Ben Terris
speaker
216 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 7 Feb
Ben Terris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, it felt exceptional. So when John Fetterman leaves Walter Reed, he's kind of given a bunch of things he has to do to stay on his recovery plan, right? Obviously, he has to stay on his medication. He needs to hydrate. He needs to get exercise. The doctors also say you should probably stay off social media.
Fetterman himself has said in interviews that social media was an accelerant for his depression. And I think that this moment, as he becomes kind of a top talker on Israel and Palestine, is drawing him back into social media. There's one really kind of key moment early on where he puts up a tweet.
And I mean, it's a complicated backstory, but it's basically like he was upset that there were protesters that were protesting hummus that was made in Israel, but in his mind, were not concerned enough with the sexual assault that was happening on Israelis by Hamas. And he puts up a tweet with Drake kind of, you know, that somehow is supposed to be indicative of this.
And the staff kind of freaks out because it feels very offensive. It feels like it's making light of sexual assault. A bunch of women staffers in the office talk to senior staff trying to get it taken down. Fetterman holds his ground for a long time and he says anybody who doesn't like this tweet is welcome to quit. Eventually he does take it down.
But this kind of roiling of the staff, this wading into very difficult conversations via meme, it just feels like the office is like – it doesn't handle it very well.
Yeah, so nobody I spoke to for this story would say that every single issue that they have with John Fetterman is because of his mental health issues. They would not say every single position that he's taking and the way that he's talking about them is because of his mental health struggles. But the issue that they have is it became harder and harder to tell which which was, right?
It was harder and harder to tell which was something that John Fetterman was speaking out about because he was going through a hard time and which were issues that he just believed in his core and always has been. And also, it's about how he spoke about these issues, right? It's one thing for John Fetterman to be pro-Israel. Lots of Democrats are pro-Israel. Chuck Schumer is pro-Israel.
But what a lot of staffers told me is the way that he started talking about Israel, the way that he would put himself into these fights and would be on social media and almost seemed to kind of relish being him against the world. Somebody in a text I saw said that John Fetterman against the world is his comfortable place.
That kind of mentality just started to feel untenable and felt like this is not just an issue of us having a difference of policy beliefs. It's about us worrying that he's taking things too far.
When I get there, at first, it's great. You know, Fetterman and I have this history. When I reported on him back in 2018, he told me that I was one of the few reporters who really got him at the time. And so he was excited to talk to me. And I was excited to talk to him. I mean, he's an interesting guy.
And so at first, before getting into kind of the difficult parts of my reporting, I wanted to just give him the opportunity to talk about things, to talk about his place in the Democratic Party, about what it was like for him to go visit Mar-a-Lago to meet with Donald Trump. to talk about what Democrats were getting right and getting wrong. And he was kind of the old Fetterman in a way, right?
I mean, he still struggles with his auditory processing. He still kind of struggles with getting sentences out exactly how he wants them to, but it's a lot better than it used to be. And he was, you know, very lucid and very excited to talk through all this stuff. And it went well. You know, as we're talking... I'm the kind of reporter who doesn't want to hide the ball for too long, right?
Like, I wanted to make sure he had the opportunity to talk about things before it got contentious, and I knew it might get contentious. And so I kind of ease into talking about health stuff. The day before sitting down with him, he had written a piece for the New York Times about taking the weight loss drug Manjaro. And he writes in that piece that he was feeling better than he'd ever felt before.
You know, his mind was crisper and clearer than ever before. And he never felt better. And so I kind of use that as a gateway to talk about medication and about health issues. And I start by saying, listen, I understand that mental health struggles are a lifelong struggle. There's going to be ups and downs. Can you tell me about that?
And very quickly, he pushes back against even that idea that it's a lifelong struggle. He basically says, look, before the stroke, I wasn't depressed. I wasn't the guy who was joy, joy, joy, joy all the time. But, you know, it was kind of a freak thing that happened.
A combination of the stroke, of the election, of exhaustion, all these things led to this one moment that made him go to Walter Reed. And after Walter Reed, he said that he's basically better. And that was a little surprising to me. I mean, you know, I've talked to a lot of people in my life in various capacities who've dealt with mental health issues. And, you know, it is a struggle.
And you kind of expect a politician to talk about that instead of just saying, like, you know, it's a magical fix. So that was a little surprising. And I pushed him on it a little to say, well, listen... I've talked to a number of your staff members, mostly former, who are worried about you. They're worried that maybe you're not on your recovery plan like you should be.
They're also worried that maybe you're not taking your medication and that the medication is serious and that you're on a bad path. Can you speak to that? And at that moment, the tenor of the conversation shifts kind of dramatically. I don't think he was really expecting that. And he denies it. He says it's all disgruntled staff who have a grudge.
And he won't really answer kind of the central part of the question, which is, are you on your recovery plan? are you doing okay? It just becomes kind of a response to who are these people? These are people who are mad at me for my Israel-Palestine position, for example, or have other reasons to have a grudge. But there's basically no truth to what they're saying.
I mean, you know, whistleblowers, and this is basically a whistleblower type story, always have some, you know, there's always a variety of reasons why people are willing to blow the whistle. It can be because they're genuinely worried about the person that they're blowing the whistle about, or they're genuinely worried about what will happen if they don't say anything.
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