Pennsylvania Democrat Senator John Fetterman has surprised people on both sides of the aisle for the past few years. The former mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, took up public office in the rust belt town on a mission to revitalize the failing rural economy. He didn’t come from a small town, or from a poor family. Instead, he grew up in York County in a comfortable middle class home. Not only that, he earned a Master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
In other words, Fetterman had cemented his progressive bona fides. Then in 2022, he suffered a severe stroke that left him with obvious difficulty reading and speaking. Not without cause, Republican critics questioned whether he was fit for office as it was often impossible to understand his speech or to have confidence that he was able to understand information he was taking in. But Fetterman steadily improved, though his progress was slowed by a severe bout of depression that had him hospitalized in 2023.
By the end of 2023, he drew a line in the sand with his party, which had tilted so far to the extreme left that even lifelong Democrats were getting alarmed at what the party was doing. Fetterman declared “I’m not a progressive” as he took the Democrats to task for their anti-Israel lurch and their unwillingness to admit that unchecked immigration was out of control.
Now he’s shocking the establishment again. They’re easy to shock, of course. Just try saying something like, “Men cannot change sex and become women” and the cackling hens on cable news will start squawk-screeching about a holocaust-against-trans-people. On January 7 Fetterman sat down with Fox News’ (bad! bad!) Brett Baier and told him he would be voting in for many of incoming President Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees, including Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Sean Duffy, and more. He also confirmed he was open to considering a yes vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.
During his Fox appearance, Fetterman said out loud something that adult politicians would have been able to say without provoking consternation until the past several years of teenage-girl-hysteria that overtook the Democratic Party. The blue team acts–quite literally–as if agreeing with any conservative on any issue is religious heresy.
“I’m open to hear from everyone, and I don’t know why that’s controversial,” Fetterman said. “And I also would like to remind everyone on the Democratic side—that’s the way democracy works. Trump won, and now they’re going to run the table. You don’t have to agree with all of it, but I want to find a way to work together on a bunch of them.”
Let’s see what the reaction on X/Twitter looked like.
