On a cool, sunny evening in April, John Fetterman, the junior senator from Pennsylvania, relaxed into the passenger seat of his robin’s-egg-blue Ford Bronco, which was parked just outside the U.S. Capitol. He was headed to his parents’ house, in York, Pennsylvania, where he grew up, and did not seem unhappy to be leaving Washington. A few hours earlier, in an elevator off the Senate chamber, he had closed his eyes and let his head slump against the control panel—whether from exhaustion or annoyance, it was hard to tell. Now, as an aide inched the Bronco through traffic, Fetterman mentioned that his Republican opponent in 2022, the TV doctor Mehmet Oz, had spent twenty-seven million dollars of his own fortune on the campaign. “And I’m, like, for what?” Fetterman said. “The glamour? I live in a tiny, very expensive apartment. It’s basically a couch and a bed. I go home and I order Grubhub.”
A certain geographic specificity has been essential to Fetterman’s rise—if Donald Trump represented a Republican version of what the politics of industrial decline might look like, then Fetterman, a left-of-center populist from western Pennsylvania, could embody the Democratic one. He is six feet eight and thickly built, a onetime college offensive tackle with a shaved head, a prominent brow, and a laconic, watchful demeanor. No matter how formal the setting, he dresses in a hoodie and athletic shorts, a costume that inspired the passage of a bipartisan bill—the Show Our Respect to the Senate (SHORTS) Act—requiring business attire of every senator in the chamber. Fetterman’s wardrobe reinforces his populist politics, but it also has physical advantages. One of his former aides told me, “I’ve been in big-and-tall stores with him. It is impossible to find a suit that looks decent when you are that big.”
Fetterman, who is fifty-four, was elected to the Senate a few months after suffering a major stroke, which still obviously affects him. By the time he was sworn in, last January, he was experiencing a bout of depression so debilitating that, on the advice of the Senate doctor, he was admitted to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for psychiatric care. When he returned to work, in April of 2023, he showed little interest in the upper chamber’s lawmaking machinery and rarely attended the Democratic Party’s weekly caucus lunch. Instead, he distinguished himself by eagerly antagonizing the opposition. Igor Bobic, a senior politics reporter for HuffPost, told me that Fetterman first caught his eye that fall, during then Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ill-fated effort to impeach President Joe Biden. “The words he was pulling out were just totally words that you wouldn’t normally hear in the Senate,” Bobic said. “You know, like ‘jagoff’ and ‘circle jerk,’ and calling Republicans ‘dicks.’ ”
Fetterman was also happy to speak out against members of his own party. In September, he was the first Democratic senator to call for the resignation of Robert Menendez, his colleague from New Jersey, who was indicted for allegedly accepting bribes and using his influence to benefit the governments of Egypt and Qatar. Those nations are complex actors in a sensitive region—“It’s not like it was Australia,” Fetterman said—and Menendez was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Memorably, federal investigators had found a stash of gold bars in a locked closet in Menendez’s home (he has pleaded not guilty to all charges). In the hallways of the Senate building, Bobic said, “every time Fetterman saw Menendez, he would just shout out, ‘Gold Bar Bob!’ ” According to Rebecca Katz, a longtime adviser of Fetterman’s, “He is the guy who says the emperor has no clothes.”
Since the Hamas attack on October 7th, Fetterman has also become the most outspoken pro-Israel Democrat in the Senate. A wall in the reception area of his office in Washington is covered with posters of missing Israeli hostages, and Fetterman’s staff assiduously updates it with news of every release or declared death. In May, when the Biden Administration threatened to suspend military aid to Israel if the country carried out a ground assault on Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, Fetterman was the rare Democrat to oppose the White House. (“Hard disagree,” Fetterman said at the time. “Deeply disappointing.”) When I asked him whether he had any concerns about the way in which Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was conducting the war, he answered with a shrug. “I’ve never rendered judgment on him, because he is the leader, he is the democratically elected leader,” Fetterman said. “And my support, my support follows Israel.”
The left wing of the Democratic Party, which has coalesced around its opposition to the invasion of Gaza and which, previously, had been a major part of Fetterman’s base, has struggled to understand the senator’s unrelenting commitment to Israel. Alissa Wise, a rabbi from Philadelphia who founded the group Rabbis for Ceasefire, voted for Fetterman in 2022. She was moved by one element of his politics in particular: when he was the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, an economically besieged steel town just outside of Pittsburgh, Fetterman marked each time a resident was killed by having the date tattooed on his forearm. (He now has nine of them.) Wise said, “I just cannot understand how someone capable of such empathy for the victims of violence in Braddock has none for the tens of thousands of Palestinian children who are also victims of violence.”
