John Fetterman Has No Regrets

John Fetterman is skipping this week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and, to hear it from him, it has nothing—literally nothing—to do with him scotch-taping photos of the Israeli hostages to his Senate office walls. Or attacking fellow Democrats Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar for falsely blaming a hospital bombing in Gaza on Israel. (“It’s truly disturbing that Members of Congress rushed to blame Israel for the hospital tragedy in Gaza. Who would take the word of a group that just massacred innocent Israeli civilians over our key ally?”) Or comparing the pro-Hamas encampment at Columbia to a neo-Nazi rally (“Add some tiki torches and it’s Charlottesville for these Jewish students,” he tweeted). 

Nor is it about “Fetterman Alumni for Peace”—a group of former Fetterman campaign staffers—publicly scolding their old boss: “It is not too late to change your stance and stand on the righteous side of history.” 

“I’ve got three young kids, and they’re out of school,” the Pennsylvania senator said of his absence this week in Chicago, waving off the suggestion that he might not be welcome there. “That’s four days I can spend with my children.”

The choice to skip the convention “was made well before that debate,” Fetterman told me in a one-hour conversation via Zoom—the senator at home, in the not quite one-square-mile, ex–steel town of Braddock, twenty minutes outside Pittsburgh; me in Los Angeles. He was referring to the June 27 Joe Biden–Donald Trump showdown that led the president to step aside and Vice President Kamala Harris to snag the Democratic nomination. 

There is perhaps no one in the party right now more unlike John Fetterman than Kamala Harris. He lives in a town that has lost 90 percent of its residents; she owns a house in super-rich Brentwood, on L.A.’s west side. He is permanently clad in hoodies and shorts; she prefers double-stranded pearls and pants suits. He seems fueled by an earnest, almost reckless righteousness; it’s unclear what she believes in.

On October 7, 2023, the day Hamas attacked Israel and murdered 1,200 civilians, Harris tweeted at 11:33 a.m.: “Doug’s and my prayers are with the victims of the heinous terrorist attacks in Israel. @POTUS and my support for Israel’s security is unwavering”—a mostly unobjectionable statement designed to offend approximately no one. 

An hour earlier, Fetterman tweeted, “I forcefully condemn these cowardly, horrifying, unprovoked attacks on Israel by Hamas. Attacking innocent civilians is particularly despicable and reflects the craven behavior of this terrorist group. I unequivocally stand with the people of Israel now, and always.”

I asked Fetterman, who is not Jewish, whether he ever feels lonely in his own party. “Well, I mean, it’s, it’s”—uneasy laughter—“I keep saying, just like the convention, it’s not about me.”

Still, it’s hard to imagine Fetterman being welcome in Chicago—as strong a sign as any of the paradigm shift that has taken place inside his party.

Once upon a time, in 2022, John Fetterman was a symbol of Rust Belt cool. He was bald and hulking at six-foot-eight, and he had a goatee and tats and a surly demeanor, and he was pro-choice, and he supported LGBTQIA+ rights. He pointed toward a future in which the Democrats could become, once again, the party of the working class—the voters they had been hemorrhaging for years. 

The Beautiful People loved Fetterman: The actress Kerry Washington endorsed him. So did Padma Lakshmi and John Legend. So did Oprah Winfrey—even though Winfrey had helped launch the television career of Fetterman’s Trump-backed Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz.

These days, not so much. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested, in May, that Fetterman is a bully. Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan tweeted, in January, “A lot of folks don’t recognize John Fetterman these days.” The Patriot-News, in Harrisburg, published an op-ed addressing the senator and headlined: “I wish I had never voted for you.”

Maybe they were onto something. In December, the senator tweeted: “I’m not a progressive, I’m just a regular Democrat.” This marked a shift: Back in 2016, when he ran (unsuccessfully) for the Senate for the first time, he called himself a “progressive champion.” In 2020, he celebrated unions, calling them, “Progressive. Simple. Sacred.”

Meanwhile, since October 7, Republicans regarded Fetterman warmly, if warily. “How is it possible that John Fetterman in the last few months has seemingly become more based than half of the senate GOP???” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted in January. “No clue what this cat is up to,” a Republican strategist told me.

