John Fetterman for President?
He might just be the president America needs right now — and he's most definitely the president it deserves.
Jamie Paul here. This post is by contributor Jacob Bielecki, but I also wanted to share a project I’ve been working on for the better part of a year that just published: Queer Majority Issue XIII: “Heretic.” Guest edited by Ben Appel, the issue features essays from Julie Bindel, Lisa Selin Davis, Musa al-Gharbi, Shannon Thrace, Cori Cohn, Holly Lawford-Smith, Glenn Belverio, Debbie Hayton, David Link, and more, plus an audio conversation with Andrew Sullivan. I also wrote an essay of my own, “A Puritan’s History of the United States”, tracing the history and branching evolution of American Puritanism from the pilgrims to modern culture wars. You can read the whole issue here.
The Democratic Party finds itself in the same position as the day after President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. Democrats have no clear frontrunner for the next election. They’re in an arguably worse position when it comes to appealing to the electorate. Non-college-educated white voters view Trump like a deity, and in the 2024 election he achieved the unthinkable by converting a record number of black men and Hispanic voters to the Republican Party.
What began in the 2016 cycle continued in 2024. The electorate is less polarized by race and more polarized by education. The more educated you are, the more likely you’ll vote for blue; the less educated you are, the more likely you’ll vote for red. Only 44 percent of Americans over the age of 25 have a college degree and a growing number of young men are forgoing college altogether. This is a frightening trend for Democrats, who used to win non-college voters without breaking a sweat. If the GOP continues to gain with these voters, the Dems are at risk of becoming a minority party for the foreseeable future. There’s only one Democrat in America who might reverse this trend. He’s big, he’s tall, he’s belligerent, he hates wearing suits, and he possibly has permanent brain damage due to a stroke. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who may just be the perfect candidate for the American idiocracy.
Perhaps this sounds harsh or outlandish. But as I highlighted in a previous article, “Voters Just Aren’t That Bright”, the average American is no more than semi-literate. 54 percent of Americans read below a sixth-grade level. Of that 54 percent, 20 percent read below a fifth-grade level. Other reports indicate that 21 percent of Americans are functionally illiterate — and most of them love Donald Trump, because, as a man who either can’t or won’t read, he’s one of them.
What blue-team America doesn’t understand is that they must find a way to appeal to these voters. There’s no way around it. A political party can’t win with only educated voters when over half the country struggles to read at an elementary school level. The math doesn’t add up. There’s been a lot of talk recently about winning voters over with an “Abundance” agenda as popularized in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book of the same name. They propose policy solutions such as repealing regulations that make it so hard and expensive to build more housing and complete infrastructure projects. They discuss the need to make government more effective and functional. To many educated liberals, this sounds nice enough. There’s only one problem: the average American doesn’t understand the intricacies of “Abundance” policy proposals because, as stated, they can’t read. And you can’t win people over with an agenda they do not comprehend.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Democrats and Republicans both vied over the coveted “soccer mom” vote — the married, middle-class, suburban white women with school-aged children who were pivotal to swinging elections in that era. This is a new era. Politics is no longer about courting the soccer mom vote, but rather the moron vote. Democrats have to win the people who think it’s a remarkable coincidence that Lou Gehrig died from Lou Gehrig’s Disease and who think that two pounds of bricks are heavier than two pounds of feathers. They must win the voters who did not know Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race until they were in the voting booth filling out their ballot. They must win the folks who purchase extended warranties, play the lottery, and who might very well die if they had to remember to breathe.
John Fetterman has all the qualities necessary to win these voters over. He’s 6’8, around 270 pounds, bald, and has tattoos and a goatee. He doesn’t look like your typical male Democratic politician, who the average voter sees as an effete pencil pusher. The socialist smears Republicans throw at Democrats won’t work on Fetterman, because he looks like the guy from Happy Gilmore with a nail in his head, only without the hair. The average voter will take one gander at Fetterman and think there’s no way someone so big and mean-looking could be a bleeding heart leftist. It doesn’t matter that John Fetterman has a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard and was supported by his wealthy parents until he was in his 40s. He looks like a working-class stereotype, therefore the average voter will think he’s a working class hero. Donald Trump won the working class despite living in a gold-plated Manhattan penthouse, because even though he is an “elite” in every socioeconomic sense, his image and style resonated with people. What he did with his wealth is exactly how working people would live if they ever got rich. John Fetterman’s Senate colleague, John Kennedy of Louisiana, is a Rhodes Scholar who attended Oxford University, but he puts on a Foghorn Leghorn impression for his public persona and constituents don’t seem to notice or care that it’s all an act.
