John Fetterman on Trump’s “Raw Sewage,” and What the Democrats Get Wrong

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

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Politics, Obama, News, Wnyc, Washington, Barack, President, Lizza, Wickenden

4.2 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Since the election, Senator John Fetterman—once a great hope of progressives—has conspicuously blamed Democrats for the electoral loss. Fetterman tells David Remnick that the Democratic Party discouraged male voters, particularly white men. He has pursued a lonely course of bipartisanship by meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago before his Inauguration, joining Truth Social, and voting to confirm Pam Bondi as Attorney General—the only Democrat to do so. But, despite Trump’s relatively high approval ratings, he lambasts the Administration for the “chaos” it is currently sowing in America. Fetterman sympathizes with voters’ widespread disgust with contemporary politicking. “Unlimited money has turned all of us in some way into all OnlyFans models,” he says. “We’re all just online hustling for money.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the political scene. I'm David Remnick. Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:15.7	John Fetterman has cut a unique figure in American politics since he came to national attention.
0:21.7	He's from a well-to-do Republican family, and he emerged as a progressive Democrat,
0:26.9	a fighter on issues affecting the working class.
0:30.3	He seemed a sort of Rust Belt Bernie Sanders rocking a hoodie and cargo shorts.
0:36.0	And he won the Senate race in 2022 against Dr. Mehmet Oz, who was endorsed
0:41.0	by Donald Trump, and that was despite Federman suffering a stroke during the campaign. More recently,
0:47.1	though, Federman has come to stand out in some very different ways. After the election, he went to
0:53.0	Mara Lago and met with Donald Trump. He joined
0:56.0	Truth Social. He voted to confirm Pam Bondi as Attorney General, the only Democrat to do so,
1:02.2	and that was after Bondi gave every indication that she would use the Justice Department
1:07.0	to pursue Trump's political opponents. Fetterman also gave us support to Trump's notion
1:12.5	that the United States could one day take over Gaza and develop it as a real estate project.
1:19.4	Over time at the radio hour, we want to provide a deep, as well as a rounded view of what's happening
1:24.7	now in Washington, and Senator F Federman in both his ideas and his
1:29.0	presentation is an outlier among the Senate Democrats. So what is he doing? And why? I spoke with
1:36.2	John Ferdeman last week. You went down to Mara Lago to talk to Trump. So tell me about your conversation with him in Mara Lago and
1:48.8	just as much, what was the reaction among your colleagues? Well, there really wasn't any reaction.
1:56.5	People here in the Senate, they're very, I don't know, very polite.
2:04.8	I mean, you know, even after like Mendez, Medendez, Medendez was walking around and people be like, oh, what happened to you?
2:07.8	They're not talking about the gold bar.
2:09.5	No one's asking, hey, how many gold bars were in your mattress kind of thing?
	...

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