New York magazine’s Ben Terris talks through his reporting on Sen. John Fetterman’s health and what it means for the future of the Democratic Party. This episode was produced by Devan Schwartz with help from Gabrielle Berbey, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Matthew Billy, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) questions tech leaders in artificial intelligence during a Senate hearing. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Senator John Fetterman is not like his colleagues. Oh, yeah. For starters, he wears a hoodie and gym shorts to work in Congress. But he's also a Democrat who went down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Donald Trump before he re-entered office back in January. He's bucked most of his party on the war in Gaza, saying his support of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu was unconditional.
He went on the Joe Rogan experience to bro down.
And then the whole nation just had like a meltdown, like, oh my God, the Senate's on fire because I dress like a slob. And then there is health issues.
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.
We're gonna ask if Jon Fetterman is okay on Today Explained.
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Hey. Today Explained, Sean Ramos from here with Ben Terrace, D.C. correspondent for New York Magazine. Ben just wrote a big profile of John Fetterman that made a lot of noise because it revealed that his health struggles may be far graver than people previously thought. We started back in 2023, around the time Fetterman checked into Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland.
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.
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