The Apostate

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, May 04, 2026

 

The most durable assumption in political analysis is that politicians behave rationally, never mind that we’ve all been locked in an insane asylum since 2016.

 

I thought of it this morning after my editor and I got to talking about the mystery of Sen. John Fetterman’s remorseless drift toward the right.

 

Could he be triangulating? she wondered. That is, with his seat up in 2028, might a man who got elected as a Bernie Sanders progressive be tacking to the center to broaden his appeal to swing voters?

 

It’s a rational strategic theory for the Pennsylvania senator’s behavior. It just doesn’t jibe with the facts at all.

 

Fetterman has made a few shrewd moves to separate himself from the left’s most toxic cultural priorities, like supporting a bill early in Donald Trump’s second term requiring federal authorities to detain illegal immigrants accused of certain crimes. He also banked some centrist goodwill by supporting half of the 22 nominees Trump put forward for Cabinet-rank positions last year. That’s triangulation.

 

What he’s been up to lately is so far beyond triangulation that it seems, well, irrational.

 

In March, during one of his frequent interviews with Fox News, he was asked who the leader of the Democratic Party is. “Our party is governed by the TDS,” he replied. “TDS” is an acronym for “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a phrase used unironically only by the president’s right-wing sycophants.

 

After the April 25 assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Fetterman joined a chorus of MAGA water-carriers by demanding that his Democratic colleagues “drop the TDS and build the White House ballroom.” American voters oppose the ballroom by a 2-to-1 margin. Democratic voters oppose it by a 4-87 spread.

 

On Thursday he was asked what he thought of Graham Platner becoming his party’s nominee for Senate in Maine. Platner is the most Fetterman-esque Democrat since Fetterman himself, a progressive economic populist with the “vibes” of a working-class right-winger, and may represent Team Blue’s best chance of flipping a seat this cycle. Fetterman promptly shivved him: “Democrats really, really like Platner in Maine, but the Republicans f—ing love him,” he sneered, mocking the candidate’s electability. “If Maine wants an a–hole with a Nazi tattoo on his chest, they get him.”

 

All of that only scratches the surface. Fetterman undercut his Democratic colleagues after they shut down the government to protest ICE’s conduct, speculated that they oppose Trump’s very unpopular war because they’re secretly “rooting for Iran,” and supplied the deciding committee vote to advance Markwayne Mullin’s nomination to lead the Department of Homeland Security. He’s also remained staunchly, uncritically supportive of Israel even as the vast majority of his party has turned against the Jewish state.

 

The point of triangulation is to align oneself with the center and against the fringy ideologues on one’s own side. What Fetterman is doing is closer to the opposite. On issues like the war and the ballroom, he’s pitting himself against the broadly popular consensus. And on matters like Platner, Israel, and the shutdown, he’s not merely antagonizing fringe progressives. He’s antagonizing the entirety of his party, very much including the center-left.

 

The result is a—no typo—108-point swing in his net approval among Pennsylvania Democrats, from +68 in 2023 to -40 now. Any chance he had of winning his party’s Senate primary in 2028 is up in smoke, assuredly. Which is why two Jonathans, Martin and Last, have speculated in the last few days that Fetterman might be preparing to cross the aisle and run as a Republican instead.

 

That too is a fine rational theory for how the senator might behave going forward. But I’m not sure it stands up to scrutiny either.

 

Disillusionment.

 

To my knowledge, no one has offered a compelling theory for how Fetterman went from “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez trapped in the body of Frankenstein” to a guy muttering on Trump state television about “TDS.”

 

Martin argues that personal relationships helped sway him. The senator is reportedly close to Republican Sens. Katie Britt and Dave McCormick and is now known to hang out in the GOP’s cloakroom off the Senate floor during long votes. He doesn’t attend Democratic conference lunches and feels members of his own party are “suspicious or kinda standoffish” toward him.

 

On that reading, Fetterman is the congressional equivalent of the lonely high school misfit whom the goth kids have invited to sit with them at lunch. Before you know it, he’s wearing black nail polish and listening to The Cure. It’s a fun scenario, but I’m skeptical: The reality of a U.S. senator’s partisan transition has to be more complicated than that.

 

Last’s theory is even simpler. “The only explanation I can come up with,” he wrote of Fetterman, “is that he suffered a stroke and this tragic health event has had long-lasting impacts on his personality and mental functioning.” The idea that support for Donald Trump might originate in brain injury appeals to me intuitively, but I don’t buy that either. I’ve heard of head trauma producing wondrous changes in behavior, yet never anything as inexplicable as wanting to vote Republican in 2026.

