David Remnick: Nothing about John Fetterman's journey to the Senate was at all routine. He was a small town Pennsylvania Mayor, with a shaved head and a goatee, and the zip code for the town of Braddock tattooed on his arm. He has a pension for cursing, sometimes loudly, and he won the Senate race against Mehmet Oz, Dr. Oz, a celebrity favorite of Donald Trump. Through it all, he kept making waves, dressing in shorts and a hoodie on the Senate floor, an act which prompted a motion to require senators to dress more professionally. Many Democrats saw Fetterman as a potential progressive beacon, a Rust Belt Bernie Sanders, someone who could rally working class voters to the Democratic Party.

John Fetterman: I ran as a proud progressive. I was the only candidate in the entire country to endorse Bernie Sanders for President. I was the only candidate to be for the full legalization of marijuana. I lead with immigration. My wife Gisele, who's in the audience, a former dreamer.

David Remnick: At least on one issue, Fetterman is veering away from many of his colleagues in the party, and that is Israel's war in Gaza. When a measure was introduced in the Senate officially supporting a two-state solution, Fetterman was one of the only two Democrats who refused to support it. He has been not just sympathetic to Israel's losses on October 7th, but insistently uncritical of the Netanyahu government, even after losses in Gaza began numbering in the tens of thousands.

Now, Pennsylvania is a crucial state in the presidential race, and Fetterman's ability to rally Pennsylvania voters or not rally them, may be hugely consequential for Joe Biden, who can ill afford to lose that state. Staff writer, Benjamin Wallace-Wells has been reporting on Fetterman for a profile that we just published in the New Yorker. Ben, two years ago, while John Fetterman was running for Senate in the state of Pennsylvania, he had a stroke, and after he was elected, he checked himself into the hospital suffering from really profound depression, as far as we know. What's been the impact of the stroke and the depression on his working life as a senator now?

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: It's pretty striking. For one thing, the stroke, and then the depression effectively took him out of circulation for the first half of his first year as a senator. Additionally, he tends to keep a pretty light schedule. He doesn't get into Washington often until Tuesday. He returns home at the end of the day Thursday. He skips the Senate caucus lunch. Just at a practical level, it's delayed his introduction to the normal social life of being a US senator, and just the working life of being in DC.

More obviously, on a day-to-day level, it changes almost every conversation he has. Everybody that he talks to, every conversation he engages in, runs through a transcription app, which prints out the words that other people are saying, and that he is saying on his phone.

David Remnick: He's looking at his phone while he's talking to somebody else, and then their words show up. I noticed when you were talking with him, unless you were using very measured sentences, he would get confused because the transcription would show up correctly.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Yes, exactly. There's nothing happening in his mind, it's just that the audio detection and transcription is imperfect, so, complex sentences, things with caveats, all of that gets muddled or lost. You end up self-editing. You end up asking very direct questions.

David Remnick: What does Fetterman say about his own health, particularly about his depression now?

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: He says that he's through it effectively. He is pretty transparent about how difficult it was. He talks about feeling ambivalent about whether he lived or died. He and his wife both talk about it in terms of self-harm. It sounds like it was a pretty serious episode. I also would say he's pretty sick of talking about it at this point, and he'd like to put it in his past.

David Remnick: Based on his work in local and state government, what was the general perception of Fetterman among Democrats when he first entered the Senate? Who was he going to be?

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: I think the perception was he was going to be a progressive. He had been a pretty staunch supporter of Bernie Sanders' first campaign in 2016. He built his political brand around many of those issues. Weed legalization was a huge one for him, but also, $15 an hour minimum wage, also Medicare for all. He had tapered some of that association and pulled back a little bit from that in the campaign in which he won in 2022. As lieutenant Governor, he had been a huge champion of pardoning people with very long sentences, and of criminal justice reform generally. I think there was a pretty fair expectation that this would be, if not quite another Bernie, one of the most left-leaning members of the US Senate.

David Remnick: What happened?

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Well, October 7th is one way of thinking about it. Most notably, most strikingly and most publicly, he followed the horrors of the October 7th attack by committing himself to the Israeli cause in a way that just about no other Democrat. In many ways, no other politician was, and that had some policy arms. He was a very rare Senator not to be willing to sign on to a resolution affirming a two-state solution, but it also was just he's somebody who's very much a media presence and is pretty good at getting media attention. He just was always aligning himself with the Israeli cause in a maximalist way.

David Remnick: What are the roots of that?

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Well, there aren't many roots. The interesting thing about Fetterman on this issue is that he's not Jewish. He had never been to the Middle East. He serves on no-foreign policy committees. He had said he was pro-Israeli in a offhand way, in a campaign context, but he'd never had to weigh in on this at all. One experience that some people think was important, which is the Tree of Life shooting, the shooting at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, that killed the 11 worshipers of a crazed anti-Semite, that's a place very near to where his kids go to school.

He became close with the rabbi. He suspended his, at the time, his lieutenant governor campaign to go. He commemorates the date of it. There is that, but beyond that, people on all sides of the Israel issue, looking back, have had a hard time finding much of any evidence that would point him in the direction he took. His account is that he was incredibly moved by the accounts of survivors by the hostage families he met with, and that he also, and I think this is significant, had an underlying feeling going back a couple of years, that the Democratic Party should not be defined by it's left wing, and that its left wing was beginning to go too far. That I think becomes important in the context of the Israeli Gaza war.

David Remnick: His sympathy for the hostages and the people killed on October 7th is more than understandable. How has he reacted to Israel's incursion and war on Gaza, in which estimates are at around 35,000 dead at this point?

