Criminal-justice reformers in Pennsylvania still speak warmly of Fetterman. His work on the pardons board also solidified a progressive political identity. Josh Shapiro, then the state’s Democratic attorney general and now its governor, was a member as well and tended to be more cautious about commuting sentences. At one point, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Fetterman threatened to run against Shapiro for governor if he kept voting against pardons. (Shapiro denied that this happened.) A senior Democratic aide in Harrisburg at the time told me, “I think the press coverage of the pardons board was the first time that Josh realized he was going to be seen only as a moderate, and it was also the first time that John realized that he was going to be seen only as a progressive, and I think that made them both uncomfortable.”
Four days before the Democratic Senate primary in May, 2022, Fetterman and Gisele pulled into a Sheetz gas station near Lancaster to make a pit stop, en route to a big campaign event in Millersville. When Fetterman emerged from the bathroom, Gisele noticed that his words were slurred and his face was drooping. He spent the weekend in a Lancaster hospital, first having surgery to remove the blood clot that had caused the stroke, then having a pacemaker and a defibrillator implanted to prevent another one. The story Fetterman has told is that he woke up from surgery on the night of the primary, learned that he had won, and fell back asleep.
He soon returned to Braddock to begin both a long recovery and a general-election campaign. For months, he had major struggles with what his campaign called “auditory processing”—understanding what he heard and getting his words out cleanly. “At first, we communicated with whiteboards,” Gisele said. “Then we switched to iPads.” When I met the Fettermans recently at their home in Braddock, a big, open loft inside a former automobile showroom, I asked whether they had given any thought to dropping out. Not really, Gisele said. The doctors believed he would recover. It was a matter of the timeline.
Gisele was sitting on a brown leather couch, wearing a summery, rainbow-colored dress. Pittsburgh Pride was beginning, an event that Fetterman had regularly attended in the past and once described on Twitter as “Best. Time. Ever.” This year, because it would likely be the site of pro-Palestinian protests, the Fettermans had decided not to go. Fetterman’s political turn has put Gisele, who works in local nonprofits, in an interesting position. Her presence once helped confirm her husband’s progressive bona fides: Fetterman long grounded his support for undocumented immigrants in her story of having come to the U.S. from Brazil without papers as a child, a fact he featured in campaign ads. More recently, when he talks about immigration, it is usually about the need for order along the Rio Grande. “Honestly, it’s astonishing,” Fetterman said last December, about the number of undocumented migrants arriving in the U.S. each month. “You essentially have Pittsburgh showing up there at the border.”
When I watched old interviews of Gisele, she was funny, occasionally impertinent, slightly hippie coded. Now she seemed more measured and poised, something a bit closer to the archetypal senator’s wife. She was very proud, she said, of how many people contact Fetterman about their own experience of stroke and mental illness. (“There was one I talked to just this morning,” Fetterman said.) It was also Gisele who noticed the symptoms of Fetterman’s depression after he won the 2022 election—that he was not eating and didn’t seem like himself. “You know, for the kids, I didn’t want them to see their dad struggling,” she said. “I didn’t want them to have to think about, ‘Is he going to harm himself,’ which I was worried about.”
For a time, Fetterman’s depression intruded on his political life, too. In the weeks after he won the election, two ex-staffers told me, Fetterman often came away from public events feeling as if he’d screwed up. One of the former staffers recalled a Martin Luther King, Jr., Day celebration in Philadelphia, in January of 2023, at which Fetterman gave a brief, innocuous speech as part of a long lineup of politicos. Afterward, Fetterman beckoned the ex-staffer over to his car, rolled down a window, and said, “What’s the damage?” The speech had been fine; there was no damage. A few days later, the senator was admitted to Walter Reed.
It is hard to imagine Fetterman acting so self-consciously now. He’d sat down next to me, in an armchair by a window, but as Gisele talked he stood up and restlessly roamed the apartment, intermittently shouting at their two dogs, both rescues, to pipe down. When I asked about his early days in Braddock, he stiffened and said, “I thought this was going to be about more contemporary stuff.” In an interview with CBS News shortly after his discharge from Walter Reed, he had mentioned that he’d experienced episodes of “self-loathing” throughout his life. When I asked him about it, he said,“It’s not like I had this low-running depression all along.” I got the sense that Fetterman was sick of being the stroke guy, or the depression guy, in the same way that he was sick of being the progressive.
