New York Mag Asks: Is John Fetterman Okay?
Is the guy changing his mind, or losing it?
If you’re looking for an 8,000-word read that will make you ponder “who is a reliable narrator? Are humans all just bags of chemicals walking around?” and “Where’s the line between political opinions and mental illness?” New York magazine’s Ben Terris has an OOF piece on John Fetterman, “All By Himself: John Fetterman insists he is in good health. But staffers past and present say they no longer recognize the man they once knew.”
Here’s a link to the whole thing.
In 2022 John Fetterman beat Oprah-protege and supplement-scammer Dr. Mehmet Oz for a Pennsylvania seat in the US Senate, even after having a stroke five months before the election. He was a Democrat beacon of hope, a small-town gritty Rust Belt guy with a hip wife, unapologetic about his progressive values.
But since then he’s done some mighty weird stuff for a Democrat: going to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s little pucker and reporting that Trump was “kind,” voting to advance Pete Hegseth’s nomination from committee, then voting against confirming him, and also to advance Elise Stefanik for UN Ambassador (even posing for a double thumbs-up photo with Stefanik), and voting to confirm Pam Bondi. He also now says he’s not a progressive any more, just a “regular Democrat,” has been buying into Trumpy rhetoric about the Southern border, and has been criticizing fellow Dems, and Jasmine Crockett. And he argued with a steward on an airplane about having to wear a seat belt. Unbecoming! But is it maybe more than that?
Now, his former staff members say he’s been talking about being off his medications, and while sometimes he seems normal and lucid, he’s been having episodes where he gets “meaner,” “manic,” and starts “saying unhinged shit,” to the point they’re worried it could hurt Democrats (but mostly are worried about Fetterman himself), and are speaking out in a “better to hear the news from us” kind of way.
The story starts out with some some scary details about what led to his hospitalization for a depressive episode: a second-hand report that he had episodes of being “catatonic,” and then “walked, obliviously, into the road and was nearly struck by a car,” and was later found “wandering on Capitol Hill” and dehydrated, like Boris Yeltsin, but sober.
In the hospital he had delusions, and told doctors “he believed members of his family were wearing wires to secretly record him. In one chaotic moment, Fetterman grew convinced that a political rally was being held in the hospital’s lobby and that he needed to break out of his room to attend.”
After his hospitalization, though, staffers said he seemed to get back to his old self, other than having to use audio-to-text transcription due to stroke-related processing delays. He took medications that seemed to stabilize his mood and threw himself into his work.
But, after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, they say something shifted. Anonymous staffers say his longtime pro-Israel stance (as the New Yorker documented) became so vehement that it alarmed his wife and staffers; he’d never been there, had no background in the conflict, declined briefings about it and refused to read any memos about it. He papered his office with photos of hostages, told Gisele that reports Israel was bombing refugee camps in Gaza was “propaganda” (even though Israel admitted to doing this), staunchly opposed any kind of a ceasefire, and ranted “Kill them all” about Hamas. (“In a statement, Fetterman denied the account, adding, ‘Any reference to killing was solely about Hamas, and I do support the destruction of that organization, down to its last member.’”)
And this reportedly coincided with him neglecting his health, and strange behavior:
The endless fights over Israel, which saw Fetterman draw further into himself, coincided with setbacks in his recovery regimen. At that point, Fetterman hadn’t gotten his blood drawn for months, despite bloodwork being a crucial component of the plan. In the final weeks of 2023, a Senate physician called the office, according to a staffer, to say that he had seen Fetterman “acting bizarrely” near the underground trolleys that shuttle people between the Capitol and nearby office buildings. He had witnessed Fetterman, seemingly unaware of his surroundings, walk directly into a group of people, nearly bowling them over.
Who is relaying this medical information is unclear. Perhaps this was processing delays, and just having a controversial opinion? But, the arguing and erratic behavior became worrying enough that two staffers threatened to quit, and a staffer texted Fetterman’s wife Gisele:
“I don’t want to sound defensive, but I want to be clear that this isn’t just me. Everyone here is feeling alarmed.”
