John Fetterman on Trump’s “Raw Sewage,” and What the Democrats Get Wrong
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From the online spectacle around Leo XIV's election to our favorite on-screen cardinals. This week on Critics at Large, we're talking all things Pope.
The Catholic Church was made for this moment. I think 2,000 years ago, the Catholic Church basically anticipated TikTok, Instagram, X. You don't have those little Swiss guard outfits and think they're not being photographed. Oil painting is not enough.
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This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. John Fetterman has cut a unique figure in American politics since he came to national attention. He's from a well-to-do Republican family, and he emerged as a progressive Democrat, a fighter on issues affecting the working class. He seemed a sort of Rust Belt Bernie Sanders, rocking a hoodie and cargo shorts. And he won the Senate race in 2022 against Dr. Mehmet Oz, who was endorsed by Donald Trump. And that was despite Fetterman suffering a stroke during the campaign. More recently, though, Fetterman has come to stand out in some very different ways. After the election, he went to Mar-a-Lago and met with Donald Trump. He joined Truth Social.
He voted to confirm Pam Bondi as Attorney General, the only Democrat to do so, and that was after Bondi gave every indication that she would use the Justice Department to pursue Trump's political opponents. Fetterman also gave his support to Trump's notion that the United States could one day take over Gaza and develop it as a real estate project. Over time at the Radio Hour, we want to provide a deep as well as a rounded view of what's happening now in Washington. And Senator Fetterman, in both his ideas and his presentation, is an outlier among the Senate Democrats. So what is he doing and why? I spoke with John Fetterman last week. You went down to Mar-a-Lago to talk to Trump. So tell me about your conversation with him in Mar-a-Lago and just as much, what was the reaction among your colleagues?
Well, there really wasn't any reaction. People here in the Senate, they're very, I don't know, very polite. I mean, you know, even after like Medendez, Medendez was walking around and people would be like, oh, what happened to you? You They're not talking about the gold bar. No one's asking, hey, how many gold bars were in your mattress kind of thing. So people weren't now, they weren't talking about it or anything. I don't think it was controversial, but for me, it was a decision where, and of course, I never exactly knew how that was going to look going down there, but I had the opportunity to sit down and meet with the president. I mean, to me, I thought that was I doing my job. And because for me, for me, I want to find things that we can work together. And there's going to be a lot that I'm going to disagree. So, yeah. They don't need my vote or any Democratic vote for a lot of things that they're going to want to do. And they're not going to have a lot of support for much of it anyway. I don't think it was controversial.
I don't think anybody, I mean, some people may have found that controversial. But for me, it's just doing a job and having a conversation. And I would like to remind everybody, more Americans picked him to be president than my team. So that doesn't mean that half our nation are fascist or they're terrible or that, you know, that. A lot of your colleagues and a lot of a lot of people think that this is an exceptional thing, that Donald Trump is not what used to be called a conventional Republican and that this is something different, threatening and to. Visit him in Mar-a-Lago represented in and I'm representing the view of many people, not necessarily my own, but represented an accommodation to that reality.
No, I mean, we all work. We work together in the Senate by definition, meeting with the president. That's not capitulation. That's just as meeting with the president and you're in the Senate. And the people that are saying that are ones that aren't tasked to try to get things done. It's easy to just, you know, for me, those are the kind of things, I mean, that's cheap shots from the cheap seats.
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