But Fetterman’s appeal goes far beyond image. He has a history of defiant behavior that should disqualify him from the Presidency and the Senate — and just about any other job, for that matter — but in American politics his antics are a pure asset. Americans delight in voting for people who are manifestly unqualified to hold public office. After his cardiologist diagnosed him with “atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm, along with a decreased heart pump” in 2017, Fetterman ignored his doctor’s orders (just as most Americans do). He refused to come in for a follow-up and neglected to take his medication until he had a stroke during his 2022 Senate campaign. The stroke damaged Fetterman’s auditory processing, necessitating the use of an iPad to help translate what people say to him. The emotional aftereffects of the stroke and the frustration of being unable to process speech caused Fetterman to spiral into a deep depression for which he checked himself into treatment.
One could say John Fetterman emerged from treatment a totally different man, but if anything, his worst tendencies were there all along, the stroke merely exacerbated them by lifting his inhibitions. After his recovery, Fetterman began bashing the progressive wing of the Democrats, who’d been among his earliest and strongest supporters. He told Bill Maher that his stroke liberated him to stop worrying about what others think and shoot from the hip — an attribute voters admire, even though it greatly hinders one’s ability to govern. Fetterman’s fallout with the left has largely revolved around his ardent support of Israel. However, Fetterman made his pro-Israel stance clear during the 2022 Senate campaign, something progressives overlooked because of his advocacy for legalizing marijuana and his support for Bernie Sanders for president. Fetterman has doubled down on his pro-Israel stance since the October 7th attacks and criticism from the left has only emboldened him. While the American public’s support for Israel has declined over the past two years, one thing that hasn’t fallen out of favor with voters is someone who sticks to their guns.
Then we have the revelations about John Fetterman’s personal life since his stroke — revelations that should be alarming to the average voter, but which may only endear Fetterman more to them. In June 2024, Fetterman was found to be at fault for a car accident that totaled both cars involved and sent him, his wife Gisele, and the other driver to the hospital. Maryland State Police said Fetterman was driving “at a high rate of speed, well over the posted speed limit,” which was 70 miles per hour.
It turns out that Fetterman has quite a long history of vehicular mishaps. He was given a speeding ticket in Pennsylvania in 2016 for driving 24 miles per hour over the speed limit and another one for going 34 miles per hour over the speed limit just three months before the car crash, which required Fetterman to complete a driver’s training course. According to a Washington Post source, Fetterman habitually texts and makes video calls while he drives — behavior shown in research to be even more dangerous than drunk driving, because at least a drunk driver is looking at the road. The Washington Post’s report also indicated that Fetterman’s staff has an unspoken rule not to get in a car with him if he’s behind the wheel, a claim Fetterman’s office denied.
This should all, at the very least, cast aspersions on his judgement, however the average American might see in Fetterman’s reckless driving an appealing reflection of themselves, because the average American also drives like a maniac. Since the COVID-19 Pandemic, American drivers have become more dangerous. Vehicular fatalities have skyrocketed and deaths resulting from hit and run crashes represented 14.5 percent of fatal accidents in 2022 compared to 12.1 percent in 2019.
A May 2025 profile in New York Magazine paints John Fetterman as an increasingly unstable and isolated figure. The piece alleges that in May 2024 Fetterman’s former chief of staff Adam Jentleson wrote a letter to Dr. David Williamson, the psychiatrist who treated Fetterman for depression at Walter Reed Hospital, expressing grave concerns about his former boss. Jentleson wrote that Fetterman was prone to engaging in “long, rambling, repetitive and self-centered monologues.” Jentleson also alleged in the letter that Fetterman was still neglecting his health just as he did before his stroke: “We do not know if he is taking his meds and his behavior frequently suggests he is not.” The profile also revealed that Fetterman told a staffer that his 2024 car accident had been caused because he’d fallen asleep at the wheel and that Gisele Fetterman’s injuries were more severe than initially thought. She had a pulmonary contusion and spinal fractures. When asked for comment, Fetterman called the profile a “hit piece.”