“I don’t think for a second that it’s you,” Gisele responded. “Will he find out tonight that [the staffers] are leaving? My fear is something is off and it won’t register.”
Gisele then texted that she had told her husband that his staff and doctor were worried about him but that he told her “that’s not true and I guess I am not talking to you today”
… and hung up on her. Then Gisele begged staffers to not let him have access to Twitter.
Gisele and John both denied this, and Gisele claimed then-chief-of-staff Adam Jentleson was “part of a conspiracy to damage her husband’s reputation, saying Jentleson fed her ‘scary, untrue stories about John’s health.’”:
I would talk to John’s doctors about what Adam was telling me and they would be confused. Those doctors would tell me that their concerns were not with John, but with Adam. Any alleged ‘concerns’ heard from me came straight from those lies, not from John’s doctors or my own eyes.
Jentleson’s reports are backed up by at least four other anonymous staffers, though, and Jentleson resigned seemingly with no other gig lined up; he wouldn’t seem to have any motive to blow up his own career. And if Gisele cares about her husband, of course she would want to protect him and not publicly throw him under the bus.
Also, John was reportedly a complete dick to Gisele, goading her to come along on his trip to Trump’s Florida trash palace:
“She wasn’t going to go, and they had fights about it.” To convince her, Fetterman told her to think of this as an opportunity to showcase what a model Dreamer looked like in an effort to get the president-elect to soften his views on illegal immigration. If she didn’t go, Fetterman said, she’d lose the right to complain about whatever he did as president. “He said in a small group with senior staff, ‘I told her to put up or shut up,’” the staffer recalled. “‘If she doesn’t go, I don’t want to hear about it.’”
BARF. (In the end, she went.)
Fetterman’s Hegseth vote was also turmoil, with Fetterman wanting to vote for Boozehole so as not to appear “weak and partisan,” and ending with Fetterman “fighting with Gisele and crying while FaceTiming with staff. ‘He says that they are trying to cancel him again but we don’t know who ‘they’ are,’ a staffer said in a text.”
Normal politics and spouse stuff, or mental illness?
How about him being good friends with breathy-voiced trad wife Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama?
Fetterman also reportedly disappeared on one of his kids’ birthdays, which he denies. And, staffers say he has cleared his schedule for entire days because he is in “no mood to be around others.”
“We often see the kind of warning signs we discussed,” his chief of staff wrote to his doctor. “Conspiratorial thinking; megalomania (for example, he claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news — he declines most briefings and never reads memos); high highs and low lows; long, rambling, repetitive and self centered monologues; lying in ways that are painfully, awkwardly obvious to everyone in the room.” That sounds an AWFUL LOT like somebody else we can think of.
After chief-of-staff Jentleson quit, he said he reported the erratic behavior to Fetterman’s doctor, and worries that Fetterman “won’t be with us for much longer,” and also that Fetterman had been engaging in risky behavior like speeding while reading entire articles on his phone. And then, a month after he sent that letter, Fetterman with his wife as a passenger rear-ended a 62-year-old woman while going more than 70 MPH, totaling both of their cars and giving Gisele pulmonary contusion and spinal fractures.
Six months ago Fetterman appeared on Joe Rogan, though, where they talked for more than two hours, and he seemed lucid and more with it than, say, a certain current president.
Fetterman blanketly denies the whole report, and claims the staffers are just disgruntled. At least five staffers seems like a lot to be disgruntled, though.
Hope he’s okay and taking care of himself.
He’s up for re-election in 2028.
I was a neurology certifed RN and cared for so many patients who'd suffered a stroke. CVAs can radically alter an individual's personality and potentiate dangerously impetuous behavior, compelling many of them to require 1:1 supervision in the hospital for the safety of the patient and all those around them.
Fetterman is engaging in demonstrably dangerous impetuous behavior. It is neither safe or responsible to allow him to function at this level at this moment in time.
I had a hard time reading the New York magazine article. It felt like we shouldn't know these intimate details about someone else without their consent.
But I also remember that the Republicans hid the fact that a Congresswoman was living in a dementia care facility for the last several months of her term.