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
The MeidasTouch Podcast · Yikes! Trump’s Health Crashes as Doctors Can't Hide It!!! · 7 Feb 2026
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The man who got a lot of credit, rightfully so, for bringing his mental health struggles to the fore, to kind of destigmatizing depression and mental health issues in politics, may be struggling more than he had let on.
He has a difficult moment at a retreat for Democrats at the Library of Congress. He's supposed to be the talk of the town and everybody wants to talk to him and get to know him, but he's sitting quietly in a corner drinking Coke and not talking to anybody. Staff gets an alert a short time later from somebody who saw him walking in the street, almost into traffic, almost getting hit by a car.
And they rush to find him. They find him wandering around Capitol Hill, and they bring him to George Washington, where they decide that he is severely dehydrated, not having another stroke, which was the big worry. And they prescribe him with medication for depression. And they think, OK, maybe he's going to be on the right track here.
But a week later, he is having a meeting with Senator Sherrod Brown. These are two guys who should get along great, you know, a couple of purple state Democrats who I think I write in the piece are more comfortable in union halls than in the halls of Congress. Like these are kind of working man type senators. At least that's how they present themselves. But the meeting is very weird.
And Fetterman is drawn into himself. He's speaking so quietly that hardly anybody can hear him. The meeting kind of ends uncomfortably and staff notices that Fetterman is now starting to walk in what one person describes as figure eights out in the hallway, kind of looking over his shoulder as if he's being followed by some sort of shadowy figure.
And that's when they call a doctor and they all decide this is time to get him to Walter Reed. This is serious.
Now, Walter Reed is really tough. He gets there and he's experiencing these kind of delusions early on while he's there. If he takes a bed at the hospital, he might get arrested. He tells doctors that he thinks his family is wearing a wire.
He has this belief all of a sudden that he has to break out of his room because there's a political rally happening in the lobby of Walter Reed and he has to get there. At this point, doctors are a little worried about what's going on. And over the course of his time at the hospital, they change his medication. His mental health struggles go into, quote, remission.
He starts taking visitors, starts doing the job from there. And when he comes out, like, he's the best he's been in a really long time.
How long does that last? He's in the hospital for six weeks. He gets out and for, I mean, look, the thing about mental health struggles is you can have good days and you can have bad days. You can have good weeks, you can have bad weeks. It's impossible to pinpoint exactly when things were good and bad because it could be good in the morning and bad in the afternoon.
But staff I talked to said the first months that he's back are great. I mean, he's diving into the job. He's getting a lot of rightful credit for the work he's doing with mental health.
I mean, honestly, people believe, and it makes sense to me, that he could have saved lives, right? When somebody like him, A, a politician who's at the top of his career, a high-functioning type A type job, can admit that they're going through something, it gives permission for a lot of people to think, oh, maybe I'm going through something. Maybe I should reach out for help.
And so it's great for a while, but it's around that time that things in the office start to kind of go south.
Yeah, I mean, it certainly is. He had talked about Israel in the past and said that he was a pro-Israel guy, which was a pretty standard democratic position for a very long time. But after October 7th, he makes it like his issue in a way that it never had been before.
And I think it threw some people for a loop. Staff got upset. Former staff got upset. Also, as I report in the piece, his wife Giselle was very upset. One time coming into the office crying, saying that, you know, they're bombing refugee camps. How can you support this? He responds that that's all propaganda.
And this kind of heightened tension that's happening in American politics as a whole, but especially in this office, I think just kind of derailed things for him and his staff in a way that made it very difficult to be working for him.
Showing 161–180 of 216 · page 9 of 11
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