R) 20%
Sleazeball 9%

Fetterman has also mastered TV, no doubt because he’s done so much of it. His first big national TV appearance came way back in 2009, when he appeared on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report to talk about his attempts to resuscitate Braddock. (This was shortly after a New York Times piece about the borough.) TV-segment producers have been drawn to him ever since, and understandably — the large bald man with the hoodie, strong opinions, and an interesting personal tale makes for good TV. Fetterman’s willingness to talk candidly about his health struggles has only increased his national TV appeal. Last fall, a few months after a Time magazine cover story about his health journey, the Senator made the rounds on talk shows, including another interview with Stephen Colbert, this time on Colbert’s CBS late-night show. Fetterman was wry and opinionated and funny as he talked about an array of topics:

His health: “Nearly dying is a major downer.”

Political life in D.C.: “I always tell people — don’t worry, it’s much worse than you think.”

His wardrobe: “I was really struck by, oh my God, the world is going to hell because he’s going to wear a hoodie on the floor [of the Senate]. I mean, like, Ukraine, or shutting down the government, all these issues — but I think it’s much more important to see what this man will wear.”

A few weeks later, Fetterman popped up on The View, again talking health and politics. At one point, co-host Sunny Hostin­ mentioned his constant battering of Menendez, asking if the New Jersey Senator didn’t deserve a trial before Fetterman­ passed judgement on him. “He has the right to his day in court,” Fetterman replied, “but he doesn’t have the right to have these kinds of votes and things — this is not a right.” A seat in the U.S. Senate, in other words, is not an entitlement.

It was quintessential Fetterman: simultaneously blunt and high-minded, putting principle above politics. Although it’s worth asking if Fetterman himself has always lived up to that apolitical ideal.

Fetterman suffered his stroke on Friday, May 13, 2022 — four days before the primary­ in which he was battling Pittsburgh-area Congressman Conor Lamb and Philadelphia State Rep Malcolm Kenyatta. After Gisele noticed her husband’s face drooping­ and, suspecting a stroke, immediately drove him to a nearby hospital, Fetterman’s campaign canceled his appearances that day and then again the next, saying he wasn’t “feeling well.” It wasn’t until Sunday — 48 hours after the initial incident — that the campaign released news he had suffered a stroke. Even then, the message seemed to downplay­ the seriousness of what happened.­

“I had a stroke that was caused by a clot from my heart being in an A-fib rhythm for too long,” Fetterman said in a statement the campaign put out. “The amazing doctors here were able to quickly and completely remove the clot, reversing the stroke, then got my heart under control as well. … The good news is, I’m feeling much better, and the doctors tell me I didn’t suffer any cognitive damage. I’m on my way to full recovery.”

It wasn’t until 17 days later — after Fetterman had prevailed in the primary — that he came clean about how dire his condition had been, saying in a statement, “I almost died.” His campaign also noted that a pacemaker he had implanted on primary day was to treat a previously undisclosed heart condition. What’s more, it was later revealed that Fetterman’s condition was so dicey that the night before his pacemaker procedure, as people across Pennsylvania prepared to vote in the next day’s primary, he was recording a video for his kids in case he didn’t survive.

Would greater transparency have altered the primary outcome? Almost certainly not; Fetterman won by more than 30 points. But that doesn’t mean voters weren’t entitled to more.

To Fetterman’s credit, despite the severe auditory processing issues he was dealing with post-stroke, he agreed to a televised debate in the fall against general-election opponent Mehmet Oz. Unfortunately, he struggled so much in the debate that it could have cost him — and Democrats — the seat. Fetterman himself was distraught about his performance and has pinpointed that moment as the beginning of his emotional slide — a downturn that started in earnest when the election was over. Despite having toppled Oz by five points, the new Senator-elect struggled to get out of bed at his family’s home in Braddock.

From left: Josh Shapiro, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John Fetterman at a pre-election rally at Temple University on November 5, 2022. / Photograph via Getty Images/The Washington Post

In mid-February, six weeks after he was sworn in to his new position, and with his despair only growing, Fetterman was persuaded by family and staff to seek help. As Time later reported, his condition got worse before it got better. He didn’t get out of his pajamas. He stopped showering and shaving. He was so filled with self-loathing that he was convinced his own family wanted nothing to do with him.

As the days passed, though, and he got medication and counseling, his condition began to improve. By late March, he was well enough to go home, then back to work.

