Sen. John Fetterman once boasted about being a progressive. Now he doesn’t recognize them anymore.
“It’s not so much that I left the title, the title left me,” said Fetterman, 54, who edged out Dr. Oz in 2022 to help keep the U.S. Senate blue, and once vowed that “Progressive values” were the heart of his political identity.
“Increasingly, [progressives] moved and migrated into some positions that I don’t agree with and I really just feel much more comfortable just being a Democrat,” the controversial Pennsylvania lawmaker told The Post this week during an exclusive sitdown in his D.C. office.
The interview was conducted in the dark, which his staff said was his personal preference.
One thing about Fetterman that hasn’t changed is his wardrobe. He wore his trademark Hoodie and gym shorts for the Post sitdown, and later donned a Pittsburgh Steelers beanie. Well-wishers have sent him so many hoodies he doesn’t know what to do with them.
Less than four years ago, Fetterman was a Bernie Sanders-loving, true-blue progressive.
“I’m proud to have @BernieSanders ‘s back,” he said during the 2016 primary against Hillary Clinton.
In his own 2016 run for U.S. Senate, Fetterman urged his followers to “make a plan to vote for the most progressive candidate in this race.”
And in November 2020 he put former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on notice: “My dude, I’m a progressive Democrat,” he tweeted.
But things changed when he took office. At first, it was the defund the police movement.
Then the migrant crisis — and many of his comrades’ refusal to address it — chipped away at his progressive armor.
“There is a crisis,” he said. “We have a crisis at our border, and it can’t be controversial that we should have a secure border.”
Fetterman cited alarming figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection showing there had been more than 300,000 migrants encounters at the southern border in December.
“That’s larger than the population of Pittsburgh. . . .That’s [Pennsylvania’s] second largest city — and that’s one month,” he said.
Both parties need to come together and develop and “comprehensive solution” to illegal immigration, he said, refusing to grade the Biden administration’s performance on the migrant crisis.
“He recognizes that there is an issue there,” the senator said, insisting Biden is looking for a bipartisan deal and not afraid of “blowback” from the left.
Cities such as New York — which have been inundated by more than 165,000 migrants since the spring of 2022, forcing painful budget cuts — should receive assistance from the federal government to help offset the burden, Fetterman said. Mayor Adams’s efforts to pry open the Washington wallet have so far been spectacularly unsuccessful.
“We have Democratic cities across the nation that have brought this issue to the forefront and they deserve to be supported and I believe ultimately they will be supported from a federal level,” Fetterman said.
Israel was also a turning point in his evolution.
After Oct. 7, when “certain quarters” of progressives embraced the language of hate, including the far-left “Squad,” whom he has criticized in the past, the die was cast.
“For example, ‘From from the river to the sea’ or pretending that that wasn’t exactly what it means . . . I would never be a part of that,” Fetterman said, alluding to Squad Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who was censured by the House of Representatives for her invocation of the slogan calling for the genocide of Jews.
Fetterman is not Jewish, but Israel is close to his heart.
“It’s just a lot of moral clarity in the situation because you have a special relationship with Israel,” he said.
“That nation is most reflective of the kinds of open, progressive, liberal policies, and it’s a strange paradox where the most progressive members of our party seem to not recognize that Israel is a nation that supports those values.”
Fetterman is reminded of the war in Israel every day. Photos of Israeli and American hostages taken prisoner by Hamas adorn the interior of his office. Another wall is dedicated to those who have been rescued.
“I get emotional thinking about it. What if that was my children? What if that was my wife?,” he told The Post. “Where does that kind of evil come from? I don’t know where the next bottom is . . . those kinds of atrocities must never be allowed to survive and endure. It has to be destroyed.”
He repeated his steadfast support of Israel’s war objective — to completely eliminate Hamas — something the Biden administration has been working overtime to persuade the country to scale back.
His embrace of Israel has particularly alienated his party’s left wing, many of whom backed his campaign under the false belief he was a fellow traveler.
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Videos of Fetterman thumbing his nose at progressive hecklers now regularly zip around on X.
“Nobody should ever have trusted John Fetterman,” said Nathan J. Robinson, a socialist and editor of the far-left magazine Current Affairs. “He repeatedly lied and betrayed his progressive supporters.”
Conservatives, meanwhile, have taken an approving second look.
“How is it possible that John Fetterman in the last few months has seemingly become more based than half of the senate GOP???” said Donald Trump Jr. in an X posting last week, using internet slang for conservative.
On other issues, he has tried to keep his head down.
Though he leans into an everyman style, Fetterman came of age in an affluent Pennsylvania suburb. His father, Karl Fetterman, was a wealthy partner at Kling Bros. Insurance. He graduated from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 1999 with a master’s in public policy.
Fetterman hasn’t spoken much about his alma mater — and the cascading scandals surrounding Claudine Gay, its former Harvard president who was ousted for plagiarism following her disastrous congressional testimony where she refused to say whether calling for the genocide of Jews is against the school’s code of conduct.
“I don’t believe in that whole cancel culture and jumping in on that,” he said of Gay’s ouster. “The running joke back when I was at Harvard was it was the Kremlin on the Charles.”
But he blasted her words. “We should never be having nuance when we’re talking about the calling of genocide. There is no gray area there. There’s no nuance on that. That must be condemned,” he said.
Despite Fetterman’s serious health setbacks — including a near-fatal stroke and treatment for depression — his speech is significantly improved. And he insisted his health troubles won’t affect his ability to serve.
“Of course, there’s been a lot of really cruel and mean things that are said and labels and things,” he said. “I’ve been able to participate fully.”