Behind Closed Doors, John Fetterman Shows Little Interest in the Work of a Senator
Wall Street Journal
Sep-o4-2026
One morning in June, three paralyzed military veterans in wheelchairs from rural Pennsylvania arrived at the office of Sen. John Fetterman for a long-awaited meeting to discuss legislation that would improve their care.
Fetterman’s staff greeted them with bad news: The Pennsylvania Democrat had to cancel. He’d told his staff he may have eaten something bad and wasn’t feeling well, according to people familiar with the matter.
Less than an hour after his staffers met with the veterans in his place, Fetterman walked into his office, showing no signs of illness. He had an appointment he didn’t want to miss, he told staff: an interview on Fox News to discuss Israel and the war in Iran.
With his hoodie-and-shorts wardrobe and working-class appeal, Fetterman occupies a unique place in a Democratic Party increasingly populated by leftist insurgents. Fetterman often portrays himself as a “regular Democrat” calling out aspects of his party’s progressive fringe—just the profile that past centrists have leveraged in a divided Senate to cut bipartisan deals and score big wins.
But behind closed doors, the first-term senator shows little interest in doing the job beyond cultivating relationships with conservative media figures and advocating for Israel, according to interviews with more than a dozen former staffers and lawmakers, as well as text messages and other internal records.
With a pivotal election looming in November that could yield a split Senate and give Fetterman outsize influence, his office is staffed with a revolving door of aides who are constantly scrambling to keep up the face of a functional operation, the interviews and text messages show.
Fetterman keeps a light daily schedule, often refusing to meet with constituents and fellow lawmakers, or canceling at the last minute, records and interviews show.
Last September, when an aide told Fetterman that officials with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, known as CHOP, wanted to meet because they were worried about Medicaid cuts, he was dismissive.
It marks a contrast to his 2022 campaign, when Fetterman spent long hours traveling to small rural communities, embracing people who felt left behind. “He won because he worked his heart out,” said Judy Hines, chair of the Democratic Party in Mercer County, in rural northwest Pennsylvania. Hines said she was worried about what she sees as a transformation in Fetterman in the years since the campaign.
In the background are concerns about Fetterman’s longstanding struggle with depression, which flared up after a near-fatal 2022 stroke that left him with lingering speech issues. Last year, Fetterman’s former chief of staff publicly aired concerns that Fetterman had stopped following his recovery plan, was damaging personal relationships, exhibiting paranoia, and addicted to his smartphone.
At the time, Fetterman dismissed his former staffer as “disgruntled” in a statement and asserted “ my ACTUAL doctors and my family affirmed that I’m very well.”
Fetterman didn’t reply to multiple requests for an interview for this story. The senator walked away from a Wall Street Journal reporter at a public event in Erie, Pa., late last month, declining to answer questions. His office also didn’t reply to multiple emails summarizing the reporting for this story.
At the Erie event, he broadly defended his record as an effort to deliver bipartisan legislative victories for Pennsylvania. “We have to work together,” Fetterman said. “We have better solutions working together rather than just fighting.”
In Pennsylvania, Fetterman’s shifting politics and public stances have led to a once-unthinkable outcome in recent polling by the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena University : He is more popular among Republican voters than the state’s Republican senator, Dave McCormick. Combined with his growing unfavorability with Democrats, this has sparked speculation Fetterman could switch parties before he is up for re-election in 2028.
In May, Fetterman publicly denied he’s considering a party switch, but recent news events have done nothing to stifle the speculation. In July, campaign filings showed he received money from a prominent conservative donor. In recent interviews, Fetterman has left open the possibility he could feel the need to leave the Democratic Party, if it adopts language in its platform on the one issue that has come to dominate his time in the Senate.
That month, he said: “If our party ever becomes…the anti-Israel party, you know, that’s when I would leave.”
Famous mayor
When Fetterman first ran for Senate in 2016, he defined himself as a Bernie Sanders disciple and progressive populist. After losing in the primaries that year, Fetterman tacked slightly to the center when he ran again in 2022. Still, his campaign focused on fighting for places like Braddock, a hollowed-out steel town near Pittsburgh where he once served as mayor, with a platform that emphasized protecting union and manufacturing jobs.