In 2019, artists in Philadelphia constructed a ten-foot-high Fetterman puppet as part of a campaign to pressure elected officials in Pennsylvania to close an immigrant-detention center; this year, it has been repurposed at pro-Palestinian marches to criticize his stance on the war. “We have a destructive fringe that’s unhelpful,” Fetterman said of his party. “And I’m living that now with Israel.” But his frustrations with the left, he went on, preceded the war. “Years ago, I became more and more appalled at the progressive—whether it’s ‘Abolish ICE’ or ‘Defund the police’—all these kinds of bizarre, boutique views. Like, here’s another toy for Republicans to play with!” Now Trump was competitive in the polls and the left’s invective was directed at Fetterman. “We are in a mad season of the Democratic Party,” he said. “We are turning against ourselves instead of realizing that we don’t have the luxury of fucking around.”
From the back seat of the Bronco, I could not see Fetterman’s face, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. His steady stream of commentary washed over me like sports talk radio. Reflecting on the Presidential race, he said it had been inevitable that Trump would be the G.O.P. nominee: “DeSantis was like a Scott Walker in four-inch lifts,” whereas Trump “broadcasts on a very specific frequency that brings out people who don’t give a shit or know who is mayor or supervisor.” In the most recent elections in Pennsylvania, he went on, Oz and the Republican candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, had both tried to replicate Trump’s approach, only to lose badly on Election Day. “There’s only one Pennywise,” Fetterman said, referring to the murderous entity in Stephen King’s novel “It.” “And everyone else who tries to pretend that—they just look like a clown at a birthday party.”
Since his stroke, Fetterman has relied on transcription software to communicate, which, in subtle but important ways, shapes his interactions. We rarely made eye contact, since, by necessity, he was usually looking at the tablet he carries with him. In the car, if I asked a question that was too long, with too many caveats, or whose syntax the machine could not make sense of, Fetterman would shake his head in frustration; the aide who was driving would speak more concisely into the mike, giving a version of the question that sometimes lacked the original’s context or subtlety. Fetterman likes to compare his use of the transcription app to the way that people use eyeglasses. I often felt that I was talking with an extremely intelligent person through a nuance-deletion machine. A lobbyist who recently met with Fetterman and received a simple, black-and-white response to a question on a complex issue was left wondering, “How much of this is the stroke?”
Fetterman also thought that the stroke had changed him, though in a different way. Part of the reason he was going to York was to check in on his father, who suffered a heart attack last summer, not long after Fetterman’s release from Walter Reed. “It’s undeniable that neither myself nor my father should be alive,” Fetterman said. “We had two situations where, if we were asleep when it happened, we would have been dead.” It was near the end of our ride. Fetterman described his ordeal as a kind of reset—he had come back unrestrained. He compared himself to the Joker. “It’s like in ‘Batman’—the original one, with Jack Nicholson,” he said. “I’ve already been dead once. It’s very liberating.”
Since October 7th, the news from Israel and Palestine has been unremittingly grim. For lawmakers in Washington, it has also been vexing, since they are being held responsible for a situation over which they have little direct control. Among Democrats, a faction on the left, opposing the White House, has called for a ceasefire and opposed sending any additional military aid to Israel. These politicians are committed, but their numbers are small: in April, when the Senate passed a ninety-five-billion-dollar military-aid package, including fifteen billion dollars for Israel, only three members of the Democratic coalition voted against it, all progressives—Jeff Merkley, of Oregon, and Peter Welch and Bernie Sanders, of Vermont.
But even Democrats who broadly support Israel have advocated for the Biden Administration to impose conditions on U.S. aid. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland senator, has proposed withholding support for Israel unless humanitarian-aid corridors to Gaza are expanded; Mark Warner, of Virginia, has pushed for scrutiny of any financing for Israeli militias in West Bank settlements. Chuck Schumer, the Majority Leader, gave a long speech calling on Netanyahu to resign, though that, like the rest of these proposals, has so far been futile. Fetterman is distinct in that he is not looking for contingencies at all. “I’ve always been no conditions,” he told me. In January, forty-nine senators from his party backed an anodyne resolution sponsored by Hawaii’s Brian Schatz affirming Congress’s commitment to a two-state solution; Fetterman refused to sign on. Last month, when the Wall Street Journal asked him if there was anything that would cause him to break with Israel, he said, “It would be some kind of an absurd situation that’s unlikely ever going to happen.”
People who worked for Fetterman told me that, when they returned from recess, in September, the senator’s operation was riding high. Their boss had helped save the Senate for Democrats, in a race that he had won from a hospital bed. They had stuck with him through his depression and were eager to see his political ingenuity at work in Washington. “Where’s the puck going?” he would ask his staffers, seeking their input on political developments. Fetterman was almost instantly battling with Republicans over his shorts and with Menendez over his gold bars. (He was also an early supporter of Menendez’s progressive opponent, Andy Kim.) “It felt like, O.K., he’s back, this is the guy we fought for,” a former senior aide to Fetterman told me. Another close adviser recalled, “It was just fun.”
