Who Did This to John Fetterman?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 20, 2023

 

On Friday, Pennsylvanians learned that their state’s junior senator, John Fetterman, checked himself into the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to receive treatment for clinical depression. It’s a condition with which Fetterman has suffered “off and on throughout his life,” according to his chief of staff, Adam Jentleson. The affliction has, however, become more acute with the rigors of Fetterman’s new job, as The Atlantic’s Jennifer Senior wrote in a profile of the senator published auspiciously enough within 24 hours of his hospitalization.

 

“Fetterman was continuously, relentlessly obligated to perform a certain role — that of a competent, confident politician,” Senior writes sympathetically. Much like any other elected official, Fetterman was compelled to play the “accessible, obliging politician,” and that onerous burden has only become more unendurable in the upper chamber of Congress. “As a senator, you can never not be on,” Senior continued. The determination to which The Atlantic’s readers are led is that this torment has been done to John Fetterman.

 

Senior writes:

 

Fetterman has basically been forced to contend with the effects of a severe brain trauma while working an absurdly demanding job in one of the most polarized and toxic political climates the country has ever known.

 

But by whom? That, readers must conclude, is a mystery.

 

For all the due and deserved sympathy the senator and his family are owed, Pennsylvania’s voters have earned a measure of pity. They were deprived of the opportunity to properly evaluate Fetterman as a candidate, and not just in regards to this apparently lifelong affliction.

 

For months leading up to the now-infamous senatorial debate between Fetterman and Mehmet Oz, political observers were subjected to a withering campaign of emotional blackmail. To even discuss the senator’s post-stroke auditorial-processing issues was deemed by those in control of the political discourse’s commanding  heights “appalling.” It was the functional equivalent of prejudice when it wasn’t dismissed as irrelevant. Not only did Fetterman’s physicians think he was “fit to serve,” but he was “getting sharper.”

 

The invasive pursuit of documentation on Fetterman’s condition became the fixation of “right-wing carnival barkers,” according to New York Magazine profiler Rebecca Traister, who, in the same piece, alleged that Fetterman’s infirmities were retreating and surmountable and acute enough to present voters with a relatable contrast to the artificial political edifice Oz fabricated for himself. And what does any of it matter anyway? After all, the Senate “has not actually been a deliberative body for decades.”

 

Senior’s welcome (albeit belated) candor reveals the degree to which Fetterman’s post-stroke recovery process and its associated trials are an obstacle to the performance of a senator’s duties. His interpersonal interactions are labored and tightly controlled. He relies on technology to process what his colleagues say, and his presence in committees is a function of live transcription devices. He must navigate an unfamiliar city without the support of his wife and children, who remain behind in Pennsylvania. None of it is conducive to an efficacious post-stroke recovery regimen.

 

Senior’s passive construction would lead you to believe that all of this was an accident of fate, but Fetterman’s torment is not inertial. This was, in fact, done to him. He was compelled to endure a grueling campaign. He was made to serve as an avatar for those who endure “ablest” discrimination. He was required to push through the worst of it for the benefit of his party and ideological allies. The sympathy Fetterman’s condition now receives from those who made him jump through hoop after hoop rings hollow.

 

Senior concludes with a reluctant admission that the “hooligans” on the right, whose offense is only to notice the ordeal to which Fetterman has been subjected, will continue to make hay of the senator’s affliction. But, she adds, they may soon be joined by similarly observant Democrats. If Democrats do eventually summon the courage to acknowledge their surroundings, it will be talked about in the press as though it was a revelation born of the left’s preternatural altruism and bottomless capacity for human decency. Perhaps his colleagues will drag Fetterman up from the deep hole into which they cast him. But no one should mistake what they’re seeing for compassion. The time to showcase that character trait passed long ago.