After rarely speaking about foreign-policy issues, Fetterman emerged during this campaign as a strong supporter of Israel. It didn’t generate much attention at the time because this wasn’t a controversial position in 2022.
Then came the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, and the war in Gaza.
Fetterman came out as an early proponent of the war, and dug in, even as the civilian death toll among Palestinians rose. His stance drew attacks from the progressive left, leading Fetterman to spar with critics on social media, while earning praise from Israel advocates and Republicans.
Among Democrats, Fetterman grew increasingly isolated, and nursed what former staffers viewed as an unreasonable degree of anger toward party leadership, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Since then, Fetterman has become a fixture on conservative media, beamed into the homes of tens of millions of Americans to voice his fierce support for Israel, sometimes displaying a relentless focus on the issue in ways that have alarmed senior staff, according to people familiar with the matter.
Late last summer, Fetterman told his advisers and senior staff he wanted to introduce a resolution forcing every senator to take a public stance on whether the war in Gaza constituted a genocide. His senior staff tried to talk him out of this idea, according to people familiar with the matter, but he was undeterred.
Last September, Israel Ambassador Yechiel Leiter met with Fetterman in his office, and suggested an alternative: Fetterman could write an op-ed explaining why he continued to support Israel, according to people familiar with the matter.
Fetterman agreed, and told Leiter he would write the submission based on any points the ambassador sent over, according to these people. A few days later, embassy staff sent over drafted points for Fetterman to consider.
Fetterman staffers decided not to tell him about it, out of concern that drafting an op-ed based on suggestions from the Israeli embassy, under the senator’s name, risked violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. A spokeswoman for Israel’s embassy declined to comment.
Fetterman dropped the issue, according to former staffers.
In late 2024, Fetterman expressed interest in being appointed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to several former staffers, which they viewed as an unreasonable ask of party leadership, including Schumer. Foreign Relations is among the most prestigious appointments, and Fetterman was just a second-year senator.
When committee appointments were announced, Fetterman got the first choice on his list, Homeland Security, but he was passed over for Foreign Relations. He was furious, former aides said, and blamed Schumer. By early 2025, Fetterman had almost completely isolated himself from fellow Democrats, according to people familiar with the matter, refusing to participate in regular caucus lunches and meetings.
In March 2025, when aides texted Fetterman that Schumer’s staff was arranging a special call for Senate Democrats one evening, he responded: “I truly don’t care.”
In a statement, Schumer called Fetterman “an important member of our caucus” and said he was proud that Senate Democrats represented a broad range of views. Schumer and Fetterman had dinner together last month, a person familiar with the matter said.
‘He just chose not to meet with us.’
Since Fetterman got out of the hospital in 2023, he has repeatedly expressed disdain for several core day-to-day aspects of life as a senator, according to multiple former staffers: meetings with constituents, attending hearings and making public in-state appearances, like town halls.
In April 2025, veteran Pennsylvania state lawmaker Anthony Hardy Williams brought a busload of constituents to Washington from Eastwick, a poorer, flood-prone neighborhood in Philadelphia, to meet with their representatives in Congress and discuss Trump administration cuts to a grant program that had helped the area.
Fetterman was the only one who refused to meet with them, Williams said in an interview. At one point, they saw Fetterman walking the halls and yelled, but he didn’t acknowledge them, according to Williams.
“He was available. He just chose not to meet with us,” Williams said.
Even when Fetterman does agree to meetings, he often cancels, according to former staffers.
Also last April, Fetterman agreed to take a meeting with another state lawmaker, Liz Hanbidge, who drove down from Pennsylvania to introduce herself, and to discuss programs that help the homeless and working poor in her county. But when Hanbidge arrived, according to staffers who were present, Fetterman claimed he hadn’t agreed to the meeting. The aides spent more than an hour pleading with him to talk to her; staffers eventually met with Hanbidge in his place.
Fetterman did take another meeting that day—with Bruce Pearl, the former college basketball coach and Israel advocate. The pair discussed legislation that would affect college sports, and Pearl thanked Fetterman for his stance on Israel, Pearl said in an interview.
