Maybe the conditions that torment him are more external than internal.
New York Magazine’s Ben Terris saved the most important part of his extensive profile of Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman for last: “I didn’t find any indication that the stroke had left him cognitively impaired,” he wrote in its concluding paragraphs.
That is not the impression that a reader would have gathered from the worried former Fetterman staffers, jilted progressive activists, and anecdotes detailing the senator’s declining mental health that preceded this observation.
The piece paints a portrait of a broken man, a shadow of his former self, plagued by depression and demented episodes. None of that was especially apparent to Terris’s sources in the immediate aftermath of Fetterman’s 2022 stroke, a period when only his political opponents acknowledged the extent of the senator’s injuries. Rather, it seems that his impairment only became impossible for the left to ignore after Fetterman made himself into a stalwart Israel supporter.
The piece observes that Fetterman “surprised” and alienated his progressive “base” beginning on October 18, 2023 — eleven days after the worst one-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and nine days prior to the start of major IDF ground operations in Israel — when he rejected the notion that Israel should decline to respond to the October 7 massacre. It describes the “gutting betrayal” his erstwhile staffers felt when Fetterman declined to blame Israel for the slaughter of its own citizens by Hamas terrorists. It reveals the extent of the internal revolt that was kicked off when Fetterman objected to a progressive boycott of Israeli hummus by noting how nonplussed those same activists were to the “rape of Israeli women + girls.” After all, the truth hurts.
One of the more illuminating features of Terris’s piece is the degree to which Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, counted herself among the left-wing activists who felt betrayed by the senator’s moral clarity:
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. Id love some help in language to separate myself from this. Can anyone help me?”
No one came to her rescue. Purportedly unrelated to the senator’s political transformation, Fetterman’s wife and staffers became increasingly unnerved by his behavior in late 2023 and early 2024 — his social-media habits, in particular. “One former staffer recalled overhearing Gisele on speakerphone that December saying to Fetterman, ‘Who did I marry? Where is the man I married?’”
The item indicates that Fetterman did not stick to the pharmaceutical regimen his doctors recommended to keep him on an even keel. “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,” Terris wrote. And there is evidence that the senator was struggling. He reportedly had erratic interactions — “manic,” one called them — with his staff and fellow senators. One year ago this month, Fetterman rear-ended a car on the highway after deboarding an overnight flight from California. The incident is laden with implications, even if the senator himself insists it resulted from understandable exhaustion.
It’s a sprawling piece, and no justice can be done to it in this succinct summary. It is, however, difficult to ignore the fact pattern here.
In the wake of Fetterman’s stroke, his election to the Senate, and his struggles in the job culminating in his admission to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Americans were told that the senator was just fine. Today, with Fetterman’s speech patterns seemingly having fully recovered and his outward performance in the job no longer a source of general apprehension, we’re told that he’s truly unwell. Indeed, the language his handlers employed was eerily reminiscent of how Biden’s minders described the ailing president. He has “good days and bad days,” his staffers lamented. “He’s struggling,” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller confessed after a March interview with Fetterman.
To the outside observer, the senator seems far better adjusted than he did at the outset of his term. Indeed, we were informed that only “right-wing carnival barkers” concerned themselves with Fetterman’s potential impairment. Those who demanded competence and cogency from their U.S. senators were guilty of “ablest” smears. Indeed, he was a victim of our unduly high expectations for him. “Fetterman was continuously, relentlessly obligated to perform a certain role — that of a competent, confident politician,” The Atlantic’s Jennifer Senior wrote in early 2023. He “has basically been forced to contend with the effects of a severe brain trauma while working an absurdly demanding job in one of the most polarized and toxic political climates the country has ever known.”
Compared to the 2023 version of John Fetterman, casual observers could be forgiven for concluding that the senator has undergone a wondrous recovery. He might wrestle in pursuit of a word every now and then, but his speech patterns are comprehensible. Beyond that, his sense of conviction and purpose are clearly heartfelt, and his heterodoxy within the Democratic Party has helped secure his political position. And yet, those who insisted Fetterman was the picture of health when he was in obvious distress now maintain that the senator is a mess, all indications to the contrary notwithstanding. The dividing line between one narrative and the other is the senator’s vocal embrace of Zionism and his willingness to work with Israel’s allies, whatever their politics may be.
Terris’s closing anecdote, in which he conveys his own contradictory impressions of the senator’s wellness, is instructive. After making that observation, Terris was unnerved by the contextually bizarre choice of descriptive adjectives when discussing his health. The reporter pressed on that issue, received a cogent response, and talked briefly off the record. Terris left the room, conversed with Fetterman’s staffers, and reentered five minutes later, at which point he encountered a very different John Fetterman. He was “like a deflated parade float,” Terris observed. “His voice was low. He barely bothered to look up. His sentences were clipped.” Whatever happened in that room in the interim profoundly altered the senator’s demeanor.
The episode might lead observers to wonder whether the circumstances that plague John Fetterman are primarily physical in nature. Maybe the conditions that torment him are more external than internal.