The silver lining of it all was the support he received from Senate colleagues, constituents, and people who’d had health battles of their own. It’s support Fetterman now tries to pay back by talking about his dark journey on national TV and offering encouragement to those who are struggling.

“All the time,” he says when I ask how often people reach out to him. “I have personal conversations with people that are considering harming themselves, or they’re very depressed. And that’s why I talked about what I went through.”

This isn’t the first time, of course, that Fetterman has become known as a champion of Americans who are struggling or on the margins, who’ve been ignored or forgotten about.

Fetterman has been covered so extensively in the press that the basics of his backstory are pretty well known: Young guy from York, PA, graduates from college, gets his MBA, and is embarking on a career in the insurance industry when suddenly, a friend is killed in a car accident. Shaken, he begins to question himself, his life and the world. He leaves his job and volunteers for AmeriCorps in the Pittsburgh area, where he sees up-close the struggles — economic and otherwise — that people face in their daily lives. He spends a year getting a master’s in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, then heads back to the Pittsburgh area, to Braddock — a borough whose population had fallen from 20,000 in its heyday to just 2,800 — where he launches a GED program for kids who dropped out of school. At their urging, he decides to run for mayor and wins his first election — by a single vote.

I ask Fetterman if he had a big career mapped out after graduating from the Kennedy School. He laughs. “Oh, hell no,” he says. “I did know I wanted to go back and do things like what brought me to Braddock originally.” This was in contrast to most of his classmates, he notes. Fetterman graduated from the Kennedy School in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, and many of his fellow graduates headed into the private sector. Those who did commit to public policy gravitated toward places like Portland, San Francisco and Boston. But not Fetterman. As he says, “I expected to go to Braddock to disappear.”

Fetterman was Braddock’s mayor, a position that paid $150 per month — he survived with support from his family. But the work he did was closer to that of a street minister (he set up a nonprofit that worked with local youth and community members), a small-time real estate developer (he used his own savings and money from his family to buy and rehab dirt-cheap buildings in town), and a hipster marketing dude (he created a website to sell the borough to artists and other “urban pioneers” he thought could help revive the place).

The whole thing was so out of the ordinary that it didn’t take long for the media to latch onto the story: Physically imposing guy — one who’s tattooed the borough’s zip code on his arm, along with the dates of murders that have taken place in town — tries to reinvigorate a forgotten community … just because it seems like the right thing to do. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette weighed in four months into Fetterman’s first term; a widely distributed Associated Press story a year later was followed by a game-changing New York Times story in 2009.

That Times piece put Braddock and Fetterman on the national radar, and even more attention followed. Rolling Stone ran a major feature titled “The Mayor of Hell.” The Atlantic included Fetterman in a cover story about “27 brave thinkers shaping the future.” The Times came back for a second bite of the apple, this one a long New York Times Magazine story. The thrust of all the coverage was similar: In the wake of deindustrialization, communities — and millions of Americans — had been forgotten about, and John Fetterman was doing what he could to make sure we didn’t give up on them. By the time Levi’s chose to make Braddock the focus of an ad campaign centered on the working class, Fetterman was being described in some outlets as its “rock-star mayor.”

Not everyone in Braddock was such a Fetterman fan — he clashed with certain borough council members and reportedly didn’t even show up for many council meetings — but the general consensus was that he at least brought energy to Braddock, something the town hadn’t felt in ages. Meanwhile, he seemed to be widening his lens, recognizing other people who’d been disenfranchised in one way or another. In 2013, two years before the U.S. Supreme Court would rule in favor of marriage equality, he was very publicly inviting same-sex couples to come to Braddock — he’d be happy, he announced, to preside over their nuptials.

John Fetterman, wearing a pride flag, shaking hands with a drag performer at the 2023 Pride Festival of Central PA / Photograph via Getty Images

By 2016, when Fetterman — fairly well known thanks to all the media coverage — declared he was running for the U.S. Senate seat occupied by Republican Pat Toomey, discontent with the status quo was bubbling up on the left and the right, for the simple reason that more and more Americans felt they’d been getting screwed over for the previous couple of decades. The Tea Party was born in 2009, in reaction to the government bailout of big banks that caused the financial crisis. Occupy Wall Street happened two years later. Black Lives Matter debuted in 2013, following the death of Trayvon Martin. In the presidential election, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump dashed into the fray, each claiming to speak for those people who’d been forgotten.