Last May, several media reports highlighted Fetterman’s paltry attendance record at Senate hearings. The next month, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial board called on Fetterman to consider stepping down. At that point, records transcripts show, Fetterman had skipped 11 of the 12 full hearings that year of his assigned committees—Homeland Security, Commerce and Agriculture.
In this time frame, Fetterman got a helpful phone call from one of his few friends in the Senate—Katie Britt, an Alabama Republican who had visited him in the hospital in 2023, and brought him cookies.
In the phone call, which Fetterman recounted later, former staffers recalled, Britt told him he could get marked as “present” at hearings by getting the attention of clerks, and then leave and go about his day.
Britt, through a spokeswoman, said she merely explained to Fetterman that “most members typically check in and then go about their days with meetings, speeches, votes, and other engagements while they wait for their turn to actively participate.”
Soon after, Fetterman implemented the strategy with his aides, including deploying an advance staffer to catch the clerk’s eye, so Fetterman could get credit for attending even though he only drifted into the room for a minute or less. Since last June, Fetterman was marked present at 26 out of 31 full hearings of his assigned committees, transcripts show, even though in 20 of them he didn’t say a word.
In Pennsylvania, Fetterman has receded from the public eye, rarely interacting in person with voters during his three-plus years in office.
When three police officers were killed near Fetterman’s hometown of York last September, he backed out of attending the funeral because it was too long.
This summer, after going nearly a year without a public event in Pennsylvania, Fetterman agreed to do two, organized by his Republican counterpart, Sen. McCormick. In June, the two senators appeared in Philadelphia together to promote President Trump’s child investment accounts.
Then last Friday, Fetterman and McCormick made an appearance in a blighted neighborhood in Erie, in northwest Pennsylvania, to meet with elected officials and community leaders to discuss housing affordability, homelessness and poverty in the region.
In a brief question-and-answer session after, a local reporter asked the senators about what they were doing to address cost-of-living issues like high gas prices.
“In terms of affordability, you know, what does that really mean?” Fetterman responded, pivoting to defending the war in Iran. “Why is gas more expensive than some people would like? Well, because we have a crisis over Iran,” he said. “So, in terms of affordability, and I do believe that will be, will resolve, and I do think it’s important to understand that Iran is the bad guy.”
Sep-o4-2026
One morning in June, three paralyzed military veterans in wheelchairs from rural Pennsylvania arrived at the office of Sen. John Fetterman for a long-awaited meeting to discuss legislation that would improve their care.
Fetterman’s staff greeted them with bad news: The Pennsylvania Democrat had to cancel. He’d told his staff he may have eaten something bad and wasn’t feeling well, according to people familiar with the matter.
Less than an hour after his staffers met with the veterans in his place, Fetterman walked into his office, showing no signs of illness. He had an appointment he didn’t want to miss, he told staff: an interview on Fox News to discuss Israel and the war in Iran.
With his hoodie-and-shorts wardrobe and working-class appeal, Fetterman occupies a unique place in a Democratic Party increasingly populated by leftist insurgents. Fetterman often portrays himself as a “regular Democrat” calling out aspects of his party’s progressive fringe—just the profile that past centrists have leveraged in a divided Senate to cut bipartisan deals and score big wins.
But behind closed doors, the first-term senator shows little interest in doing the job beyond cultivating relationships with conservative media figures and advocating for Israel, according to interviews with more than a dozen former staffers and lawmakers, as well as text messages and other internal records.
With a pivotal election looming in November that could yield a split Senate and give Fetterman outsize influence, his office is staffed with a revolving door of aides who are constantly scrambling to keep up the face of a functional operation, the interviews and text messages show.
Fetterman keeps a light daily schedule, often refusing to meet with constituents and fellow lawmakers, or canceling at the last minute, records and interviews show.
Last September, when an aide told Fetterman that officials with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, known as CHOP, wanted to meet because they were worried about Medicaid cuts, he was dismissive.
It marks a contrast to his 2022 campaign, when Fetterman spent long hours traveling to small rural communities, embracing people who felt left behind. “He won because he worked his heart out,” said Judy Hines, chair of the Democratic Party in Mercer County, in rural northwest Pennsylvania. Hines said she was worried about what she sees as a transformation in Fetterman in the years since the campaign.
