Fetterman stands with Israel as critics protest
Pa. Democrat says he’s still the same guy as in 2022
WASHINGTON – If there’s one thing Sen. John Fetterman wants you to know about him, it’s that he’s the same guy he was on the campaign trail.
The junior Democratic senator from Pennsylvania still shows up to work each day in a Carhartt hoodie and gym shorts, peppers conversation with profanity and takes potshots at the “losers” and “sleazeballs” he feels need to be called out – and he won’t mince words when it comes to Israel.
“I said I dress like a slob, I dress like a slob,” he said. “I said I was going to stand with Israel, I stand with Israel. I said I’m going to be a reliable Democratic vote, and I’m still a reliable Democratic vote.”
That’s not how many on the left see him lately.
Since the Israel-Hamas war began, Fetterman has become one of his party’s most outspoken supporters of Israel and a vocal critic of the pro-Palestine protests on college campuses. He’s on an island apart from his Democratic peers, most of whom have attempted to strike a balance between supporting Israeli self-defense while condemning the carnage that has come from the country’s response in Gaza.
Fetterman’s position has come as a shock to progressives who championed him on the trail in 2022, when he was the only Democrat to flip a seat in the upper chamber. Then, left-leaning admirers saw him as a populist rising star in line with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
In an exclusive interview with USA TODAY, Fetterman argued that those assumptions were wrong from the start, and that he signaled his “unwavering” support for Israel well before he was elected.
“I am not a progressive,” he said. “I’ve been saying that for years. I just don’t identify with that label. But I’m still a Democrat and someone you can count on.”
Fetterman – still four years away from another Senate campaign of his own – will put his popularity to the test this fall as an on-the-ground supporter for President Joe Biden in Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state, and well beyond it too.
The Senate troll
Fetterman gained national attention in 2022 Senate partly because he was willing to be a troll.
His campaign became a bloodbath of memes as the Fetterman camp lampooned his GOP rival, celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, as an out-of-touch New Jerseyan. Most famously, they made hay when Oz complained about the high cost of crudités – or, as most Pennsylvanians would call it, a veggie tray.
In the months since Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people and taking hundreds hostage, Fetterman has applied the same taunting tone to those protesting U.S. support for Israel’s counterattack.
In one viral exchange, he walked by waving an Israeli flag as pro-Palestinian protesters got arrested outside his Senate office building. Last week, he called the protests at Columbia University the “pup tent intifada.”
The transition has left Fetterman’s original left-leaning supporters reeling.
Lehigh University student Julie Wright recalled laughing about a crudité sign in the campus cafeteria in 2022. It was a few months before her first opportunity to cast a ballot, an exciting moment, “bugging my friends about whether they registered to vote,” Wright said. She has since become president of Pennsylvania College Democrats.
Now, however, Wright said she and some of her fellow young Democrats barely recognize Fetterman. She feels there’s a disconnect between the candidate and the senator.
People feel “he’s not actually a progressive,” Wright said. “That’s what was pushed during his campaign. And people are talking a lot about holding candidates accountable.”
Leadership at Our Revolution – a progressive nonprofit that contacted hundreds of thousands of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren supporters to urge them to vote for Fetterman – is second-guessing its endorsement.
Fetterman “checked off every single progressive priority that we cared about,” the group’s executive director, Joseph Geevarghese, told USA TODAY. But “once he’s been in power … it doesn’t seem as if we’re aligned.”
In 2022, Geevarghese noted, Our Revolution’s candidate questionnaire focused on issues such as climate, jobs and health care. He said the Israel-Hamas war will likely be a primary topic on the questionnaire moving forward.
“He is taking positions, for example, on Gaza, on immigration, that really don’t reflect the candidate that we thought he was,” Geevarghese said. “That’s disconcerting.”
A few of Fetterman’s staff left in rapid succession earlier this year for progressive offices off Capitol Hill. The senator pushed back on media coverage that suggested their departure was a reaction to his views on Israel, saying “it’s
not unusual” for staff to leave for other opportunities.
Asked whether he considered himself a progressive during his 2022 Senate campaign, Fetterman plainly responded: “No. I’ve been saying this again and again.”
Fetterman said he’s “grateful” to “anyone who chose me over some weirdo from New Jersey.” He added that his previous voters don’t need to agree with him on everything, “but you can count on me to be consistent on the things that I campaigned on,” from LGBTQ+ rights to infrastructure investments.
“I would tell any progressives that worked for me: Look at my votes,” the senator said.
‘Why don’t they have our back?’
The moment you step into Fetterman’s Senate office, you see walls plastered floor to ceiling with the faces of the 240 hostages taken by Hamas during its Oct. 7 attack.
Standing in front of those posters, Fetterman speculated that his may be the only Senate office that has both a LGBTQ+ pride flag and a National League of Families POW/MIA flag – an indicator, he suggested, that you can “absolutely” represent multiple important issues that don’t fall neatly along political lines.