On October 6th, Fetterman agreed to sign a letter that was circulating in the Senate expressing concern about Netanyahu’s plan to weaken the Israeli judiciary, a constitutional trespass that had sparked mass protests in Tel Aviv. The following day, when news of the terrorist attack arrived, one of Fetterman’s first texts was to a subordinate, saying he wanted to get his name off that letter. Even in less troubling times, Fetterman’s staff knew, he was not a politician who dealt in gray areas. One of his “political superpowers,” as one staffer put it, is his “radical empathy,” a characteristic that was easily activated by the violence Israelis suffered on October 7th. “Who says, ‘I’m going to go and kill and rape and torture and kill innocent children and women—well, I can’t forget my GoPro,’ ” Fetterman said to me. “And they put that on their helmet like they were going to go skateboarding.”
During the following weeks, staffers noticed that Fetterman tended to turn conversations about policy toward the horrifying details of the Hamas murders themselves. He also would gripe about the attention given to left-wing activists and lawmakers, including members of the so-called Squad, whose support for Palestinians often seemed, to Fetterman, flatly pro-Hamas. On October 18th, he tweeted, “Now is not the time to talk about a ceasefire.” Within the office, some staffers sought to rationalize the position, telling themselves that, if he eventually criticized Israel, he would have more standing to do it.
On October 31st, the Israel Defense Forces struck Jabalia, the largest refugee camp in Palestinian territory. A spokesperson for the I.D.F., in confirming the strike, reported that a senior Hamas commander had been killed and several tunnels destroyed. The Gaza Health Ministry, which is affiliated with Hamas, said that more than fifty civilians were killed and another hundred and fifty were injured. That week, Fetterman was asked about the Israeli attack by congressional reporters. “They are not targeting civilians,” Fetterman said. “They never have. They never will.”
Afterward, the former aide told Fetterman that he sounded unsophisticated and naïve. Perhaps, the aide suggested, Fetterman could say that Israel didn’t intentionally target civilians. Fetterman shrugged him off. “He’s a stubborn son of a bitch,” the aide said. “We got more and more into the world view that you’re either with Israel or you’re with the Squad, and there’s nothing in between.”
Fetterman is not Jewish, had never visited the Middle East, and had served on no foreign-policy committees. If he was going to be talking so much about Israel, his staffers thought, it made sense to keep him briefed. On November 6th, Fetterman met in his offices with a retired Israeli security official who had been brought in by a group advocating for a more measured approach to the conflict. The meeting quickly went off the rails. The Israeli official referred to Hamas’s attack as “impressive.” The official meant in a technical sense, but Fetterman took offense. Later that day, according to former staffers, he was still angry that such a word could be used to describe an attack like October 7th. What was impressive, Fetterman said, was Israel’s restraint.
During this time, Fetterman met with the father of a tank commander who had been taken hostage by Hamas. “And he was talking about it with such restraint, such dignity,” Fetterman said. “I was thinking, What if it’s my own son? And are they alive or, especially for a soldier, I can’t imagine how terrible the conditions would be. And I was blown away. I couldn’t process that.”
The following day, Fetterman posted to social media a short video of the wall in his reception area covered with posters of the hostages. Activists had been caught on film tearing down similar posters in New York and Los Angeles. “Here’s a place where they’re not going to be vandalized or torn down,” Fetterman said. The video got eleven million views, a fact that Fetterman still likes to cite. “It must really resonate with people,” he told me.
It was slowly dawning on members of Fetterman’s staff that his early support of Israel wasn’t likely to be a temporary position. The situation grew tense enough that, when there were pro-Palestinian protesters in the Senate buildings, which happened often, his employees did everything they could to avoid telling him, because, as one put it, “We were worried he might do something insane.” On November 14th, pro-Israel groups staged a rally in Washington that drew an estimated two hundred and ninety thousand people. Fetterman joined the march, wearing the Israeli flag wrapped around his shoulders. At the time, he was developing a deeper relationship with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. A Fetterman adviser texted a photograph of the senator at the rally to one of the group’s board members. “I was, like, Wow!” the board member told me.
Shortly before Thanksgiving, Israel and Hamas negotiated a weeklong ceasefire, during which Hamas returned a hundred and five hostages and Israel released two hundred and forty Palestinian prisoners. Several aides brainstormed a statement, recognizing the agreement as a good start. Fetterman, the former aide said, thought that the deal was too weak to praise. The aide told me, “I was, like, ‘What, you know more than Mossad? You know more than the negotiators in Qatar?’ ”
Braddock, Pennsylvania, population seventeen hundred, is a tiny sliver of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area—a single run-down commercial street along the Monongahela River, and a few hundred houses on the hillside behind. The town was largely built around the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, opened in 1875 and still operational, whose original owner was Andrew Carnegie. Fetterman grew up on the other side of the state, in Reading and York, the son of a Republican insurance-company executive. For a time, he seemed to be following his father’s career path, graduating with a business degree from Albright College and earning an M.B.A. from the University of Connecticut. The story Fetterman came to tell on the campaign trail is that these plans were disrupted just before he graduated from business school, when a close friend who was driving to pick him up was killed in a car crash. “That could have very easily been me,” Fetterman said at a 2022 rally. “I thought, What have you done with your life?”