In the background are concerns about Fetterman’s longstanding struggle with depression, which flared up after a near-fatal 2022 stroke that left him with lingering speech issues. Last year, Fetterman’s former chief of staff publicly aired concerns that Fetterman had stopped following his recovery plan, was damaging personal relationships, exhibiting paranoia, and addicted to his smartphone.
At the time, Fetterman dismissed his former staffer as “disgruntled” in a statement and asserted “ my ACTUAL doctors and my family affirmed that I’m very well.”
Fetterman didn’t reply to multiple requests for an interview for this story. The senator walked away from a Wall Street Journal reporter at a public event in Erie, Pa., late last month, declining to answer questions. His office also didn’t reply to multiple emails summarizing the reporting for this story.
At the Erie event, he broadly defended his record as an effort to deliver bipartisan legislative victories for Pennsylvania. “We have to work together,” Fetterman said. “We have better solutions working together rather than just fighting.”
In Pennsylvania, Fetterman’s shifting politics and public stances have led to a once-unthinkable outcome in recent polling by the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena University : He is more popular among Republican voters than the state’s Republican senator, Dave McCormick. Combined with his growing unfavorability with Democrats, this has sparked speculation Fetterman could switch parties before he is up for re-election in 2028.
In May, Fetterman publicly denied he’s considering a party switch, but recent news events have done nothing to stifle the speculation. In July, campaign filings showed he received money from a prominent conservative donor. In recent interviews, Fetterman has left open the possibility he could feel the need to leave the Democratic Party, if it adopts language in its platform on the one issue that has come to dominate his time in the Senate.
That month, he said: “If our party ever becomes…the anti-Israel party, you know, that’s when I would leave.”
Famous mayor
When Fetterman first ran for Senate in 2016, he defined himself as a Bernie Sanders disciple and progressive populist. After losing in the primaries that year, Fetterman tacked slightly to the center when he ran again in 2022. Still, his campaign focused on fighting for places like Braddock, a hollowed-out steel town near Pittsburgh where he once served as mayor, with a platform that emphasized protecting union and manufacturing jobs.
After rarely speaking about foreign-policy issues, Fetterman emerged during this campaign as a strong supporter of Israel. It didn’t generate much attention at the time because this wasn’t a controversial position in 2022.
Then came the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, and the war in Gaza.
Fetterman came out as an early proponent of the war, and dug in, even as the civilian death toll among Palestinians rose. His stance drew attacks from the progressive left, leading Fetterman to spar with critics on social media, while earning praise from Israel advocates and Republicans.
Among Democrats, Fetterman grew increasingly isolated, and nursed what former staffers viewed as an unreasonable degree of anger toward party leadership, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Since then, Fetterman has become a fixture on conservative media, beamed into the homes of tens of millions of Americans to voice his fierce support for Israel, sometimes displaying a relentless focus on the issue in ways that have alarmed senior staff, according to people familiar with the matter.
Late last summer, Fetterman told his advisers and senior staff he wanted to introduce a resolution forcing every senator to take a public stance on whether the war in Gaza constituted a genocide. His senior staff tried to talk him out of this idea, according to people familiar with the matter, but he was undeterred.
Last September, Israel Ambassador Yechiel Leiter met with Fetterman in his office, and suggested an alternative: Fetterman could write an op-ed explaining why he continued to support Israel, according to people familiar with the matter.
Fetterman agreed, and told Leiter he would write the submission based on any points the ambassador sent over, according to these people. A few days later, embassy staff sent over drafted points for Fetterman to consider.
Fetterman staffers decided not to tell him about it, out of concern that drafting an op-ed based on suggestions from the Israeli embassy, under the senator’s name, risked violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. A spokeswoman for Israel’s embassy declined to comment.
Fetterman dropped the issue, according to former staffers.
In late 2024, Fetterman expressed interest in being appointed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to several former staffers, which they viewed as an unreasonable ask of party leadership, including Schumer. Foreign Relations is among the most prestigious appointments, and Fetterman was just a second-year senator.
When committee appointments were announced, Fetterman got the first choice on his list, Homeland Security, but he was passed over for Foreign Relations. He was furious, former aides said, and blamed Schumer. By early 2025, Fetterman had almost completely isolated himself from fellow Democrats, according to people familiar with the matter, refusing to participate in regular caucus lunches and meetings.