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: His top line is, "I'm for no conditions." He will not criticize the Netanyahu government. He will downplay any human rights concerns about children or aid convoys or innocent people being struck, killed disrupted. He says, "I will recenter every conversation about Israel on Hamas, and on October 7th, and make clear that it is Hamas' fault what is happening." He has not just had an attachment to and a sympathy with the hostage families and the victims of the attacks, but his politics, his read of what is happening is really completely defined by that, in a way that permits no conditions [unintelligible 00:08:39].

David Remnick: Ben, let's hear a bit of your conversation with him about this.

John Fetterman: To do those kinds of awful terrible kinds of things, and they film that. What part of the human soul is that? Where does that come from? That does those kind of things. With not just like a duty, but with actual glee, and they were just excited to be doing it. It's like, "Oh, by the way, I'm about ready to go massacre, rape and torture a bunch of people. By the way, where's the battery for the GoPro?" It's just twisted. That's the kind of evil that should not be allowed to survive or at least not be functional.

David Remnick: Fetterman lives in a small town outside Pittsburgh called Braddock, and a group of pro-Palestinian protesters showed up to the house. What happened there, and how did Fetterman handle the encounter?

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: It's pretty striking. It's in the middle of the winter. It's a time when the Senate is in recess. His house is a former auto showroom in the middle of this rundown little industrial town, so, it's the only prominent striking building in the town. It's very visible, also notably has the flat roof. The protestors get there, and their plan is to read excerpts of Palestinian narratives of the war.

There's about 250 of them. They're getting set up and they notice this enormous figure up on the roof and it's Fetterman. He's 6'8", he's got the build of the college football player he once was. It's evening and he stands up on his roof and he spreads this enormous Israeli flag and everything's silent for a minute. Then the protesters start chanting anti-genocide chants. He's up there for two, maybe three minutes. He goes back inside.

David Remnick: Here's Fetterman and his wife Gisele.

Gisele: I think that you shouldn't target homes, especially if there's children because essentially what those two peace groups did is they doxed my children who are under 18 and federal crime. I think you can protest anywhere you'd like, but I think that for children. There should be consequences for that.

John Fetterman: You can protest at a public office or anything but they chose to come out here and I was up out on the roof listening to it, and then they started to get ugly and started yelling about genocide and my 10-year-old was in here and saying things. I don't really know why it's anything other than just an appropriate, like, "Hey, I just showed the Israeli flag." I'm not sure why that would be provocative or anything.

David Remnick: Now Ben, draping himself in the flag [chuckles] if you want to get rid of protesters. I don't know. It sounds like waving a red flag at them somehow. Why did he do what he did?

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: I think he wanted to make a stunt. I think that he knew that a video of him on top of a roof holding a huge Israeli flag is something that will get photographed and shared. He didn't want to be the guy who's pro-Israel halfway. If he was going to do it, he wanted everybody to know about it. I think there's also another element, which is that it is confrontational with the protesters. It does make it somewhat about them. It calls attention to what they're doing to maybe what he would say is excesses to their crossing a line and coming to his home. I think he probably didn't want them to get away with it.

David Remnick: Let's hear a little bit more from Fetterman, and here he is talking about Hamas.

John Fetterman: I do think it's a fact that when you have that kind of an evil and that kind of a movement that came out of a society, whether it was Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, or the Confederacy here in the South, that kind of movement has to be destroyed into submission. That society that gave birth to it has to now reach to a point where I have to turn our back to that kinds of views and that kinds of pursuits. Now both Japan and Germany were [unintelligible 00:13:08] nations and the Confederacy surrendered, and that's why Atlanta had to burn.

David Remnick: That's why Atlanta had to burn. What does that mean to him that that's why Gaza has to burn?

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: That's certainly how I took it. That seemed to me pretty clearly his implication. What he was saying was, it's not just the political or terroristic leadership of Hamas that needs to be ended in this war. It's the underlying what he says, society that supports it, that has to have its opinions changed by force. That's to me a pretty eyebrow-raising, striking and very extreme construction of what Israel must do in a defense of the war. It's not just saying, "We're at war with Hamas, with the leadership of this militant organization." It's saying, "We're at war with the people of Gaza."

David Remnick: What's complicated to understand about that is that in the Democratic Party, even Chuck Schumer, who's the senate majority leader, and who himself is Jewish, and he comes from a congressional district when he was in the house that was heavily Jewish and has never been a leftist outlier on this issue, has turned very critical of Netanyahu and his conduct of the war. To hear this from John Fetterman who came into the Senate as a progressive, as somebody who identified on the left, is to my mind, surprising.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Absolutely. Not only somebody who came into the Senate as a progressive and was identified as on the left but came in just a year and a half ago and is not somebody who has been embedded in this issue. For him to be moving past Chuck Schumer and past many centrist Democrats, many pro-Israel Democrats is unexpected in every way.

David Remnick: Has he been critical of President Biden on this issue?

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: A little bit. When President Biden sought to pause armed shipments to Israel over the Rafah operation, he was a very rare Democrat who stepped out and said, "No, I think that's a bad idea. The armed shipments should continue." This thing keeping with his no conditions view. But in general, I would say he is eager to say not only that he is aligned with President Biden in generally, but what he's doing is in service of President Biden's reelection. That in order for the Democrats to remain viable in places like Pennsylvania, in order for Biden to win this election, he's got to keep from having the party become hostage to the left effectively.

David Remnick: Famously, we've got six swing states. Pennsylvania is crucial. If Biden doesn't win Pennsylvania, it's really trouble. What role does Fetterman play there?

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: I think six months ago, both I and the Fetterman people would've said a really big role. Fetterman in his own campaigns was pretty crucial at helping the Democrats reach white voters, often without college degrees in rural parts of the state, the exact kind of people who are swinging either away from the party or even more toward.

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