I don’t have a lot of political regrets, but at the very top of the list is voting for John Fetterman in 2022. At the time, I was living in a small town called Tunkhannock in the northeast corner of Pennsylvania, where I grew up, and Fetterman’s campaign ads were on TV constantly. You won’t have heard of Tunkhannock, because almost nobody outside the area has. The population at the last census was just 1,766, two of the biggest employers are Walmart and a Procter & Gamble warehouse, and with a median household income of $37,071, there isn’t a lot of wealth or economic opportunity to go around. In other words, it’s a place not too different from Fetterman’s adopted hometown of Braddock. On the campaign trail, Fetterman said he’d be an advocate for “small towns and rural communities” like those, and for the working-class people who live there. He talked about the “union way of life” and the need to raise the criminally low $7.25 an hour minimum wage, and he’d been a union worker himself as a UPS driver organized under the Teamsters. He promised to help legalize recreational marijuana, which can still get you locked up in Pennsylvania—especially if you’re not white. He even had some unusually good foreign policy takes, saying in 2021 that he wanted to normalize U.S. relations with Cuba and end the decades-long embargo against the embattled Communist nation. Then, too, his decision to stay in the Senate race after he suffered a stroke seemed admirable—exactly the kind of toughness and determination you want in a political leader. 

There were red flags, too, and in hindsight they should have stood out more. The biggest was Fetterman’s stance on Palestine, as he consistently opposed any criticism of Israel’s apartheid violence in Gaza and the West Bank, including the BDS movement. In 2022, it wasn’t yet clear that this would become the single defining moral issue of our time. Fetterman also reversed course on fracking during a televised debate, claiming he’d “always supported” the pollution-spewing industry even though he’d once attended Sunrise Movement rallies to stop it. And he said the idea of defunding the police was “always absurd,” even though there's been no meaningful reduction in killings by police since George Floyd's murder. 

But on the whole, I figured the good outweighed the bad. Fetterman’s opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, was a millionaire who made his fortune peddling dodgy miracle cures and openly said that uninsured people “don’t have a right to health”; he was worth defeating, even with a flawed candidate. At worst, I thought Fetterman would turn out to be a figure like Senator Elizabeth Warren (who has proposed a wealth tax) or Ed Markey (sponsor of the Green New Deal): nowhere near as far left as I’d like, but slightly better than your average Democrat. So I filled out a ballot for him in November, and I even chucked in five bucks to his campaign when he started sending spam emails. I’ve got the pinback button to prove it. It sits at the bottom of my kitchen junk drawer these days, along with the half-burnt birthday candles, bread ties, caps off Tanqueray bottles, and other useless crap, because that’s exactly what Fetterman’s politics have turned into.

Just two years later, he hasn’t only betrayed progressive voters like me who elected him. He’s become Donald Trump’s accomplice in pushing the MAGA agenda. 

As my fellow Pennsylvanian Kim Kelly wrote in her profile “John Fetterman, American Jagoff,” it didn’t take long for Fetterman to turn his back on the Left. He did one or two good things when he first got into the Senate, it’s true, like introducing a bill to eliminate school lunch debt. But soon after the October 7 attacks, he became what Kelly calls “the world’s most antagonistic Israel stan,” even donning the Israeli flag as a cape and waving it from his roof to mock protesters demanding a ceasefire. Since the “American Jagoff” article came out, it seems like Fetterman finds a new way to defend atrocities and scoff at the very concept of human rights every day. When Pope Francis called for an investigation into the charges of genocide in Gaza, Fetterman took to social media to announce that “I reject the accusation and investigation in the strongest terms,” as if the Pope had asked for his input. When United Nations human rights experts warned against U.S. support for war crimes, he accused them of having an “anti-Israel bias.” When the International Criminal Court issued its arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant—a decision that wasn’t taken lightly—his reply was that the court had  “No standing, relevance, or path. F— that.” (Dashes his; apparently mass bloodshed is fine, but swearing is too much.) When Israel planted bombs in hundreds of allegedly Hezbollah-owned pagers in Lebanon and detonated them—which is illegal under international law, and has killed at least two children and left others with horrible burn wounds—Fetterman said that “if anything, I love it.” When Meta decided that the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” was not, in fact, “hate speech,” Fetterman made a stink about it. He’s personally travelled to Israel and met with Benjamin Netanyahu—and it seems like Netanyahu is the one person who can make him change out of his grubby hoodie and put on a suit when he comes to Washington, a courtesy Fetterman rarely extends to either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Tomorrow, he’ll probably think of a new way to be awful to Palestinians and their supporters. It’s never-ending.  