 

My best guess is that deep disillusionment with his own party, politically and personally, caused Fetterman’s shift. He’s plainly disgusted by how eagerly the progressive base rallied against Israel after the horror of October 7, creating a mutual grudge. (“In our conversation, Fetterman was much more eager to discuss how his support for Israel is the root of Democratic anger at him than he was his political future,” Martin reports.) And I suspect he feels hurt and betrayed by how many leftists, including former staffers, made hay of his health struggles as they grew angry at him over Israel and other policy heresies.

 

He feels alienated from his own side and appreciated by the other, so increasingly he’s luxuriating in the latter’s Strange New Respect. What else is left to do but make it official by becoming a Republican? That would give him a fighting chance of winning reelection in 2028—Trump has already pledged his endorsement if Fetterman flips, per Martin—and could make him the most powerful man in the Senate depending on how many seats Democrats win this fall.

 

Imagine a 51-49 Democratic majority next year with control of the chamber entirely dependent on whom the big guy from Pennsylvania chooses to caucus with. (You don’t need to imagine, actually: I wrote about it before in the context of a potential Supreme Court vacancy.) Not even former Sen. Joe Manchin, another famously “maverick” centrist Democrat, had that kind of institutional juice.

 

Surely a happy, or at least happier, future awaits John Fetterman in the Republican Party, no?

 

Let’s think this through.

 

Little to gain on policy.

 

What would the senator gain policy-wise from flipping?

 

In a national environment in which Republicans looked likely to hold the House, a party switch would make sense. The Senate GOP would still be in a position to put legislation on the president’s desk and John Fetterman, as a key vote for the right, would be in a position to wield Manchin-style influence over its substance. He might even resolve to drag Senate Republicans toward the middle on matters where he still leans left.

 

But that’s not the environment we’re in. Democrats will almost certainly control the House next year and will come under intense pressure from their base not to compromise with Republicans except on must-pass bills. Fetterman’s Senate switch wouldn’t do anything to help his new party move its legislative agenda.

 

In fact, he might end up stuck between his old party and his new one. The senator “supports abortion rights, gay rights, legalizing marijuana, and is pro-labor,” as Martin reminds us, and has voted with Democrats 93 percent of the time. If House Democrats passed a populist spending bill with lots of breaks for the working class, John Fetterman could end up in the awkward position of supporting it but being unable to vote for it because the Republican Senate majority he joined refuses to put it on the floor.

 

His main value to Trump as a Republican convert would be his vote to advance presidential nominees, including and especially if Clarence Thomas and/or Samuel Alito opt to retire before 2028. But Fetterman doesn’t need to switch parties to do that. If anything, his influence over nominations would be greater if he remained a Democrat.

 

As a newly minted Republican, his party would want him to support any—and I do mean any—nominee Trump sends over. That’s the whole point of recruiting him to the GOP: The president would expect Fetterman to assure the confirmation of even the sleaziest Trumpist cronies. And how could the senator refuse? Having burned all of his bridges on the left, it would be goofy if he immediately began burning them on the right by opposing some MAGA chud for the Supreme Court.

 

As a Democrat in a 51-49 Senate controlled by Chuck Schumer, on the other hand, he could play the new majority leader and the president off of each other. From Schumer he might seek and secure a promise that all nominations will receive a floor vote, threatening to switch sides if his demand isn’t met. From the president he might seek assurances that all nominees are well qualified, threatening to drop his insistence on floor votes for nominations if Trump doesn’t comply.

 

The fact that Fetterman’s core task as a new Republican would be to move nominees, no matter how unfit, makes the entire party-switching thought experiment feel absurd. Why the hell would anyone volunteer to be a rubber-stamp for this kakistocracy as it goes about staffing the federal government with ever more cutthroat toadies? Who contemplates the possibility of an Aileen Cannon Supreme Court nomination and thinks, “I’d like to be the legislator that makes that possible”?

 

All of this matters, needless to say, only if Democrats end up with precisely 51 seats. That’s the scenario in which Fetterman gets to decide which party controls the chamber. Any number above that and Democrats don’t need him for a majority; any number below that and the same is true for Republicans. To switch parties in the first scenario would put him in the Senate minority, a place no lawmaker wants to be. To switch parties in the second would achieve nothing except to improve his chances at winning a second term in 2028.

 

Which is the real reason he might consider switching, right?

 

Little to gain politically.

 

Certainly, he stands a better chance at reelection as a Republican than as a Democrat. He has no path to winning a Senate primary in his current party and a solid path if he flips.

 

Granted, a guy who “supports abortion rights, gay rights, legalizing marijuana, and is pro-labor” isn’t a natural match for a reactionary faction like the GOP primary electorate, but Fetterman would have two great advantages with it as a candidate. One is Trump’s endorsement, assuming the president keeps his pledge to reward him if he switches sides. (Big if!) The other is the reservoir of goodwill he would accrue on the right by committing a truly momentous betrayal of the left, taking a Senate seat that they awarded him in 2022 and handing it over to Trump and the GOP.