By 2001, after receiving a degree in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Fetterman was working in Braddock, helping young parents get their G.E.D.s. Four years later, he ran for mayor and won by a single vote, 149–148. The job, which paid a hundred and fifty dollars a month, was largely ceremonial. A council runs most of the municipal business. George Dougherty, a professor of public administration at the University of Pittsburgh, who served as the borough’s state-appointed financial coördinator, said that he met Fetterman only three times in five years. Most of the Democrats who made names for themselves as mayors of declining cities in this period—Pete Buttigieg, in South Bend, Indiana; Martin O’Malley, in Baltimore—billed themselves as turnaround artists, but Fetterman left a different impression: more than trying to fix Braddock, he represented it. Tattooing your arm in commemoration of people who have died suggests a much less technical idea of what the mayor of a poor place can do than saying you will halve the murder rate. It is also more realistic.
Fetterman had been drawn to Braddock, he told a reporter for ReadyMade magazine in 2007, by its “malignant beauty.” He bought an old church for fifty thousand dollars, lived in its unheated basement for eight months, and eventually remade it as a communal arts space. He was also buying and refurbishing houses. (“If I’m not getting dirty, I’m not doing my job,” Fetterman said at the time.) He met his wife, Gisele, in 2007, after she read about him in a magazine and wrote him a letter; they now have three kids. Their projects together grew more idealistic and ambitious. Gisele opened Free Store 15104, which makes donated goods available to residents, and the couple provided space to a restaurant called Superior Motors, which drew national notice. Fetterman was soon appearing in Levi’s ad campaigns and speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Still, Braddock remained rough. In 2011, Fetterman was profiled in the Times Magazine, which treated his gentrification efforts skeptically, noting that he had got only ten households to move to the town. Two years later, Fetterman pulled a shotgun on a twenty-eight-year-old Black man named Christopher Miyares, who was jogging near the Fettermans’ home in a mask and goggles. Fetterman was unapologetic, saying that he’d heard gunfire. (He also said that he did not know Miyares was Black.) Years later, a progressive opponent accused him of seeking “vigilante justice,” but the incident barely registered at the time. The general tone of the coverage of Fetterman—a Bunyanesque progressive emerging from Trump country—suggested a bigger future. “Democrats yearned for a folk hero,” ran the headline in a 2018 Washington Post article. “But will they vote for one?”
They would, eventually. By 2015, Fetterman was campaigning virtually full time for statewide office, beginning with a long-shot run for the U.S. Senate on a Sanders-style populist platform: Medicare for all, marijuana legalization, a fifteen-dollar-per-hour minimum wage. Outside the Democratic power bases of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, he barnstormed relentlessly, drawing crowds in places where his party had often struggled. Neil Makhija, who is now a Montgomery County commissioner, recalled meeting Fetterman a decade ago in Makhija’s coal-country home town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. “John came to a meeting in the basement of the Jim Thorpe Inn—there must have been twenty people there—and he was talking about how geography doesn’t have to be destiny,” Makhija said. “He’s just genuinely interesting.”
Fetterman finished third in the Senate primary. Two years later, he won the primary for lieutenant governor and was easily elected on the ticket of the popular gubernatorial incumbent Tom Wolf. During the campaign, Fetterman became close to his Republican opponent, Jeff Bartos. It was admittedly an unexpected friendship, Bartos told me, but it also made sense. “There’s a lot of stuff—dealing with donors, just how draining it is on the road—that no one else cares about,” Bartos said. “You can’t talk to your staff about it, because it’s demoralizing. So it helps to find someone going through the same thing. Otherwise, it’s very lonely.”
Ten days before the election, Bartos was attending a parents’ weekend at Franklin & Marshall College, where his daughter was a freshman, when he received a call from Fetterman. That morning, an extremist had killed eleven people and wounded six at the Tree of Life synagogue in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh. Bartos, who is Jewish, recalled Fetterman telling him, “You were the first person I thought of. I’m so sorry for what happened. I’m so sorry that this is happening in our world.” Fetterman attended vigils for the victims and has since stayed in touch with Tree of Life’s rabbi. Bartos believes that the experience helped attune Fetterman to the existence of violent antisemitism and provided some of the background for his pro-Israel stance. “I’m just incredibly inspired and proud of the way he’s going about his work,” Bartos said.