Fetterman threw in with the resurgent left wing of the Democratic Party. He endorsed Bernie, backing him on issues like Medicare-for-all and a $15 minimum wage and energizing young voters when he spoke. He ended up finishing third in the Democratic primary — Katie McGinty won the nomination, then lost to Toomey in the fall — but it was clear Fetterman was on the rise.

Senator Bernie Sanders endorsing Fetterman for lieutenant governor in 2018 / Photograph by Rachael Warriner/Alamy Stock Photo

Two years later, he won the race for lieutenant governor — beating the politically wounded incumbent, Mike Stack — and once in office further polished his left-wing bona fides. As chair of the Board of Pardons, he recommended commuting 36 life sentences, and in a role assigned to him by Governor Tom Wolf, he traveled the state, holding conversations about legalizing weed.

In his 2022 run for the Senate, Fetterman was the favorite of the left in what pundits expected to be a tight two-person race against Conor Lamb, whose star was on the rise after he won a Congressional district that had gone for Trump in 2016. But the promised close battle quickly turned into a blowout. “We underestimated how popular he was,” Lamb told me. “He had really wide name recognition.”

Even in that successful race, though, there were cracks in Fetterman’s relationship with progressives. One was over the statewide fracking ban, which Fetterman once supported but flipped on because it would have cost jobs for the working-class Pennsylvanians he felt so connected to. The other was over the now infamous “jogging incident” in Braddock. On a winter night in 2013, Fetterman, still mayor, heard what he thought were gunshots and saw a man running. He got his son inside, called 911, then grabbed a shotgun and chased the man down, detaining him until police arrived. It turned out the man — who was Black — was merely a jogger, and that the gunshots might have been fireworks. Fetterman claims he made a split-second decision and that because it was cold and the man was bundled up, he wasn’t even able to see the color of his skin. The incident got a modicum of coverage at the time but resurfaced during the 2022 primary, with critics on the left saying it proved racial bias on Fetterman’s part.

The incident didn’t end up significantly hurting him politically — again, he won the primary by more than 30 points — but what he perceived as an attack from the left on his character wounded him. Hadn’t he literally spent more than a decade trying to revive Braddock, a majority minority community? Hadn’t he called out racism when he’d seen it? Hadn’t he expressed solidarity and outrage over young murder victims in Braddock? And now people on the left — at least some of them, no doubt, young white college grads whose version of activism was liking a tweet — were calling him out?

“He felt punched in the mouth by progressives,” says someone who watched Fetterman weather the criticism. “There was no nuance to the attacks. They just called him a racist.”

When it comes to Braddock, the real irony might be that all these years later, despite Fetterman’s efforts as mayor, the borough’s overall economic situation hasn’t improved much, if at all. Population has fallen below 2,000. The main street still has plenty of empty storefronts and boarded-up buildings. Many of the hipsters and artists attracted by Fetterman’s call 15 years ago have moved on. But John and Gisele Fetterman are still committed to the place, raising their three kids in a refurbished car dealership across from the steel factory.

A few weeks ago, I visited Braddock. It was a rainy day, and I was struck by how few people I saw. At one point, I stopped by Free Store 15104, an outpost run by Gisele Fetterman that provides surplus goods to Braddock residents in need. As I approached, I saw a woman sitting on the porch in front of the store. I said hello and asked if she worked there. “No, I’m just looking to get out of the rain,” she said. Only then did I realize the store was closed that day, and the woman had all her belongings bundled up next to her.

John Fetterman isn’t a light man. I’m not referring to his physical build, but to his demeanor and the way the world seems to weigh heavily on him. While his hospitalization last year was the biggest mental health challenge he’s faced, he’s dealt with depression throughout his life. Gisele has compared his bouts of melancholy to those of Lincoln.

As we sit in his Congressional office, it’s clear Fetterman is beyond bewildered by the institution he’s now part of. On his own side of the aisle, he’s obviously aghast that Menendez — whom Fetterman has called “the Senator from Egypt,” given his alleged shady bidding on behalf of that country — still serves. But his biggest frustration is with the dysfunction of the current Republican Party. Fetterman runs through a list of things he can’t quite believe: the party’s failure to support Ukraine; the game of chicken the GOP played when it came to raising the debt ceiling and potentially defaulting on the country’s bills; the near-shutdown of the government that the party’s right wing has routinely engineered; the “performance art” he says members of Congress regularly engage in, offering amendments that will never in a million years pass but that a small band of supporters — ­and donors — loves.