 

More so than any policy position, right-wing credibility in the age of Trump depends on one’s willingness and ability to own the libs. As a partisan turncoat, Fetterman would have owned them in a way even the president has failed to do. It’s not a coincidence that his approval with Pennsylvania Republicans is 73-18.

 

Even so, the fact that he would have a better chance of winning a second term as a Republican doesn’t mean he would have a good chance. Start with this: Ditching the left to join the GOP in 2026 feels a bit like investing one’s life savings in Enron circa 2000.

 

The president is at a second-term low in approval in Nate Silver’s polling tracker. The latest Washington Post survey finds the share who disapprove of him at 62 percent, the worst number in either of his presidencies. Public opinion on how he’s handling the cost of living split 23-76 in the same poll, and his net approval on the issue across a variety of surveys has fallen so precipitously that data nerds are having to redesign the Y-axis of their graphs to capture it.

 

Trump’s support may recover somewhat over time, but the Iran war and its effect on oil prices is the sort of crisis that he’ll never fully shake, I think. The public’s illusions about him being good for the economy and skeptical of Middle Eastern misadventures have been shattered. Republicans will carry that baggage all the way to 2028.

 

That’s what Fetterman would be throwing in with if he flipped. His ardent support for Israel was already destined to make his next run for Senate a heavy lift, thanks to opposition to the Jewish state rising in both parties. Why would he want to tie Trump’s anchor around his neck too?

 

Even if Fetterman switched parties and skated through a Republican Senate primary, he might face a challenge from the right in Pennsylvania’s general election. Various GOP factions will have an axe to grind with him—pro-lifers and anti-Israel “America First-ers,” most notably—and the president might not have enough mojo with populists by 2028 to prevent a third-party candidate from jumping in and gaining traction. You can guess what the outcome would be if Fetterman ended up running against a unified Democratic electorate that’s spoiling to beat him (imagine the turnout, especially if his nemesis Josh Shapiro is the party’s presidential nominee that year) and an independent Tucker Carlson type urging MAGA voters not to support an “Israel first” fake Republican.

 

Republican Arlen Specter became a Democrat in 2009 in the belief that it would help him get reelected and ended up losing Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate primary the following year handily to Joe Sestak. Too many Democratic voters doubted the sincerity of his conversion and opted for his opponent. That’s what Fetterman would be up against if a “real Republican” ran as a third-party spoiler in his 2028 race.

 

And of course, it’s anyone’s guess how committed Trump would remain to getting Fetterman reelected after Fetterman eventually crossed him. According to Martin, it’s been on the senator’s mind. “Committed conservatives like [Bill] Cassidy and [Tom] Tillis are getting pushed out of their seats,” Fetterman told him, leaving him to wonder whether there would be similar “retribution” for, say, his vote against the One Big Beautiful Bill last year. At any point after joining the GOP, the president could end his political career with a single sentence on Truth Social: “I no longer support John Fetterman, who is still a member of the radical left at heart!”

 

The Tillis example is useful. Like Fetterman, he represents a purplish state and needs to pander to the center a bit more than the average Republican for electoral reasons. If American politics were still rational, Trump would have understood that and accommodated him—but it isn’t and so he didn’t, threatening to back a primary challenge to him last year after Tillis opposed the One Big Beautiful Bill’s cuts to Medicaid. That led an exasperated Tillis to announce his retirement, creating an open seat that Democrats are likely to flip in November.

 

That’s the future that probably awaits John Fetterman if he becomes a Republican. He’ll end up a one-termer anyway, eventually uniting Donald Trump and the left in hatred of him.

 

If he’s destined to be an ex-senator in 2029 either way, he’s better off staying put in his current party and enjoying his liberation. He’s dead to the left no matter what, but the same right that would have demanded he be a mindless foot soldier if he switched parties will go on adoring him as long as he remains their favorite “maverick” Democrat. And if he hits the jackpot in the midterms, with Democrats winning 51 seats on the nose, he’ll enjoy more influence next year over policy as a member of Schumer’s caucus than as a member of John Thune’s. There’s only one person who gets to decide what legislation looks like in Donald Trump’s party, and it will never be John Fetterman.

 

“Many Democrats, in Pennsylvania and Washington, argue persuasively that he doesn’t like the job,” Martin notes near the end of his piece on the senator. That’s good to hear, because Fetterman’s strange anti-triangulation has all but guaranteed that he won’t hold that job much longer, no matter what he does now. Better that he retire with a modicum of dignity than as a desperate failed late recruit to the president’s army of servile postliberal chuds.