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, like most state capitals, is a town of insiders. A leading Pennsylvania Democrat told me that Fetterman arrived with “no political coalition behind him.” But he soon demonstrated a talent for generating attention. His lieutenant governor’s office came with a balcony, where he hung a trans-equality flag, infuriating Republicans. One of the lieutenant governor’s duties is overseeing the state’s pardons board. Fetterman toured Pennsylvania’s prisons, encouraging inmates to appeal. “If you’re cynical about the commutation process, you have good reason to be,” Fetterman told a group of lifers at the state correctional institution in Dallas, Pennsylvania. “But we have the best opportunity in forty years to get people out.” During Wolf’s second term as governor, he commuted forty-nine life sentences, compared with five in the previous term, when Fetterman’s predecessor ran the board.
Criminal-justice reformers in Pennsylvania still speak warmly of Fetterman. His work on the pardons board also solidified a progressive political identity. Josh Shapiro, then the state’s Democratic attorney general and now its governor, was a member as well and tended to be more cautious about commuting sentences. At one point, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Fetterman threatened to run against Shapiro for governor if he kept voting against pardons. (Shapiro denied that this happened.) A senior Democratic aide in Harrisburg at the time told me, “I think the press coverage of the pardons board was the first time that Josh realized he was going to be seen only as a moderate, and it was also the first time that John realized that he was going to be seen only as a progressive, and I think that made them both uncomfortable.”
Four days before the Democratic Senate primary in May, 2022, Fetterman and Gisele pulled into a Sheetz gas station near Lancaster to make a pit stop, en route to a big campaign event in Millersville. When Fetterman emerged from the bathroom, Gisele noticed that his words were slurred and his face was drooping. He spent the weekend in a Lancaster hospital, first having surgery to remove the blood clot that had caused the stroke, then having a pacemaker and a defibrillator implanted to prevent another one. The story Fetterman has told is that he woke up from surgery on the night of the primary, learned that he had won, and fell back asleep.
He soon returned to Braddock to begin both a long recovery and a general-election campaign. For months, he had major struggles with what his campaign called “auditory processing”—understanding what he heard and getting his words out cleanly. “At first, we communicated with whiteboards,” Gisele said. “Then we switched to iPads.” When I met the Fettermans recently at their home in Braddock, a big, open loft inside a former automobile showroom, I asked whether they had given any thought to dropping out. Not really, Gisele said. The doctors believed he would recover. It was a matter of the timeline.
Gisele was sitting on a brown leather couch, wearing a summery, rainbow-colored dress. Pittsburgh Pride was beginning, an event that Fetterman had regularly attended in the past and once described on Twitter as “Best. Time. Ever.” This year, because it would likely be the site of pro-Palestinian protests, the Fettermans had decided not to go. Fetterman’s political turn has put Gisele, who works in local nonprofits, in an interesting position. Her presence once helped confirm her husband’s progressive bona fides: Fetterman long grounded his support for undocumented immigrants in her story of having come to the U.S. from Brazil without papers as a child, a fact he featured in campaign ads. More recently, when he talks about immigration, it is usually about the need for order along the Rio Grande. “Honestly, it’s astonishing,” Fetterman said last December, about the number of undocumented migrants arriving in the U.S. each month. “You essentially have Pittsburgh showing up there at the border.”
When I watched old interviews of Gisele, she was funny, occasionally impertinent, slightly hippie coded. Now she seemed more measured and poised, something a bit closer to the archetypal senator’s wife. She was very proud, she said, of how many people contact Fetterman about their own experience of stroke and mental illness. (“There was one I talked to just this morning,” Fetterman said.) It was also Gisele who noticed the symptoms of Fetterman’s depression after he won the 2022 election—that he was not eating and didn’t seem like himself. “You know, for the kids, I didn’t want them to see their dad struggling,” she said. “I didn’t want them to have to think about, ‘Is he going to harm himself,’ which I was worried about.”
For a time, Fetterman’s depression intruded on his political life, too. In the weeks after he won the election, two ex-staffers told me, Fetterman often came away from public events feeling as if he’d screwed up. One of the former staffers recalled a Martin Luther King, Jr., Day celebration in Philadelphia, in January of 2023, at which Fetterman gave a brief, innocuous speech as part of a long lineup of politicos. Afterward, Fetterman beckoned the ex-staffer over to his car, rolled down a window, and said, “What’s the damage?” The speech had been fine; there was no damage. A few days later, the senator was admitted to Walter Reed.