It’s true that he’d embraced border security, but his real crime—the thing that had alienated him from the progressives—was Israel. They don’t let him forget it.

In November, protesters outside the Capitol booed him. In January, anti-Israel protesters descended on Fetterman’s home in Braddock. (The senator took to the roof, waving an Israeli flag.) Online activists called him Genocide John. And every Friday for months, protesters have demonstrated outside his Philadelphia office, chanting, “Let Gaza live,” and “Cease-fire now.” (The protests are called “Fridays at Fetterman’s.”)

There are even people on his current staff who think he is wrong.

“I don’t agree with him” about Israel and Gaza, Carrie Adams, Fetterman’s communications director, told me in a phone call, after my interview with the senator ended. 

“I have a sense that his international views are a lot less nuanced than my generation, because when he was growing up, it was might makes right, and for my generation and younger who, of course, are the ones protesting this, they have a much more nuanced view of the region,” Adams added. 

I’ve been a reporter since the summer of 1998, when I covered Bill Clinton’s trip to Martha’s Vineyard for the Vineyard Gazette. This was the first time I’d ever encountered anyone—on Capitol Hill or anywhere else, on the record, off the record, on background, whatever—criticizing “the principal.” 

It’s true that young people especially disagree with Fetterman. Sixty-five percent of today’s college students have a favorable opinion of the pro-Hamas encampments that took over so many university campuses last spring and are now threatening to explode back to life—on campus and at the convention, where as many as 100,000 protesters are expected. 

But still. If sporting a keffiyeh and retweeting whatever the Gaza Ministry of Health just said is how young progressives signal to each other that they’re in the in-group, that they’ve gone full radical chic, then Fetterman is whatever the opposite of that is. 

Which doesn’t seem to bother him.

“I’ve been frustrated by some of my members and how they’ve chosen to handle that situation,” Fetterman said of Israel’s war against Hamas. He didn’t specify which Democratic members he had in mind—presumably, the Squad and other members of the Progressive Caucus who have relentlessly bashed Israel. “I don’t agree with a lot of their views, but whatever kinds of political choices or any kind of political costs that I’ve incurred throughout all that, I don’t care.”

He added: “I haven’t once even regretted any of that.”

Fetterman was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in August 1969, when both his parents were 19. He was, as he says, an “unplanned event.”

For the first several years of his life, his parents struggled, but then his dad got a job in an insurance company, in York, and he rose up the ranks, and then he started his own company.

The young Fetterman went to a little college in Reading, and played football. After graduation, he went to business school at the University of Connecticut, but the car-crash death of his friend sent him into “a whirlwind of grief and soul-searching.” He changed course.

Eventually, he wound up at Harvard’s Kennedy School—he was looking, he said, for a way to combine his interests in economics and social work with public policy, but he wasn’t sure where that would lead. Sometime after that, he moved back to Pennsylvania, to Braddock, to help poor kids get their GEDs and find jobs. In 2006, he ran for mayor, which he thought of as an extension of his activism, a way to change things. He won by one vote. 

Braddock has a population just south of 1,700. It is not the kind of place anyone pays attention to. But Fetterman managed to turn his town, and himself, into a kind of national rallying cry, a brand. Celebrity.

His fame was helped along by the Levi’s ad campaign, a few years later, which turned Braddock into a symbol of working-class despair and renewal. A series of beautiful, short movies—the shaky, hand-held camera, coupled with an Appalachian Spring–style soundtrack. “People think there aren’t frontiers anymore,” a wispy child’s voice intones. “They can’t see how frontiers are all around us.”

The most striking feature of Fetterman’s rise was that he was not a striver. He had not moved, with automaton-like certainty, from one credential to the next. There was no big goal that he seemed to focus on monomaniacally. There was, about him, a kind of wandering, and it was circuitous and inefficient, but also apparently free of the many compromises that make up the ascent of more conventional people.

All of this endeared him to voters. In November 2022, he beat Mehmet Oz with a smart, trolling campaign that included, most famously, a video mocking Oz’s use of the word crudité, which Fetterman called a “veggie tray.” 

By then, Fetterman had learned to play the role of candidate—how to get out there, give speeches, shake hands, hug strangers, make them feel listened to. He had learned the ways of the partisan.