“It’s a false choice,” he said. Fetterman still lives in Braddock, the steel town near Pittsburgh where he served as mayor for 13 years. It’s a short drive to the Tree of Life synagogue, the site of an antisemitic mass shooting in 2018. On that day, Fetterman felt horror, he said. He immediately called Jeff Bartos, then his GOP opponent for lieutenant governor, who is Jewish, to check in on him. He paused his campaign for two days to join vigils with the local Jewish community.
“That certainly drove home that antisemitism is deadly and it’s a real thing. And now (Jews) have the trauma of Oct. 7,” he said.
That’s one reason “why I’ve done what’s going on in our front office,” Fetterman said. “It must be incredibly unnerving and terrifying if you are a Jewish student, when you have all of these
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., has lost some progessive support but gained praise from others for his staunch support of Israel.
things. I’m sure they might feel like – why don’t they have our back?”
Fetterman’s critics ask where that empathy is for the residents of Gaza, where more than half of the population is experiencing catastrophic hunger and more than 34,000 people have been killed, including at least 13,000 children.
The senator responded that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is “worse than horrible, it’s heartbreaking.” But he pinned the blame on Hamas, which he says is the only party with the power to bring the war to an end by taking a cease-fire deal, surrendering and returning the hostages.
“They started this,” Fetterman said of Hamas. “They have designed this to maximize the kinds of destruction and death. They hide behind places like hospitals and civilians and schools and refugee camps.”
Fetterman suffered a stroke during his 2022 Senate campaign, which left him with an auditory processing disorder that makes it challenging to speak fluidly or quickly decipher spoken words. He uses a speech-to-text software that provides real-time closed captioning for media interviews and for conversations with staff and colleagues.
He says he’s always been committed to the issues he cares about. But the stroke – and a battle with clinical depression – further put things in perspective.
“It’s like that line from the first ‘Batman’ – I’ve been dead once already,” he said. “It’s been very liberating in a sense. It allows me to focus on what really matters, and that’s my family and making a contribution.”
Like a ‘rock star’
Fetterman’s outspoken support for Israel has drawn praise and even some financial support from Republicans, which he has embraced.
“We need more people in this institution that are willing to speak directly to hard things,” said Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala. The pair, who entered Congress at the same time and are both raising schoolaged children, struck up a friendship at orientation. “I’m grateful for his leadership and his willingness to be bold. We need that.”
He’s also been embraced by some Jewish groups in Pennsylvania, which have found his stance a source of elation in recent months.
Jeff Finkelstein is president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh. He remembered seeing Fetterman at a federation gathering as mayor of Braddock and more recently at a Pittsburgh vigil for Oct. 7 hostages.
He described Fetterman’s presence at a federation event in Washington this March: “You would think a rock star was greeting us,” Finkelstein said.
Finkelstein said he doesn’t believe Fetterman’s position conflicts with the senator’s liberal tendencies, calling Israel a bastion of democracy and noting its support for LGBTQ+ rights.
“People can have really strong, progressive stances and support Israel,” Finkelstein said. “It’s not ‘this that.’ It’s ‘this that.’ ”
and The impact for Biden or
Like Fetterman, Biden is fielding fierce opposition from young, progressive voters over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war, during which he has largely shown steadfast support for Israel.
It’s unclear whether that distaste will translate to enough Democratic base voters abandoning Biden in November to cost him the state. Recent polls show the presidential race will likely be tight. During Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary in April, more than 60,000 voters chose the write-in option. Biden won the state in 2022 by around 80,500 votes.
Fetterman has criticized Biden for not going far enough to stand with Israel. But the senator told USA TODAY that while they sometimes disagree, Biden is “an awesome president, and I’m all in on him.”
Fetterman has already been on the campaign trail stumping for Biden – including speaking at a Florida Democratic Party fundraiser despite efforts from the party’s Progressive Caucus to disinvite him for being “a genocide promoter.”
One poll from Quinnipiac University found that around a quarter of voters said they viewed Fetterman more favorably since he began expressing strong support for Israel, while 14% said it made them think less favorably of him.
Several Democrats said in interviews that they thought Fetterman would still be an effective surrogate for Biden in the Keystone State.
U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., represents Fetterman’s hometown. A member of the progressive “squad,” she has been a vocal critic of Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Lee beat a primary challenger last month who took her on over the issue.
Asked what she thought about Fetterman’s stance, she said, “I would like to see people being a little bit more nuanced. There’s a realm of disagreement that is possible without labeling everybody as Hamas or an extremist.”
Pennsylvania voters “are going to take a holistic approach to votes,” she said. “There’s a disproportionate amount of attention that’s being spent on this one topic, but I think that Pennsylvanians care about lots of things that they would love to get some attention or for people to maybe even provide some solutions for.”
Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., is the chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Peters said Fetterman “is going to be who he is.”
“He is an incredibly authentic U.S. senator, and people appreciate him for his authenticity,” Peters said. “I’m sure he will be effective at campaigning.”
Fetterman, for one, isn’t worried. He argues that Pennsylvania voters have largely been supportive of his stance on Israel and that they’ll show up for Biden, too, when they realize the stakes of the November election.
“American people will be presented with that incredibly stark choice,” he said. “I think they’re going to make the right choice.”