It is hard to imagine Fetterman acting so self-consciously now. He’d sat down next to me, in an armchair by a window, but as Gisele talked he stood up and restlessly roamed the apartment, intermittently shouting at their two dogs, both rescues, to pipe down. When I asked about his early days in Braddock, he stiffened and said, “I thought this was going to be about more contemporary stuff.” In an interview with CBS News shortly after his discharge from Walter Reed, he had mentioned that he’d experienced episodes of “self-loathing” throughout his life. When I asked him about it, he said,“It’s not like I had this low-running depression all along.” I got the sense that Fetterman was sick of being the stroke guy, or the depression guy, in the same way that he was sick of being the progressive.
On the evening of January 26th, with the Senate out of session, about two hundred and fifty pro-Palestinian protesters staged a demonstration at Fetterman’s house. The event had been well publicized, and, in the recollection of an organizer named Stephanie Pavlick, about eight police cars were present. The plan was to have volunteers read tributes written by family members and friends of Palestinians killed during the war. About ten minutes before the event was supposed to start, Fetterman appeared on the roof. He spread his arms, unfurling an Israeli flag. The crowd chanted, “Fetterman, Fetterman, you can’t hide, you’re supporting genocide.” Fetterman, as Pavlick recalled, said nothing, which itself made for a dramatic image. “He’s huge, but at the same time he was far away,” she said. “He’s all the way up there, three stories up, and we were just down here on the sidewalk.”
When I asked Gisele about the protest, she said that she’d always understood politicians’ homes to be off limits: “Essentially, what those two peace groups did was they doxxed my children, and that’s a federal crime.” Fetterman was more emphatic. Homes, he said, “are not part of the deal.” He added, “You can protest at a public office or anything, but they chose to come out here. And I was on the roof listening to it. And then they started to get ugly and started yelling about genocide, and my ten-year-old was there. So I just showed the Israeli flag.”
Fetterman’s offices in Washington are on the first floor of the Russell Senate Office Building. On the day I visited, the only light in his inner chamber came from two Edison-bulb lamps, one on either side of a couch, so that otherwise brisk policy meetings took place in a slightly sombre atmosphere. That afternoon, I watched Fetterman lean over a speakerphone as Senator Debbie Stabenow, of Michigan, gently lobbied him about an agricultural aid bill. Fetterman made it clear that his main interest was in preserving SNAP food benefits for poor people. For a moment, he seemed exactly like what his voting record suggests he is—a very normal sort of Democrat.
But the ways in which Fetterman is an ordinary politician have never been as useful to his Party or himself as his genius for finding the center of political attention. There is both art and labor to this. Igor Bobic said that Fetterman has a useful cynicism about the processes of power. “In a gaggle with twenty of us reporters,” Bobic said, “he is able to very quickly distill the absurdity of what is going on.” Tom Wolf, the former Pennsylvania governor, told me that Fetterman is willing to try things that no one else thinks to try. “He marches to the beat of a different drummer,” Wolf said. “But he can be very effective when he takes something seriously.”
During my first day with Fetterman, I joined him for a long, slow walk through the Senate tunnels. Three aides surrounded him with the anxious efficiency of tugboats trying to coax a barge into port. There was a subway car for the use of senators to our right. Fetterman said that, when he discovered that Bernie Sanders, who is eighty-two, always walked instead of riding, he decided that he would, too. Not a minute later, Sanders himself, head down, zoomed past on our left, without acknowledging Fetterman—the Vermont senator is a foot shorter and thirty years older than the Pennsylvanian, but he was somehow moving three times as fast.
Fetterman was on his way to cast a vote on judicial nominees. Because of the SHORTS Act, he is not allowed on the floor of the Senate in his usual garb, and so he delivers his votes by signalling a clerk from the doorway. But the real action came beforehand. The news of the day concerned the pro-Palestinian encampments and protests on college campuses, which were still raging, and a group of reporters quickly formed. After waiting patiently for Fetterman to open his transcription app, one of them asked what he thought of the protesters. “It’s the pup-tent intifada,” Fetterman said. “You can break down the protesters—it’s the pro-Hamas, and then it’s the really pro-Hamas, at this point.” He noted the antisemitism that had surfaced among the demonstrators; another reporter asked if schools should lose federal funding if such behavior continued. “Well, I think there has to be consequences,” Fetterman said. “Like, right now, there is no consequence. You can blow up a bridge, or block a road, or those kinds of things.”
This was an exercise in blunt hyperbole, in that Fetterman had drawn attention to the darkest aspects of the protests—that Jewish students were sometimes stopped on campuses and asked whether they were Zionists—by inventing an even darker one: no protester has blown up any bridges, let alone done so with impunity.