On the evening of January 26th, with the Senate out of session, about two hundred and fifty pro-Palestinian protesters staged a demonstration at Fetterman’s house. The event had been well publicized, and, in the recollection of an organizer named Stephanie Pavlick, about eight police cars were present. The plan was to have volunteers read tributes written by family members and friends of Palestinians killed during the war. About ten minutes before the event was supposed to start, Fetterman appeared on the roof. He spread his arms, unfurling an Israeli flag. The crowd chanted, “Fetterman, Fetterman, you can’t hide, you’re supporting genocide.” Fetterman, as Pavlick recalled, said nothing, which itself made for a dramatic image. “He’s huge, but at the same time he was far away,” she said. “He’s all the way up there, three stories up, and we were just down here on the sidewalk.”
When I asked Gisele about the protest, she said that she’d always understood politicians’ homes to be off limits: “Essentially, what those two peace groups did was they doxxed my children, and that’s a federal crime.” Fetterman was more emphatic. Homes, he said, “are not part of the deal.” He added, “You can protest at a public office or anything, but they chose to come out here. And I was on the roof listening to it. And then they started to get ugly and started yelling about genocide, and my ten-year-old was there. So I just showed the Israeli flag.”
Fetterman’s offices in Washington are on the first floor of the Russell Senate Office Building. On the day I visited, the only light in his inner chamber came from two Edison-bulb lamps, one on either side of a couch, so that otherwise brisk policy meetings took place in a slightly sombre atmosphere. That afternoon, I watched Fetterman lean over a speakerphone as Senator Debbie Stabenow, of Michigan, gently lobbied him about an agricultural aid bill. Fetterman made it clear that his main interest was in preserving SNAP food benefits for poor people. For a moment, he seemed exactly like what his voting record suggests he is—a very normal sort of Democrat.
But the ways in which Fetterman is an ordinary politician have never been as useful to his Party or himself as his genius for finding the center of political attention. There is both art and labor to this. Igor Bobic said that Fetterman has a useful cynicism about the processes of power. “In a gaggle with twenty of us reporters,” Bobic said, “he is able to very quickly distill the absurdity of what is going on.” Tom Wolf, the former Pennsylvania governor, told me that Fetterman is willing to try things that no one else thinks to try. “He marches to the beat of a different drummer,” Wolf said. “But he can be very effective when he takes something seriously.”
During my first day with Fetterman, I joined him for a long, slow walk through the Senate tunnels. Three aides surrounded him with the anxious efficiency of tugboats trying to coax a barge into port. There was a subway car for the use of senators to our right. Fetterman said that, when he discovered that Bernie Sanders, who is eighty-two, always walked instead of riding, he decided that he would, too. Not a minute later, Sanders himself, head down, zoomed past on our left, without acknowledging Fetterman—the Vermont senator is a foot shorter and thirty years older than the Pennsylvanian, but he was somehow moving three times as fast.
Fetterman was on his way to cast a vote on judicial nominees. Because of the SHORTS Act, he is not allowed on the floor of the Senate in his usual garb, and so he delivers his votes by signalling a clerk from the doorway. But the real action came beforehand. The news of the day concerned the pro-Palestinian encampments and protests on college campuses, which were still raging, and a group of reporters quickly formed. After waiting patiently for Fetterman to open his transcription app, one of them asked what he thought of the protesters. “It’s the pup-tent intifada,” Fetterman said. “You can break down the protesters—it’s the pro-Hamas, and then it’s the really pro-Hamas, at this point.” He noted the antisemitism that had surfaced among the demonstrators; another reporter asked if schools should lose federal funding if such behavior continued. “Well, I think there has to be consequences,” Fetterman said. “Like, right now, there is no consequence. You can blow up a bridge, or block a road, or those kinds of things.”