“We embarrass ourselves,” he says of Congress as a whole. “Millions of people depend on our government, and just because it’s your personal thing … you just don’t do that. And that’s been shocking to me. That it’s never about anything meaningful. It’s just pandering to the extremes of your party.”

An anti-Fetterman billboard in Philadelphia in November 2022 / Photograph via Getty Images/Mark Makela

In his 16 months in the Senate, Fetterman has been a rock-solid Democratic vote, not only opposing Republican shenanigans but supporting Democratic priorities like housing affordability, gun control, protecting the environment, student debt relief, and police reform. The only major bill on which he’s bucked the party was a symbolic vote he cast against last summer’s debt-limit bill, which included a proviso from Republicans imposing work requirements on Americans in their 50s applying for food assistance. Fetterman joined left-wing colleagues Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in voting no, though he’s said if the vote had been close and there was a risk the debt limit wouldn’t be raised, he would have changed his vote.

And yet thanks to his positions on immigration and Israel, Fetterman is effectively dead to many left-wing voters, particularly those with the loudest voices on social media and on the younger side. In a poll taken by Quinnipiac University in January, only 28 percent of young voters had a favorable view of Fetterman, while 45 percent had an unfavorable view.

Before I interviewed Fetterman, I called progressive Inquirer columnist Will Bunch. Bunch and I have known each other for years, and I wanted to understand more deeply the left’s ire regarding Fetterman. Bunch told me the biggest factor was simply shock at the Senator’s die-hard support of Israel: “He seems oblivious to the plight of 12,000 children who’ve been killed in Gaza,” he told me. But he also said progressives felt betrayed. The left’s embrace of Fetterman as far back as 2016 was crucial to elevating him politically. “I don’t think John Fetterman would have happened without that moment,” Bunch said of 2016. “He won support that lasted into subsequent campaigns.”

Just as infuriating — or maybe demoralizing — have been Fetterman’s statements that he’s not really a progressive, just a regular Democrat. “It’s human nature,” Bunch said. “Nothing is guaranteed to offend people like someone bragging they’re not like you.”

In some ways, Fetterman’s rigid defense of Israel is hard to square with his overall worldview. For all his time in politics, Fetterman has worn his allegiance to ­underdogs — to the forgotten, the left-behind — on his sleeve. While the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians is long and complex and fraught, in this particular chapter, it’s tough to look at so many suffering Gazans and not see them as the underdogs.

But Fetterman pushes back when I raise that point. “I would think that people that are hostages since October 7th, in a tunnel and being tortured — that’s an underdog,” he says. “And the fact that innocent Israeli civilians were massacred, and children and women were raped and mutilated … as a weapon, as a strategy.”

As for the innocent Gazans who’ve been killed, Fetterman lays that completely at the feet of Hamas, which he compares to other evil regimes over the course of history — “ISIS, or Nazis, or the Imperial Japanese, or the Southern Confederacy.” His point is that defeating those enemies also required harming innocent people. What’s more, Fetterman says, progressives are deluding themselves about what Hamas — which oppresses women and gay people and is no friend of democracy — really stands for. “The one and only nation in that region that embraces traditional progressive values is Israel,” he says.

If Fetterman’s position on Israel since October 7th has been a shock to many on the left, you can argue that it shouldn’t be. In the 2022 Senate campaign, Fetterman was clear on where he stood, telling Jewish Insider, “Whenever I’m in a situation to be called on to take up the cause of strengthening and enhancing the security of Israel or deepening our relationship between the United States and Israel, I’m going to lean in.” He added, in clear reference to pro-Palestinian­ House progressives like Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, “I want to go out of my way to make sure that it’s absolutely clear that the views I hold in no way go along the lines of some of the more fringe or extreme wings of our party.”

What’s interesting is that as Fetterman and I talk in his office, he seems less interested in making the case that he’s right about Israel than in simply making the case he should be allowed to have such a position, without being called a morally bankrupt enabler of genocide.

Pro-cease-fire activists stage a die-in in Fetterman’s office in January 2024 / Photograph via Associated Press/Allison Bailey/NurPhoto

“It’s reasonable to have differing views,” he says. “Say someone wants a cease-fire — that’s reasonable. I happen to hold a different view. I just wish most of the conversations­ could be more productive, as opposed to showing up and protesting or yelling or saying terrible things on social media.”

