John Fetterman’s War

Fetterman, who is fifty-four, was elected to the Senate a few months after suffering a major stroke, which still obviously affects him. By the time he was sworn in, last January, he was experiencing a bout of depression so debilitating that, on the advice of the Senate doctor, he was admitted to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for psychiatric care. When he returned to work, in April of 2023, he showed little interest in the upper chamber’s lawmaking machinery and rarely attended the Democratic Party’s weekly caucus lunch. Instead, he distinguished himself by eagerly antagonizing the opposition. Igor Bobic, a senior politics reporter for HuffPost, told me that Fetterman first caught his eye that fall, during then Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ill-fated effort to impeach President Joe Biden. “The words he was pulling out were just totally words that you wouldn’t normally hear in the Senate,” Bobic said. “You know, like ‘jagoff’ and ‘circle jerk,’ and calling Republicans ‘dicks.’ ”