In early April, Tracy Baton helped organize a “Hands Off!” rally protesting President Donald Trump in downtown Pittsburgh that was attended by more than 6,000 people. But she wasn’t just angry at the president—she was also incensed by her state’s Democratic senator, John Fetterman. So was the crowd.
“Fetterman?” one speaker yelled from a stage near the steps of City Hall.
“Jagoff!” protesters shouted back in unison.
“Fetterman?”
“Jagoff!”
The term is Pittsburghese for “jerk.”
“It means you’ve broken the social contract,” says Baton, a 62-year-old social worker. “It’s a neighbor who you know won’t give you a cup of sugar.”
Or, in Fetterman’s case, it describes a politician who campaigned as a Bernie Sanders–loving populist and vowed to help Democrats advance their priorities past the party’s two obstructionists, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin—only to reprise their roles once in Congress and cozy up with Republicans.
“He ran in the 2022 primaries against Joe Manchin, and now he’s become Joe Manchin,” says Mike Mikus, a longtime Democratic operative in Pennsylvania. “An unprincipled Manchin.”
He’s sided with Republicans on denying immigrants due process, voted to confirm a 2020 election denier to lead the Department of Justice, and approved a GOP budget that freed Trump to slash spending without oversight. His recent actions have enraged progressives, mystified colleagues, and alarmed former and current aides.
Even Conor Lamb, who ran to Fetterman’s right in Pennsylvania’s 2022 Democratic Senate primary, doesn’t know what to make of the metamorphosis.
“John has changed who he was, and he’s never really adequately explained that,” the former member of Congress says. “He presented himself as fighting for people and caring about the minimum wage and the people who were just barely getting by. I think all those people are wondering now, where is he?”
In May, a bombshell profile by New York magazine’s Ben Terris provided a feasible rationale. The story was a gutting dive into the psyche of the senator, who had a stroke during his campaign and required six weeks of hospitalization to treat clinical depression shortly after taking office. Terris laid out concerning behind-the-scenes behavior in striking detail: outbursts that drove away staff, paranoid and grandiose delusions, reckless driving, and a near-fatal crash that injured his wife. As anybody with mental health struggles can attest, Fetterman is a victim of whatever demons he’s fighting. But he’s not the only one: He also has 13.1 million constituents to think about—not to mention a party in free fall.
Fetterman’s unique backstory is as familiar as his trademark gym shorts and hoodie: A hulking Harvard Kennedy School grad settles in the Rust Belt town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, runs for mayor, and uses the perch as a springboard to loftier ambitions.
As mayor, a position that came with little power, he used family money to launch a nonprofit to cut through red tape. The organization, Braddock Redux, did nothing to revive the steel industry, but it did bring a new community center and green space. A James Beard Award–nominated chef opened a (short-lived) fine-dining restaurant downtown. Yet this modest revitalization brought a flood of national attention, including an appearance on the Colbert Report and a New York Times Magazine profile.
In 2016, he launched a long-shot Senate primary bid against establishment Democrats who, Fetterman said, weren’t progressive enough on fracking or the minimum wage. The New Republic dubbed Fetterman a member of “Bernie’s Army” who got “emotional talking about opportunity for all,” including “immigrants seeking a better life.” Fetterman aggressively sought Sanders’ endorsement, telling Slate, “I’m sitting here with my corsage, waiting.”
Two years later, he successfully ran for lieutenant governor and, in 2022, made another Senate run, taking on celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz. In addition to criminal justice reform, Fetterman focused on reducing economic disparities and supporting LGBTQ rights. He also warned of climate change, though he eased his opposition to fracking.
“He was absolutely comfortable speaking in terms of progressive issues, progressive concerns, and being quite aligned with the left of his party,” says Christopher Borick, political science professor and polling director at Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College.
His campaign was catnip to out-of-state Democrats desperate to halt an exodus of working-class voters. It helped that Fetterman did not fit the image of a stereotypical progressive. “He’s 6’ 8”, weird-looking. Doesn’t dress up in a suit and tie and doesn’t look like someone you’d think would be a Bernie-endorsed candidate,” says a former Fetterman campaign staffer. “People would see him and they wouldn’t think, ‘Oh, this guy’s a crazy lefty.’ They would think this is a normal guy who lives next door to their grandma.”
Just five months before the election, an ischemic stroke took Fetterman off the campaign trail for three months and forced him to rely on closed captioning to process speech. Still recovering and facing $84 million in outside spending, he nonetheless beat Oz by nearly 5 points, with hefty backstopping from staff and his wife, Gisele, who became his most visible surrogate.
To those contemplating the party’s future, it looked like Fetterman and his everyman persona had blazed a path for battleground-state Democrats. Rebecca Katz, his former chief campaign strategist, even launched a political consulting firm that cites Fetterman’s win as the model to “elect more and better Democrats.” But what Katz didn’t say was that she quit working for Fetterman after nine years as his mental state declined. He seemed, as she reportedly texted colleagues in March, “meaner.”
Terris reported that just weeks after taking office in January 2023, Fetterman began displaying alarming symptoms, including, at his lowest, experiencing delusions that family members were wearing wires. He was hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and treated for depression in February. By late March, Fetterman’s doctor reported marked improvements.
“His treatment gradually produced remission of his depression,” the neuropsychiatry chief wrote in a discharge note. “He expressed a firm commitment to treatment over the long term.”
But a little over a year later, Fetterman seemed to be unraveling again. His driving was so dangerous that staffers reportedly wouldn’t ride with him, and in June, he rear-ended an elderly woman while speeding “well over” the 70 mph limit, according to a police report.
