My gargantuan senator is throwing a hissy fit. According to reporting by the Associated Press, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman attended a meeting last week with representatives for a teachers union, at which Fetterman says that they "had a spirited conversation about our collective frustration with the Trump administration’s cuts to our education system." The other people in the meeting say that the Senator started repeating himself and shouting. They say he was yelling, "Why does everyone hate me, what did I ever do?" and "Why is everybody mad at me?" A member of Fetterman's staff ended the meeting, ushered the visitors into the hallway, and then broke down crying and had to be comforted by the teachers.
This is toddler behavior. Why does everyone hate me? What did I ever do? Why is everyone mad at me? Sir! You are 6-foot-8 and a Senator for a purple state. By the nature of your job, something like 50 percent of the people in your own state will hate you at all times, and that's not including the people in your own party who also don't like you. Being an elected public servant is not a long red-carpet strut where everyone treats you like a pop star and bows to you and asks who you're wearing. Power is a responsibility, and with it comes the reality that not everyone is going to like you.
But beyond the childish feelings expressed here, what's more upsetting to me is the form in which they're coming out. There is no reason for any member of the Senate to yell at any of their constituents. That's not the job, and if that sort of conduct is embarrassing, it is also not just embarrassing. It shows a shocking lack of social awareness and capability.
This whole story came spilling out just a week after Ben Terris published a feature in New York in which a number of people close to the Senator, named and unnamed, make the case that Fetterman might not be fit to serve. In it, Terris provides a series of extremely concerning tableaus concerning the Senator. Fetterman was obsessed with Twitter, despite previously admitting it was an accelerant for the depression he was hospitalized with after his 2022 stroke. He was driving his car extremely recklessly, in instances other than the one in which he got into an accident that injured his wife. He bought a gun. He was becoming increasingly paranoid. The people close to him worried that he was not taking his medication. Many of his longtime colleagues have stopped working with him.
There is great concern among Fetterman's former staffers that this is the manifestation of untreated mental illness. As someone who has struggled often and intensely with depression throughout my life, I am not unsympathetic to the havoc one's own brain can wreak. What I am unsympathetic about is refusing help and making that everyone else's problem. While the paranoia and gun-buying do seem potentially related to some kind of mental break, Fetterman actually is disliked. Anecdotally, no one I interact with in the city of Philadelphia has a nice word to say about him. And substantively, an internal Democratic poll obtained by Politico shows that 49 percent of Democratic voters in Pittsburgh view him unfavorably, compared with only 13 percent viewing Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro unfavorably.
It's pretty easy to understand why people don't like him, even beyond his weird, nasty, high-handed treatment of his own constituents. Fetterman is not just stridently pro-Israel but practically pro-death; in opposing a ceasefire, a source told New York, Fetterman said “Let’s get back to killing” and "Kill them all." More locally, Hamid Bendaas wrote on Twitter that "an anecdote that didn’t make it in this is when Fetterman met with UnitedHealth lobbyists shortly after a plane crash killed six people in PA. The lobbyists expressed their condolences and were horrified when he replied that it wasn’t a big deal and 'Not that many people died.'"
Fetterman has always operated with a big chip on his shoulder. He's an outsider. He's not like other politicians. He's rougher and edgier. This is both his aesthetic and political appeal, and it helped him win. But within his actual Senate office, this attitude seems to turn him into a man more interested in holding a seat of power than in actually trying to help people. From Terris's piece, one paragraph in particular stuck in my mind all weekend:
Fetterman became so torn by the decision that, on the day of a procedural vote that would move [Pete] Hegseth’s nomination [as Secretary of Defense] closer to completion, he floated the idea of not voting at all. “What if I left?” he asked his staff. Instead of voting, he said, maybe he should just sneak out of Washington and hole up at his parents’ place in York, Pennsylvania. “I felt like I was looking at a six-eight 8-year-old,” the staffer said.
This isn't "independent thought," as Matt Yglesias wrote in a now-deleted tweet. It's just poor governing from someone who is not up to the job. The job of an elected representative is not just to represent the people who elected you, but to convince them that you are doing so. And Fetterman is not doing either job. He is sometimes breaking ranks with the Democratic party, but mostly, he seems to be shirking his duties.
According to GovTrack, Fetterman has missed 30 of 240 votes since January. He has missed all nine meetings of the Senate Homeland Security Committee and all 11 meetings of the Senate Agriculture Committee in 2025. According to NBC News, he has only attended one of the 26 business meetings the Senate Commerce Committee has held, and that was after the New York piece published. This might all be explained away by Fetterman working to serve the people of Pennsylvania. But he's not doing that either.
Fetterman's job is to represent the state of Pennsylvania, yet according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, he has only appeared in public in the state once since August. There is a joke I hear often in Philadelphia that the Senator is too busy going to Israel to bother showing up here. He has, in fact, not made a public appearance in the city since August 2024, when Kamala Harris picked her VP at Temple University. (In point of fact, it's a tie: Fetterman went to Israel in June of 2024, and then went back in March of this year.)
All of this is to say that Fetterman is not doing the job he was elected to do. He is not representing the people who voted him into office—a failing which has time and time again cost Democrats valuable seats in Congress. Republican Sen. Dave McCormick, who was elected in November, is consistently holding town halls and meetings in the state.
I am not new to the world of disappointing senators. I grew up in Texas, where the senators were (regardless of party) as conservative as they come. I've called both Ted Cruz and John Cornyn's offices more times than I have called some of my dearest friends, for absolutely no gain. Then I lived for almost eight years in Washington, D.C.— a place that is famously taxed but not represented by a voting member in either house of Congress. I lived through the first Trump administration, where everyone was constantly yelling about calling your senator, without anyone to call. This was devastating, because it was a reminder, every time, that the more than 700,000 people who live in our nation's capital don't have any representation at all.
When I moved to Philadelphia, I was thrilled to vote in the 2022 election—to finally have a senator to annoy. I voted for John Fetterman. I had hesitations, because he has always been much more conservative than me on a few issues. But I felt optimistic about getting to vote for a senator at all.
Since helping elect him to public office, I have been filled with ... not regret exactly, but a kind of secondhand embarrassment. It is almost worse to have a senator who clearly hates his job, does not care for the people he says he represents, and makes almost no effort to be seen doing his job inside his own state than it is to not have a senator at all. I really do not agree with Dave McCormick in the slightest and in fact would challenge him to a duel if that option were available to me. But at least he's visibly trying to work for the people who elected him. Fetterman is not. I hope he is challenged in the primary, because I'm not sure how anyone can be expected to vote for him again.