In March 2025, when aides texted Fetterman that Schumer’s staff was arranging a special call for Senate Democrats one evening, he responded: “I truly don’t care.”
In a statement, Schumer called Fetterman “an important member of our caucus” and said he was proud that Senate Democrats represented a broad range of views. Schumer and Fetterman had dinner together last month, a person familiar with the matter said.
‘He just chose not to meet with us.’
Since Fetterman got out of the hospital in 2023, he has repeatedly expressed disdain for several core day-to-day aspects of life as a senator, according to multiple former staffers: meetings with constituents, attending hearings and making public in-state appearances, like town halls.
In April 2025, veteran Pennsylvania state lawmaker Anthony Hardy Williams brought a busload of constituents to Washington from Eastwick, a poorer, flood-prone neighborhood in Philadelphia, to meet with their representatives in Congress and discuss Trump administration cuts to a grant program that had helped the area.
Fetterman was the only one who refused to meet with them, Williams said in an interview. At one point, they saw Fetterman walking the halls and yelled, but he didn’t acknowledge them, according to Williams.
“He was available. He just chose not to meet with us,” Williams said.
Even when Fetterman does agree to meetings, he often cancels, according to former staffers.
Also last April, Fetterman agreed to take a meeting with another state lawmaker, Liz Hanbidge, who drove down from Pennsylvania to introduce herself, and to discuss programs that help the homeless and working poor in her county. But when Hanbidge arrived, according to staffers who were present, Fetterman claimed he hadn’t agreed to the meeting. The aides spent more than an hour pleading with him to talk to her; staffers eventually met with Hanbidge in his place.
Fetterman did take another meeting that day—with Bruce Pearl, the former college basketball coach and Israel advocate. The pair discussed legislation that would affect college sports, and Pearl thanked Fetterman for his stance on Israel, Pearl said in an interview.
Last May, several media reports highlighted Fetterman’s paltry attendance record at Senate hearings. The next month, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial board called on Fetterman to consider stepping down. At that point, records transcripts show, Fetterman had skipped 11 of the 12 full hearings that year of his assigned committees—Homeland Security, Commerce and Agriculture.
In this time frame, Fetterman got a helpful phone call from one of his few friends in the Senate—Katie Britt, an Alabama Republican who had visited him in the hospital in 2023, and brought him cookies.
In the phone call, which Fetterman recounted later, former staffers recalled, Britt told him he could get marked as “present” at hearings by getting the attention of clerks, and then leave and go about his day.
Britt, through a spokeswoman, said she merely explained to Fetterman that “most members typically check in and then go about their days with meetings, speeches, votes, and other engagements while they wait for their turn to actively participate.”
Soon after, Fetterman implemented the strategy with his aides, including deploying an advance staffer to catch the clerk’s eye, so Fetterman could get credit for attending even though he only drifted into the room for a minute or less. Since last June, Fetterman was marked present at 26 out of 31 full hearings of his assigned committees, transcripts show, even though in 20 of them he didn’t say a word.
In Pennsylvania, Fetterman has receded from the public eye, rarely interacting in person with voters during his three-plus years in office.
When three police officers were killed near Fetterman’s hometown of York last September, he backed out of attending the funeral because it was too long.
This summer, after going nearly a year without a public event in Pennsylvania, Fetterman agreed to do two, organized by his Republican counterpart, Sen. McCormick. In June, the two senators appeared in Philadelphia together to promote President Trump’s child investment accounts.
Then last Friday, Fetterman and McCormick made an appearance in a blighted neighborhood in Erie, in northwest Pennsylvania, to meet with elected officials and community leaders to discuss housing affordability, homelessness and poverty in the region.
In a brief question-and-answer session after, a local reporter asked the senators about what they were doing to address cost-of-living issues like high gas prices.
“In terms of affordability, you know, what does that really mean?” Fetterman responded, pivoting to defending the war in Iran. “Why is gas more expensive than some people would like? Well, because we have a crisis over Iran,” he said. “So, in terms of affordability, and I do believe that will be, will resolve, and I do think it’s important to understand that Iran is the bad guy.”