That meant lavishing undue praise on those in one’s tribe. “I’m proud to be all about the Democratic Party, and I really, absolutely have been just blown away, you know—the power that she spontaneously unified the Democratic Party,” he told me, referring to Harris. 

And it meant bashing those in the opposing tribe. “It is possible that Trump could win another term, because people have decided that we want more of that kind of chaos and the darkness and that kind of thing,” he said. 

So it was not surprising that, over the years, he had racked up a few rivalries—starting with Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. After Harris passed over Shapiro for veep, there was speculation that Fetterman had had something to do with it. (When I asked Fetterman whether he thought Harris passing over Josh Shapiro for her running mate had anything to do with the governor being Jewish, Fetterman replied: “I don’t believe any antisemitism was a part of that process, because nobody tolerates that.”) 

But that was just acting—that was just Fetterman performing his role as politician, and even though he was good at it, it wasn’t his natural state, his default position.

At root, he was a man at war. He had suffered a stroke in May 2022, which had almost derailed his Senate campaign, and one month after he’d gone to Washington, in early 2023, he was hospitalized for six weeks with crippling depression. When he emerged from the hospital, he felt, as The Washington Post put it, “unleashed.”

This is when John Fetterman dispensed with most, if not all, the politicking. When he let loose—railing against disgraced Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, and then, of course, Hamas and the atrocities of October 7. 

It was a strange and even exhilarating thing to watch. A sort of Bulworth moment. The man, returned to himself by his doctors, setting aside the pretense, refusing to play the game that most everyone else in his universe played—was congenitally incapable of not playing. It was one of those moments you don’t expect to see, and when you do, it is not what you expect. Fetterman unplugged was not a national hero, but a pariah of sorts. He had exposed, however unwittingly, the chaos that had engulfed the left.

The Hamas attack of October 7 ripped open a chasm on the American left and exposed a profound moral confusion: The old-time liberals had always been friends of Israel, because they thought Israel was the underdog, an island of democracy surrounded by autocrats and terrorists. But the progressives, steeped in the identitarian politics that had engulfed the universities and culture over the past three or four decades, insisted on viewing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a racial lens, one that transformed the Jewish state into the colonizers (the white people) and the Palestinians into the colonized (the people of color). Never mind that most Israelis, being Sephardic or Mizrahi, did not “present as white.” Never mind that Israel was a grand project in decolonization—the building of a home out of an ancient homeland on which Jews had lived for thousands of years.

One of the few people on the American left who was not confused was John Fetterman. He grasped instinctually, like most ordinary Americans, that one does not butcher and rape children, teenagers, grandmothers, that the attack was not about decolonization, that this was a Marxist canard superimposed on a conflict and region that almost everyone outside it knows nothing about.

It was this commonsensical thinking—so plainly laid out, devoid of any of the word-salad idiocy that now passes for high-minded oratory on the progressive left—that made him a hero to so many American Jews.

In May, Yeshiva University in New York City awarded him the Presidential Medal for Global Leadership for his support of Israel. During his speech, in front of about 5,000 people, Fetterman removed the crimson sash he was wearing, a symbol of his alma mater, Harvard University, and said he was “profoundly disappointed” by “Harvard’s inability to stand up for the Jewish community after October 7. And for me, personally, I do not fundamentally believe that it’s right for me to wear this today.” 

I was there. I was surprised, even moved. But also perplexed. He never said why he cared so much about these Jews on this swatch of desert thousands of miles from home. When I pressed him, he seemed a little annoyed. “I’m always going to go for the hard right, the hard correct, place,” he said. He meant the correct position—the position that jibed with his values. “I’ve been very clear from the beginning on that.”

He said that, in July, when he found out that Noa Argamani, one of the Israeli hostages who had been freed by Israeli forces, was in Washington with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he had to meet her. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, you are my hero,’ ” he told me. “I just wanted to shake her hand. She’s so much stronger than I could ever be.” (Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, meanwhile, sat in the House chamber while Netanyahu addressed Congress, with a scowl on her face and a sign that said, “WAR CRIMINAL.”)

He told me he was happy to see the Israelis “systematically” eradicating Hamas’s senior ranks. “I love the fact that they’re able to assassinate members of Hamas leadership,” he said, alluding to the recent double assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, and Fuad Shukr, in Beirut. “Israel has demonstrated they can reach anyone, and I fully support that.”