This past winter, one by one, Fetterman’s staffers began to leave his office. The communications director, his deputy, and a communications aide all departed. In April, Adam Jentleson, who had been Fetterman’s chief of staff, took a less involved role as an adviser. Fetterman’s current staff argues that this is not an abnormal rate of turnover for a Senate office, that the reasons people left were complex, and that some of them still work with the senator in smaller roles. That is all true, though differences over Israel are a common thread among the departures. “I’ve carried out things for Fetterman previously, or for other electeds I’ve worked for, that I don’t one hundred per cent agree with,” one aide who left told me. “If you’re in this business, you’re never going to agree with the principal all the time.” But Fetterman’s advocacy on Israel, the aide said, was “so in your face, troll-y, and kind of reductive in a way. Like, people are dying. This isn’t a troll.”
In a sense, the Fetterman aides who disagreed with his stance on Israel were experiencing a form of generational reckoning. Many of them had come out of the Bernie Sanders movement, in which it was broadly assumed that the future of the Democratic Party lay on the left—in the expansive, outsider politics that drew so many millions of young people to the Sanders campaign. But that particular fusion of populism and progressivism has been hard for others to replicate. Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are progressives, but they aren’t really anti-establishment populists. Fetterman is that kind of populist, but, as his aides were discovering, he wasn’t really a progressive. Maybe Sanders, like Trump, was Pennywise, too.
By the spring, some of the staffers who had left noticed a pattern in Fetterman’s political moves in which a broad anti-left positioning was detectable, if also woefully underbaked. At the end of March, Fetterman commemorated Vietnam War Veterans Day by thanking the soldiers who “defended our freedoms in Vietnam,” a Cold War framing that most Democrats had long ago left behind. In May, he inveighed against lab-grown meat, a cause that few other than Ron DeSantis have embraced. A week later, a young climate activist from Pennsylvania approached Fetterman in the hallways of the Senate, introduced herself, and asked about a pipeline project that he had once opposed and now supports. In response, Fetterman took out his phone and started both recording and ridiculing her. “I didn’t expect this!” he said, sarcastically. “Oh, my gosh!”
Jentleson offered an intricate theory of what Fetterman is up to. In the last few elections, Democrats have increasingly struggled to win the support of working-class voters of all races, leaving the Party heavily dependent on suburban moderates, many of whom typically vote Republican but despise Trump. The Party’s future depends on re-ingratiating itself with less educated voters who might be economically populist and might dislike the G.O.P.’s turn toward the religious right, but who, as Jentleson sees it, “don’t want to feel super judged all the time.” Fetterman’s instinct is for what Jentleson called “vice signalling”—a countermeasure to the performative do-gooderism of the left. The cumulative effect of Fetterman’s clothes, his cursing and snark, his blunt anti-élitism, and his push for legal weed was to try to displace some of the Yale Law School atmosphere that occasionally threatens to fog in the Democrats.
Since 2020, one of the most significant patterns to emerge in U.S. politics has been a backlash against the left, powered by the perception that it has gone too far—on COVID restrictions, on the increased codification of political correctness following the murder of George Floyd, on containing radical speech on the Internet. The demonstrations on college campuses against the Israeli war in Gaza have provoked a similar response. These pent-up frustrations have focussed the energies of right-wing media, led to successful efforts to oust university presidents at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, and fuelled the third-party campaign of Robert Kennedy, Jr., who is perhaps best known for his anti-vaccine advocacy. The backlash is also playing an increasingly large role in the comeback candidacy of Donald Trump.
Fetterman has picked his way through this landscape with care. He remains steadfast on many of the liberal positions that he has long espoused: most of all, on L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights and racial and criminal justice. He plainly disdains Trump and the Republicans. But he has also courted pro-Israel and centrist voters in his stylized rebukes of progressive activists. This spring, Fetterman met the New York Post’s political correspondent, who had previously mocked him as a “slob,” for a convivial dinner at a fancy New York restaurant, and declared, “I’m not woke.” This new posture has won him fervent support, not just on Fox News, where he appears regularly, but among centrist members of his own party. In a May interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the New Jersey senator Cory Booker called Fetterman “one of the most exciting Senators that’s come through the Senate in the ten years I’ve been here.”
Jentleson said, of Fetterman, “He sees the Party being defined by the extremes in the public image, and he is pushing back against that, in a very strong way.” Keeping the White House out of Trump’s hands, and helping the Democrats stay viable in places like Pennsylvania, might hinge on the Party’s ability to distance itself from the activist left. “Most voters do not form their political views through the lens of Israel,” Jentleson told me. “What they formulate is more intangible and is a sense that the Democratic Party is being led around by the far left.” But in order to get inattentive voters to associate the Democratic Party with centrism rather than progressive activism, he added, “you might have to be theatrical.”