Fetterman is hardly the first person to call out the intolerance of some on the left, though he’s certainly had a bitter dose of it. When I mention the tweet I saw about “rooting for the stroke next time,” he laughs and shakes his head.

“That’s mild,” he says. “That’s common.” He tells me about a GIF someone created that shows a vein bursting in his head, and about the harsh DMs he receives on the regular. In one direct message, a person expressed the hope that Fetterman remain depressed for the rest of his life. Another was even worse: “He said to do a Budd Dwyer in front of your kids,” Fetterman­ says. Dwyer was the embattled Pennsylvania state treasurer who, during a 1986 news conference, shot himself in the head.

“Think about that,” Fetterman says, with a dark laugh. “That someone woke up in the morning and said, let’s slide into someone’s DMs [and tell him] to blow your brains out in front of your kids.”

The attacks on Fetterman strike me as emblematic of two things. One is the particular gift progressives have for turning on their own — often in the most scolding, self-righteous way possible — when they don’t pass a purity test. The other is the very real difference between Fetterman and so many inhabitants of the left. Even as he’s embraced many, many left-wing positions, Fetterman has never embraced trendy language like “trauma” and “trigger,” nor lofty framings like “oppressor and oppressed.” His progressivism — his ­liberalism — has been far more grounded, practical, even retro: remembering people who got left behind, giving help to people who don’t have enough, letting people be who they are and say what they think; showing loyalty to people who share your values. His approach is as earthy as his wardrobe.

Ultimately, Fetterman tells me, he cares less about progressives’ view of him than the willingness of some of the left not to support Joe Biden. He gets exasperated — again — when talking about hundreds of thousands of voters who checked “uncommitted” in early Democratic primaries, saying that failing to support Biden is choosing to support Trump. And he’s frightened to death about what Trump: The Sequel would be like.

“If Trump wins, he runs the table,” Fetterman says. “He controls the House and Senate. And now it’s very clear that he has control of the Supreme Court. It will be his second term, but he will fight to be president for the remainder of his life and impose the outrageous kinds of laws that would be appalling to most of your readers.”

The left’s insistence on purity reminds him, Fetterman says, of 2016. That year, he endorsed Bernie Sanders in the primary but in the general election gladly supported Hillary Clinton over Trump. For his trouble, he was called a sellout and a corporate shill by some on the left, who said he should be supporting the Green Party candidate.

“I was like, fuck around and find out,” he remembers. “The margin of all three of the blue wall [states] that allowed Trump to become president was within the margin of the stupid throwaway votes for that awful Jill Stein. And I’m just like, how did that work out for you?”

Everything about John Fetterman’s career has been upside-down, inside-out. He’s brash when veteran politicos say play nice. He’s aloof in a world where conventional wisdom says you have to be gregarious. He went to Braddock when the cool people went to Silicon Valley and Portland. He took left-wing positions designed to help the working class when most other Democrats were in the center — and now embraces centrist positions when many Democrats are pulling left. He’s big and bald and tattooed and dresses like a truck driver in a profession where the pros prefer you look like a Kennedy.

And yet here he is in the U.S. Senate — with rising popularity. Last summer, Fetterman’s approval rating with Pennsylvania voters was underwater — 39 percent approved of him, while 50 percent disapproved. As of this winter, those views have flipped: 45 percent now approve, while only 42 percent disapprove. Is the difference those TV appearances in which he’s shared tales of his depression? His views on Israel? His willingness, no matter what you think of his view on Israel, to stick his thumb in the eye of the moralizing left as well as the crazy right?

Fetterman insists he doesn’t pay attention to polls. “I follow what I believe is the truth and let the chips fall,” he says.

Then he goes on: “I don’t think anybody thought — including myself — that talking about and championing mental health is a real winner for politics. But I didn’t care. Because I was grateful to be made more … what’s the word? … whole. Or recovered. And I would want that for anybody. I thought I had lost my family, my career and everything, and just the opposite happened. And getting help made the difference.”

John Fetterman isn’t perfect. He espouses political ideals he doesn’t always live up to. He complains about what enemies say on social media even as he trolls his own enemies there. Yet he seems to have an innate sense that what voters crave in this age where politics doesn’t work for a lot of them are politicians who actually look like people: scarred, depressed, a little asshole-ish sometimes, but still trying to save what’s broken and forgotten and left out.

Published as “Is This the Fetterman Pennsylvania Elected?” in the May 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.