To point out the obvious, this is not what I voted for. The Israel stuff alone would be enough to make Fetterman a repulsive warmonger unworthy of anyone’s support, but he has also started to embrace Republican rhetoric about immigration and the border, claiming it “isn’t xenophobic” to want tighter controls on who can enter the country. In December 2023 he declared that he was simply “not a progressive,” which came as news to the people who’d helped him raise an estimated $48 million in mostly small-dollar donations after he spent several years calling himself one. But it’s in the last few months, since Donald Trump won the 2024 election, that Fetterman has begun to turn more fully toward the Right. 

The first warning signs came, as they often do, when Fetterman started to backslide on LGBTQ rights. This is an area where he’d previously been reliable—in the past, he’d flown trans-inclusive Pride flags (along with a marijuana flag) outside his office as Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, condemned Republican rhetoric that “targets transgender kids to score cheap political points” during the 2022 Senate race, and promised to ban homophobic “conversion therapy” nationwide. But shortly after Kamala Harris’s embarrassing electoral loss last November, Fetterman gave an interview to Semafor where he seemed to blame progressive “statements about gender” for her defeat and credited transphobic Republican ads as having been effective:  

[I]t’s also true, undeniably, that if someone ran for president in 2020 and pandered to that Squad mentality, or to get likes on Twitter, and they made those kinds of statements about gender, they were going to be pretty hard to defend. That was going to get weaponized. And it’s undeniable that Republicans created a really powerful message: “She’s for they/them, and Trump is for you.” That was, I think, our cycle’s version of “where’s the beef?” or “I knew Jack Kennedy, and you’re no Jack Kennedy.” That kept hitting again and again and again and again for 10s of millions of dollars. It had an ear worm quality. And I’m not surprised that that resonated.

It’s not clear what a “Squad mentality” means exactly, but it’s not hard to read between the lines. Fetterman appears to think transphobia is a “powerful message” that “resonates” with voters, and he would like to see the Democratic Party tone down its “statements about gender” in order to win elections. He’s not the only Democrat to take this angle. During his Senate race last year, Texas Democrat Colin Allred even ran a transphobic ad of his own, saying that “I don’t want boys playing girls sports, or any of this ridiculous stuff that Ted Cruz is saying” in an effort to one-up his Republican opponent. Fetterman’s position isn’t quite that bad, and he’s still capable of making good decisions on LGBTQ issues; this month, he stood up for transgender legislator Sarah McBride, offering her his personal bathroom after House Republicans announced a rule forcing all legislators to use the restroom associated with their gender at birth. (Aren’t you glad your tax dollars go toward policing people’s toilet habits instead of fixing, say, child poverty?) Fetterman says that “there’s no job I’m afraid to lose if it requires me to degrade anyone,” and maybe he means it. But it’s hard to trust him on that, considering that in December he also voted for a defense spending bill that specifically excludes transgender healthcare for military members’ children. Ultimately, an ally you can’t count on 100 percent of the time is no ally at all. 

After that Semafor interview, it wasn’t long before Fetterman started to openly express support for Donald Trump and his policy agenda. When Trump announced his cabinet picks in mid-November of last year, Fetterman was quick to say that he would gladly vote for Marco Rubio as secretary of state, calling him a “strong choice.” In fact, Rubio is a terrible choice, since he wants greater hostility with China and Iran, either of which could bring the world closer to nuclear war. He also supports crushing sanctions against Cuba, regime change in Venezuela, and has a creepy admiration for El Salvador’s dictator Nayib Bukele. His antagonism toward Cuba stands out, since Fetterman was completely correct back in 2021 when he called the U.S. embargo a “damaging” policy from a “bygone era” that “punishes innocent people”—but now, apparently, he’s happy to vote for someone who believes the opposite and wants to inflict that same punishment. (For that matter, so are the rest of the Senate Democrats, as Rubio was confirmed with a unanimous 99-0 vote. Current Affairs has reached out to the offices of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in particular, asking them to explain that decision, but so far heard nothing back. But at least they made their votes quietly, and didn’t abase themselves by calling Rubio “strong.”) 

Fetterman also says he’ll vote for another awful choice, Representative Elise Stefanik—a hardcore Israel supporter who believes the nation has a “biblical right” to own the West Bank—as ambassador to the United Nations. Given her obvious bias, it’s hard to believe Stefanik will even attempt to get any real diplomacy done. Worryingly, anonymous sources have told The Hill that Fetterman is even “considering” voting for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an unabashed crank and anti-vaxxer, to run the Department of Health and Human Services. From the whole Trump clown car, only Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth—both alleged sexual predators—have apparently been too much for him so far. 