The 2024 commencement ceremony for Yeshiva University, a private Jewish institution in New York’s Washington Heights, was held not in an auditorium but at the Louis Armstrong tennis stadium, in Queens. It was the Wednesday after Memorial Day. Fetterman had accepted an invitation to receive an award at the ceremony and give a short speech. Backstage, where rabbis and donors kibbitzed expectantly, I chatted with Yeshiva’s president, Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, who, a few weeks earlier, had flown to Jerusalem to meet with Netanyahu. “Many of the members of our community are just one degree of separation from someone who was a victim of October 7th, or a hostage, or a soldier,” he told me. When Fetterman arrived, the most eager to meet him was Janet Hod, a Yeshiva board member who is originally from Pennsylvania. “I’m a huge Trump person—huge,” Hod said. “But he”—she indicated Fetterman—“is right up there with Trump.”
Outside, the ceremony was at once deeply moving and fervently pro-Israel. The students were largely segregated by sex: the graduates on the left side of the aisle were all men, and those on the right were overwhelmingly women. A dean asked the assembled to pray for “our soldiers” in the I.D.F. There were stirring recorded testimonials about members of the Yeshiva family who had died on October 7th and in the subsequent war, and video presentations about the lobbying and community service that Yeshiva students had done after the attacks. Rabbi Berman told the graduates that they were now “charged with the mission of supporting Israel and the Jewish people.” When the singer Mordechai Shapiro performed a rousing rendition of “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem, the crowd waved Israeli flags.
Eventually, it was time for the senator to speak. “Honestly, I was truly humbled and blown away when I was invited,” he said. “And then I did some research and I discovered that last year’s speaker had invented the Iron Dome. And I don’t belong in that company, I truly don’t. I’m just a senator with a big mouth, that happens to be committed to standing with Israel.” Fetterman was wearing a black robe with a crimson hood, which commemorated his degree from the Kennedy School of Government. He said that he had been reflecting on his last graduation. “And that was literally a quarter century ago, twenty-five years ago, and I was graduating from Harvard University.” At the mention of Harvard, there was a smattering of boos. Fetterman waited for them to abate and then said, “But today I have been profoundly disappointed” by Harvard’s “inability to stand up for its Jewish students after October 7th. And for me, personally, I do not fundamentally feel it’s right for me to wear this today.” He took off the crimson hood and, delicately, laid it down next to him on the stage. When the speech ended, and Fetterman passed through the crowd, he was encircled by a group of Yeshiva graduates, who danced with him.
That Friday, I was with Fetterman in Braddock. He seemed to want to make it clear to me that he had not blindly plunged into the politics of Israel. He had anticipated that his position “would become more and more unpopular, and members of my party would move more and more away from the Israeli side.” He might eventually, he added, “be the last man standing.”
The issue of Israel and Palestine is famously knotty. I asked what Fetterman had been reading about Israel, meaning books—the work of theorists, historians, or policy types that had influenced him—but he understood me to be asking about which news outlets he read. (In a recent Times story, an ex-aide had attributed his political turn to an increasing diet of conservative news media.) He opened his phone and showed me his Apple News feed, pointing out that it included mainstream, conservative, and progressive outlets—“The Guardian, oh, my God,” he said.
From the leather couch opposite us, his communications director, Carrie Adams, seeing that we were talking past each other, prompted him. “And meetings with experts, not just news outlets,” she said. Fetterman couldn’t hear her at first—the captioning on his transcription device had not worked. She repeated herself, more loudly, “And meetings with experts, not just news outlets.”
“Well, sure, yeah,” Fetterman said. “But I’m, like, ‘There are no Middle East experts.’ Because if there are experts, well, have things gotten any better?” He went on, “I’ve had meetings with these experts, and they’re not able to answer all of these questions.”
The line that Fetterman often gives in response to left-wing disillusionment with him is that the Democrats have adopted many of the progressive positions that he once advocated for—legal weed, a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage—and so he now seems more moderate by comparison. Another way to put it might be that his identification with Israel and his antipathy toward activists have always been part of his political makeup, too. But what has changed is that he now operates largely alone, without a deep network of political allies and policy experts and without many of the staffers who had been with him the longest and whom he trusted the most. (Katz, Fetterman’s strategist since 2015, also recently departed.) It seemed to me that, if the stroke and the depression had had an effect, it was to deepen his isolation and self-reliance, at a time when he was developing a different view from other Democrats about how politics is changing—about where the puck is headed. This has made him not only a more singular and provocative figure but also a more extreme one.
At one point, I asked Fetterman what end he saw for the war—would it be Hamas’s dismantling, or something else? “I do think that it’s a fact that when you have that kind of an evil, or that kind of a movement that came out of a society, whether it was Nazi Germany or imperial Japan or the Confederacy, right here in the South, that kind of movement has to be destroyed into submission,” Fetterman said. He had reframed the question. It wasn’t just Hamas’s political movement that needed to end, but the underlying support for it: “That kind of society that gave birth to it now has to reach a point where it has to turn its back to those kinds of uses and pursuits.” Fetterman seemed to seize upon the Civil War analogy. After a moment, he added, “And that’s why Atlanta had to burn.” ♦