Senior employees, including back-to-back-to-back communications directors, quietly departed. But some began to speak out. One of the first was Annie Wu Henry, a former campaign social media strategist. “In the past, I’ve described the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race as one where we voted for a candidate with empathy and character,” she posted on X in May 2024. “Today, I’m apologizing to everyone who also believed that was the case.”
That month, according to New York, Fetterman’s chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, sent a long email to the senator’s doctor with the subject line “concerns.”
Fetterman’s positions, an ex-aide says, are “clouded through a fuck-the-opposition-left” mindset.
“We often see the kind of warning signs we discussed,” Jentleson wrote. “Conspiratorial thinking; megalomania…high highs and low lows; long, rambling, repetitive and self-centered monologues; lying in ways that are painfully, awkwardly obvious.”
Fetterman did not respond to questions from Mother Jones, but told New York that the magazine’s revelations came from “disgruntled employees,” that his staff was not informed about his personal health, and that he’s felt like the “best version” of himself in recent months. (A week after the story published, the Associated Press reported on a new “outburst” from Fetterman. While meeting with a teachers union, he questioned why “everybody is mad at me” and “why does everyone hate me?,” according to the AP, which also reported a member of his staff broke down crying.)
Much of Fetterman’s worrisome behavior took place at the same time he was staking out defiant (and sometimes befuddling) policy positions, especially his bellicose support for Israel. Despite consuming what an ex-aide describes as a lot of far-right news and rarely reading staff memos, he self-identified as the smartest thinker on the subject.
That staffer, who worked for Fetterman both on the campaign trail and in Congress, believes it was the Israel-Hamas war that really broke him, leaving his positions “clouded through a fuck-the-opposition-left” mindset. “Had the war never happened, he would maybe have voted to confirm Marco Rubio. He wouldn’t be voting for Pam Bondi.”
His bombastic rhetoric on Israel caused a rift not only between Fetterman and his aides, but between Fetterman and his wife. Eventually, according to New York, Gisele confronted him in his office about Israel’s bombing of refugee camps in Gaza.
Fetterman reportedly shot back: “That’s all propaganda.”
There are plenty of pro-Israel politicians in Washington. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bestowed only Trump and Fetterman with mementos celebrating the exploding-pager strike targeting Hezbollah militants that resulted in 32 deaths and thousands more injured. Fetterman had famously tattooed the dates of Braddock homicides on his arms to remember the victims, yet he accepted a silver beeper from Netanyahu: an unmistakable symbol of Israel’s brutal aggression that has left tens of thousands of civilians dead.
“That kind of an evil…whether it was Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan or the Confederacy here in the South, that kind of movement has to be destroyed,” Fetterman told the New Yorker, referring to Hamas. “That’s why Atlanta had to burn.”
His new position on immigration was similarly stark, especially considering his wife’s own background. When she was 7, Gisele’s family illegally crossed the border, fleeing violence in Rio de Janeiro. “Every time there was a knock at the door when we were not expecting guests, it was like my heart would drop,” she told a podcast in 2021.
During his Senate campaigns, Fetterman was sympathetic to people with stories like hers, stating on his 2022 website, “I would not have my family if it weren’t for immigration.” But as Trump was poised to return to the White House, he was one of just two Senate Democrats to co-sponsor the Laken Riley Act, which requires the Department of Homeland Security to detain migrants accused of theft and other minor offenses and hold them without bail. He then was the only Democratic lawmaker on Capitol Hill to make the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump, whose eldest son had repeatedly accused Fetterman of not having “a working brain.”
Fetterman has also voted to confirm more Trump Cabinet nominees than almost anyone else in his party. He was the only member of his caucus to vote yes on Attorney General Pam Bondi, who falsely claimed that voter fraud had robbed Trump of victory in 2020 in Fetterman’s home state. There was a time Fetterman had made a national name for himself calling out Trump’s Pennsylvania election lies on major networks, but today, a third ex-staffer says, he is “Trump’s favorite Democrat.”
In March, Fetterman backed the GOP budget bill, scoffing at the idea Senate Democrats should have followed the lead of their House colleagues and held out for a better deal. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called for a “Democratic Party that fights harder,” Fetterman replied curtly: “We kept our government open. Deal with it.”
That prompted Lamb to come to AOC’s defense. On X, he accused Fetterman of “collaborating with—rather than fighting” Republicans. “It seems like the only time you hear from him,” he told me, “is about Israel or about attacking his fellow Democrats.”
It isn’t just antagonistic behavior; people who see him up close say that it also isn’t obvious he’s doing the work. He’s sponsored fewer bills than 75 percent of his fellow senators; on vote attendance, he ranks last.
“He’s not interested in any real legislating,” says a Democratic Hill source. “He misses a ton of votes. He’s not someone who you’re ever going to find in a back room leading the negotiation of a bill. It’s just not what he does.”
Even before May’s revelations, Fetterman was losing ground with his base as fundraising cratered, according to Federal Election Commission filings. As a fourth ex-staffer, who worked on his campaign, warns, “I don’t think that he’s going to have the same people putting time and energy and grassroots dollars into his race that he did last time.” That is, of course, if there is a next time.
When I checked back in with Tracy Baton after New York’s investigation, she had just returned from another anti-Trump rally, where protesters had again vented at the senator, chanting: “Fetterman, Fetterman, stand up and fight. We don’t need no MAGA-lite.”
As a licensed mental health provider, she understands the nuance between struggling with a psychiatric condition and losing yourself in one. “If you have a mental illness,” she told me, “you still have to be accountable for your actions and their consequences.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.