It’s not just Trump’s nominees that Fetterman seems to like, though. He’s also been cozying up to the man himself. Since it became clear that Trump would be the next president, Fetterman has been urging his fellow Democrats to “chill out” and avoid having a “freak out” about his policies, even saying at one point that “If you’re rooting against the president, you are rooting against the nation.” Since Trump’s policies include violent ICE raids and mass deportations, the accelerated destruction of the climate, and increased aggression against other countries around the world, this advice is obscene. Nobody should be willing to “chill out” about such things, and everyone with a conscience should be “rooting against the president,” since the president wants to harm “the nation” and its people. If you’re a member of the main opposition party, that’s your whole job: to oppose. But Fetterman doesn’t see it that way. He’s gone out of his way to pursue a cordial relationship with Trump, paying him a personal visit at Mar-a-Lago and even becoming the first Democratic senator to join Truth Social, Trump’s bizarre Twitter clone. In early December, Fetterman suggested that Joe Biden should give Trump a pardon for his 34 felony convictions over falsifying business documents in the Stormy Daniels case, calling the prosecution “bullshit” that had been “weaponized for political gain.” He needn’t have bothered, since a judge would soon sentence Trump to an “unconditional discharge” with no actual punishment whatsoever, but the comment made his attitude toward the incoming president clear. Fetterman has even entertained Trump’s most outlandish ideas, like purchasing (or invading) Greenland to claim it as U.S. soil, saying that it’s “pretty reasonable” and “strategically a smart thing.” And in the latest expression of his vehement anti-Palestinian stance, he praised Trump’s decision to send 2,000-pound bombs to the IDF—which even “Genocide Joe” Biden wouldn’t do because it is impossible to drop such large bombs in a densely populated area like Gaza without risking massive civilian casualties—as an example of “finding common ground in DC.”

There’s a distinction to be made here, because there’s a way of working across political party lines that can be effective. When he’s questioned about his current approach, Fetterman says that he’s simply willing to “meet with anyone to secure some wins, including President Trump.” On his attitude toward conservatives more generally, he says that Democrats should:

Have a conversation with anyone that’s willing to have an honest conversation. That’s always been the rule, and that’s what I’m going to continue. I’ve had conversations on Fox News, and they’ve played me straight. I’ve shown up on Newsmax, and they’ve played it straight. And Rogan. Rogan was great. He was cordial and open and warm.

If this was an accurate description of what Fetterman is doing, it would be good advice. Throughout his career, Bernie Sanders has pursued a similar strategy of having “honest conversations” with people and organizations other Democrats would hesitate to engage with, even getting a Fox News town hall crowd to cheer for universal healthcare during his 2020 run. He’s gone on Joe Rogan’s show himself, and it worked; Rogan endorsed him in front of his millions of viewers. More recently, Sanders has also expressed a willingness to work with the Trump administration on certain highly specific issues, like Trump’s campaign promise to cap credit card interest at 10 percent, or even some of RFK Jr.’s ideas about regulating the food industry. But there’s an enormous difference between working with an opponent to advance a specific policy and making blanket statements about how nobody should be “rooting against” that opponent at all. So far, Sanders hasn’t compromised his core principles in his engagements with Trump, except with the Rubio vote. As Fetterman puts it, he’s just trying to “secure some wins” wherever he can get them. Fetterman is doing the opposite, and handing policy wins to Trump instead. 

There’s no more heinous example of that pattern than Fetterman’s pro-MAGA turn on immigration. In early January, Fetterman co-sponsored the Laken Riley Act, which requires Homeland Security agents (most notably ICE) to detain any undocumented immigrant who’s arrested for nonviolent property crimes like shoplifting. The key word there is “arrested,” as the law does not require that the charge of theft be proven, or even that the accused get a trial. It skips straight to imprisonment and likely deportation, even for people who later turn out to have been falsely accused, and it denies immigrants any semblance of due process. The law also contains provisions that empower state attorneys general—like, for instance, Ken Paxton in Texas—to sue the federal government to force the deportation of particular immigrants, or to block immigration from so-called “recalcitrant” countries that don’t unconditionally accept deported immigrants being returned to their shores. It’s a deeply anti-immigrant piece of legislation, and since it’s well-documented that immigrants commit less crime than citizens born in the U.S., there’s no public safety justification for any of it. It’s purely about expelling people the GOP thinks are undesirable, and John Fetterman is all for it. It’s tawdry to speculate about politicians’ family lives, but you have to wonder what Gisele Barreto Fetterman—who was an undocumented immigrant herself before marrying John, and has written op-eds in support of immigrants’ rights—thinks about all this.