The day the NY Mag article was published, a video leaked from February 2024 of Fetterman arguing with an American Airlines captain over his refusal to wear a seatbelt on a flight from Washington DC to Pittsburgh. Fetterman insisted that he was wearing his seat belt and that his hoodie was covering it. The captain told Fetterman he needed to see the seat belt, or Fetterman would be removed from the plane. Fetterman eventually complied, but the video is only further proof of the same combativeness that made him so appealing to Pennsylvania voters. Americans are a defiant and paranoid lot. What should be disqualifying might end up being Fetterman’s strength in a national election.
Also in May, Fetterman lashed out during a meeting with a Pennsylvania teachers union in his Senate office. He slammed his hands on a table, shouting, “everybody is mad at me!” and “why does everyone hate me, what did I ever do?” One of Fetterman’s staffers escorted the visibly shaken teachers out of the room and was comforted by them when she broke down and cried. Unsurprisingly, details of Fetterman’s outburst were leaked a few days later. On June 1, 2025, the Philadelphia Inquirer, whose editorial staff endorsed Fetterman during his 2022 Senate Campaign, called on him to resign if he continued to skip votes, committee hearings (which he told the New York Times were boring), and meetings with constituents and Senate colleagues. The following day during a Fox Nation appearance with Pennsylvania’s Republican Senator Dave McCormick, Fetterman called the editorial a “smear.” Two days later, his chief of staff, Krysta Sinclair Juris, resigned.
In a reasonable country, John Fetterman would be seen as an embarrassing outlier. However, guess which other prominent American politician is prone to public outbursts, chews through staff like bubblegum, lashes out at any criticism, and is completely uninterested in doing his job? The Democratic Party has found their answer to Donald Trump.
Every disqualifying tendency John Fetterman has exhibited should turn off a sane electorate. But the American electorate is not a sane one. This is an electorate that made Donald Trump President because they resented having to hear “please dial three for Spanish” when they made a phone call. Donald Trump won because, though he is as materially disconnected from the common American as it is possible to be, voters see in his anti-establishment attitudes and lowbrow paranoia a tribune who makes them feel seen and heard. In today’s political landscape, it’s frankly miraculous that someone like John Fetterman is a Democrat. But his policy positions mostly check out. Despite his obvious instability, Fetterman is pro LGBT rights and supports abortion.
The only policy issue on which Fetterman has genuinely changed positions is immigration, calling Dem positions/policy on the border “a mistake our party made.” He remains opposed to mass deportations but has been more adamant about strengthening border security — which in turn strengthens his own favorability. Kamala Harris and Fetterman’s former Senate colleague Bob Casey Jr. lost their elections in 2024 largely due to how unpopular immigration has become among the electorate, including among immigrants themselves. And this trend doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon. The American public trusts Donald Trump on immigration above any other policy issue, and although his approval ratings on immigration have fallen, they are only slightly underwater, indicating just how hardened the country’s anti-immigrant views have become since Trump’s first term. Of course, the general public tends to change their mind on immigration depending on which party holds the Presidency. When Trump cracks down on immigration, all of a sudden many voters who wanted mass deportations prefer a more lenient policy. Then when a Democrat is president, these same voters want mass deportations again. John Fetterman has been one of the few Democratic politicians to criticize his party’s stance on immigration, which could earn him a lot of credibility with these fickle voters.
Pennsylvania Democrats, MSNBC viewers, and progressives most of all have soured on Fetterman. But while the left may hate John Fetterman with every fiber of their being, let’s not forget that before his stroke, he was their guy. They liked John Fetterman and never once paid any mind to his many deficiencies because he was a rebellious jerk who irked the establishment. Though he didn’t turn out to be the kind of politician the left had hoped for, he may be the politician America needs right now. Other than Donald Trump, there is no politician in America whose flaws are more representative of the general public than John Fetterman. His erratic driving, persecution complex, self-centeredness, laziness, and belligerent defiance makes him the most relatable Democrat in the union. His name has already been floated as a potential candidate for president in 2028 and, believe it or not, this deeply flawed and unhealthy man may very well be the Democratic Party’s best hope at retaking the White House. God help us all.
See also: “Voters Just Aren’t That Bright”
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Thanks, I hate it
Stop the ride, I want to get off. (As I get older and older, I find the perpetual adolescent-ization of our culture more and more annoying.)