He said he thought that anyone, Democrat or Republican, who was not rooting for Israel and Ukraine had succumbed to a weakness of spirit or confusion or tribalism. 

“What disgusts me is the way the Republicans—some of them—turn their back on Ukraine,” Fetterman said. “It’s the same fight for democracy, whether that’s Ukraine, whether that’s what’s happening in Taiwan or in Israel. I’m always going to stand with our critical allies throughout that kind of a fight, and how anybody could turn their back on an ally like Ukraine—it’s disgusting.”

Fetterman, 55, remembers watching the 1984 movie Red Dawn, about the Soviets invading America. “They were the bad guys, you know—everybody was cheering for the Wolverines”—the band of high-school kids in rural Colorado who form a fledgling resistance against the communists—“and now people are like, ‘Well, no, maybe I see the value in Putin.’ ”

He is especially critical of J.D. Vance, a former Marine and Donald Trump’s running mate, who boasted, in a 2023 text to right-wing conspiracy theorist Charles Johnson, “Dude I won’t even take calls from Ukraine.”

“I truly don’t understand what Vance actually believes in,” Fetterman told me. Referring to a recent Daily Beast story, which included photos of Vance, then in his mid-twenties, in a blonde wig while playing beer pong, he said: “Of course, now we all know that Senator Vance does dress up in drag—no problem with that, that’s fine, hey, I’m all about it, whatever, that’s fine—but, you know, people like Vance have tried to demonize that.” He meant, presumably, the Ohio senator’s opposition to gender-affirming care and his claim that LGBTQ+ activists were “groomers”—and his antipathy, as Fetterman and other Democrats saw it, to recognizing and honoring other people’s identities.

The Israeli war against Hamas, which Vance supports, and American aid for Ukraine’s fight against Russia, which Vance opposes, are part of the same sprawling, intercontinental struggle against the authoritarians and their clients, Fetterman said. 

“That’s not about American politics,” he said. “That’s about democracy—it’s clear, it’s a global war against democracy, like, it’s the easiest vote that I ever had.” He was referring to the recent $95 billion foreign-aid package, including roughly $16 billion in military aid for Israel and $9 billion in humanitarian assistance to Gaza. In the end, the aid bill passed overwhelmingly in the Senate, 79 to 18. Only two Senate Democrats opposed it. In the House, where the progressives have more of a stronghold, 37 Democrats opposed aiding Israel. 

“I will never understand a Democrat that voted against Israel in that kind of gigantic aid bill,” Fetterman told me. President Biden signed the bill into law in late April.

It is hard to imagine many—or any—future Democratic presidents doing the same. A January poll indicates 62 percent of Democrats think Israel has gone too far in its war against Hamas. A March poll showed that just 38 percent of Americans aged 18 to 34 support Israel. That figure is dropping.

If nothing changes, by the time Kamala Harris is sworn in in January, or someone else in January 2029—for pro-Israel and Jewish Democrats, it's only a question of when—the sea change on the American left will be complete. The confusion will have been made permanent.

Unless the liberals can save us. The people, like John Fetterman, who are old enough to be sane, but not too old to speak to younger voters. The people we sometimes call Generation X. I know this type. I’m going on 52. 

Yes, of course, it’s stupid to view the whole of humanity through a media construct. A “generational” prism. Nonetheless. 

Did Fetterman, who is not up for reelection until 2028, think that this sliver of Americans wedged between the huge, nauseating Boomer and millennial hordes—those of us with no obvious political bent, who straddled the analogue and the digital, whose identity was not wrapped up in any stilted, generational packaging—could return America to itself?

He refused, in very John Fetterman style, to take himself—or the question—too seriously. 

“I’m not an advocate for any one specific kind of generation, whether it’s mine, or whatever, but I believe in the American experience, and they’re going to elect the right leader,” he told me.

But then, he conceded the point. Smirking just so. Yes, okay, fine—Gen X will save the world. 

“Well, I think Generation X, we should remind everybody that Mötley Crüe”—like the countless kids who once flocked to their concerts—“can kick some ass.”

Peter Savodnik is a senior editor for The Free Press. Read his piece “I Was Wrong About John Fetterman” and Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @petersavodnik.

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