Fetterman has even started to show signs of losing the sympathy for the working class that was his main selling point during the 2022 campaign—if he ever really had it, that is. Along with his budding bromance with Trump, he’s started flattering billionaire oligarch Elon Musk, saying that “I admire Mr. Musk” for being “undeniably a brilliant guy” and that “he is on a different team, but that doesn’t make me an enemy.” Notably, this was on December 5, long after Musk started endorsing racist conspiracy theories online—and Musk soon returned the compliment, saying that “Fetterman is based and truthful” after his endorsement of the Laken Riley Act. Meanwhile, Fetterman’s attitude is very different when it comes to the Luigi Mangione case, as he’s called the outpouring of online sympathy for the accused shooter “vile” and referred to Mangione himself—who, as of yet, is innocent until proven guilty—as “the asshole that’s going to die in prison,” encouraging people to think of the slain UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson as a “father” and an innocent victim. Taken together, these two cases paint a stark picture of Fetterman’s class allegiances: plenty of sympathy for billionaires who systematically deny people healthcare or show obvious neo-Nazi tendencies, but no sympathy for people angry about the malignant impact of the healthcare industry on their lives. It’s one thing to dress how you imagine a working-class person would; it’s another thing to think like one, and Fetterman fails that test. 

Despite—or rather, because of—all this, there’s been a concerted effort to paint Fetterman as “the future of the Democratic Party,” a title the New York Times first bestowed on him in 2022. Even now, top New York Times columnists are still in the tank for him. During one of his insufferable scripted “conversations” with Gail Collins, tenured bad-opinion-haver Bret Stephens said this: 

Bret: Seth Moulton. Andy Beshear. Elissa Slotkin. Wes Moore. John Fetterman. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. Ritchie Torres. Dems, that’s your sanity caucus. Listen to them.

That’s a real murderer’s row of mediocrities—literally, as Torres and Fetterman are notorious for their support of Israeli war crimes, while Gluesenkamp Perez is known for lying about bananas. Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy has also praised Fetterman as a rising star, saying that he “should be leader of the Democratic Party” earlier this month. But it’s important to remember that both Stephens and McCarthy are Republicans. They do not want the Democratic Party to win or govern effectively; they just want it to become as much like the Republican Party as possible. The meme about the “guy who hates you and your cause” offering advice for your cause applies. Beyond party loyalties, Stephens in particular is a serial warmonger who has written that “We Absolutely Need to Escalate in Iran,” and who thinks it would be a fine idea to use “military force” (that is, invasion) to “Depose Maduro” in Venezuela, ignoring the catastrophic consequences this would have for ordinary Venezuelans. When someone with bloodthirsty ideas like that holds you up as an example of “sanity,” you ought to look in the mirror and wonder if something’s gone badly wrong with your political and moral compass. 

This is more important than just one guy having bad politics. Right now, there’s a struggle over what the Democratic Party should be and do in the Trump era: should it be a left-wing (or at least liberal) opposition party that defies Trump on fundamental issues like immigration, abortion, LGBTQ rights, and labor, or should it be a party of compromise and “bipartisanship” that concedes ground to the Right? People like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib represent one pole of opinion; people like Fetterman and the rest of Bret Stephens’ “sanity caucus” represent the other. If they successfully become the dominant faction, opposition to Trump within the U.S. government will be muted and ineffectual, and he will have an easier time inflicting harm on millions of people in the U.S. and the wider world. That’s why they mustn’t be allowed to gain control over the Democratic Party and its future, and make it even worse than it already is. 

Ever since I took a full-time job editing Current Affairs, I've lived in New Orleans, and that has its own political problems. Many of the elected leaders here in Louisiana are Republicans like Jeff Landry, Steve Scalise, and Mike Johnson—a shabby gang of bigots, religious zealots, and bought-and-paid-for lackeys of the fossil fuel industry that’s slowly killing their constituents. But in a perverse way, I actually respect them more than John Fetterman. A right-wing politician like Landry is loathsome and dangerous, but at least he doesn’t lie to your face about what he believes. He stands up and declares his worst positions with his full chest, and you know where you stand in return. Fetterman can’t say the same—and his perfidy has wide-reaching effects, because the next batch of progressive candidates for office will have a harder time convincing voters to trust them because he turned out to be a fraud. 

In nations more politically advanced than the U.S., like Peru, voters can trigger a recall election if their legislators don’t follow through on what they were elected to do. Even in communist Cuba, which is often criticized as undemocratic, people have the right to recall their assembly delegates if they displease them. It was the same in the early Soviet Union. In the United States, though, we’re explicitly forbidden from recalling members of Congress no matter how badly they behave, which encourages all kinds of nonsense on their part. John Fetterman is a perfect example of why that’s a bad idea. He essentially ran a huge false-advertising scam on everyone who supported him, pretending to have one set of ideals and goals and then adopting another when he was safely in office. He pandered to people on the political Left for just long enough to get our votes and donations, then gave us the middle finger and started endorsing Donald Trump’s MAGA agenda at every opportunity. Today, he’s probably the best friend Trump has in the Democratic caucus, and an active accomplice in the harms he’s trying to inflict on people. There ought to be an avenue for Pennsylvania’s voting public to punish him for that, and changing the system to allow a recall vote is the most obvious. And until such a system comes into being: John, I want my five bucks back!