The Hypocrisy of Fetterman’s Defenders

Remember the days after President Joe Biden’s barely-coherent debate performance, when Democratic dead-enders insisted that nothing was the matter? That was embarrassing. But apparently it wasn’t so embarrassing that everybody took away the correct lesson, because something similar is now happening between Senator John Fetterman and a coterie of admirers on the right. Conservatives are now doing the exact same thing that the Biden defenders did: denying the obvious unfitness of a politician because he’s politically useful.

Fetterman is the subject of a devastating new profile in New York magazine (my former employer). Ben Terris reports that Fetterman’s staff and even his wife have repeatedly expressed concerns over his mental health, following a pattern of strange statements and actions from the senator, including a near-fatal car crash.

After Terris’s story appeared, conservatives leaped to Fetterman’s defense, depicting it as a hit piece motivated by anger at the senator’s recent rightward tilt, which has manifested in an ultra-hawkish defense of Israel, warm words for President Donald Trump, and a vote to confirm Pam Bondi as attorney general. “Fetterman was indispensable in 2022. He was reliably liberal and therefore could never be seen as going rogue. But now that it’s actually happening, suddenly the party has deemed him quite expendable, hence the flimsy New York magazine piece that just came out of nowhere,” the conservative Washington Examiner charges. This line of attack has been repeated in columns in the The Daily Wire (“As Fetterman Defends Israel, Dems Suddenly Question His Mental Health”), National Review (“Progressives Warn That John Fetterman Suffers From Acute Pro-Israel-itis”), and several other outlets.

None of these articles acknowledges, let alone attempts to rebut, Terris’s extensive account of Fetterman’s erratic behavior, which is at least as clear as the evidence of Biden’s infirmity. Many of the conservative attacks conflate the effects of Fetterman’s stroke, which occurred before the 2022 election, with his hospitalization for depression the following year, questioning how Democrats could vouch for Fetterman in 2022 while doubting his fitness today.

A stroke is a discrete event from which full recovery is possible. It is also, of course, possible to recover from depression. But as Terris notes, Fetterman’s staff had strong reason to believe he was failing to adhere to his recovery plan. “No one I spoke to for this article could be sure about whether Fetterman stayed on his medication during this period, but five different people said they heard comments from the senator that suggested he was not,” Terris writes. Additionally, he reports, “in group texts including senior staff from March 2024, staffers used terms like manic to describe his behavior. They pointed out that he was canceling medical appointments despite the blood tests being ‘pillars of the recovery plan.’” Adam Jentleson, then the senator’s chief of staff, wrote a letter to Fetterman’s doctors last year laying out his concerns about his boss’s well-being and disregard of doctor’s orders.

To be sure, assessing whether certain behaviors that troubled Fetterman’s staff (incoherent rants, compulsive social-media posting) indicate unstable mental health is at least somewhat subjective. In the Trump era especially, one person’s raving lunatic is another person’s bold populist truth-teller. But Fetterman’s terrifying record of erratic driving, including a crash that occurred when he insisted on driving home after a red-eye flight, is a matter of objective fact.

What’s more, the thesis that “woke” staffers are sandbagging the boss with bogus concerns has trouble explaining why the strongest piece of evidence comes via the letter to doctors from Jentleson, who scolded Democratic staffers who’d criticized their bosses on Israel (“The thing about being a staffer is that no one elected you to represent them,” he posted in October 2023) and has publicly urged his party to defy progressive pressure groups. The right-wing critique also fails to explain why Fetterman’s staffers refuse to ride in any car he’s driving. If their disagreement was ideological in nature, remaining in his employ while engaging in a targeted boycott of Fetterman-driven vehicles would be a very odd form of protest.

[Franklin Foer: How Biden destroyed his legacy]

The conservative complaints more or less begin from the premise that Fetterman’s ideological apostasy is the only possible explanation for a story on his infirmity. The possibility that a journalist would report on a public figure’s health for nonideological reasons seems to escape them completely. Some of the right’s suspicious minds appear not to understand the basics of journalism. Consider this passage from the Examiner:

So, who are these current staffers? We’ll never know, because just like every political hit piece, these allegations are based on anonymous sources. But here’s where things get both nefarious and obvious: A letter written by former Fetterman chief of staff Adam Jentleson to Walter Reed Medical Center regarding his concern for the senator’s health was miraculously leaked to New York magazine.

The writer proceeds immediately from claiming that “we’ll never know” the source of the allegations to insisting that the fact that we know the primary source is nefarious. The “miraculous” leaking of Jentleson’s letter is not evidence of a conspiracy but a straightforward description of how reporting works.

Many conservative publications are built on a hyperbolic critique of the mainstream media, which assumes that all “objective” journalism is mere cover for left-wing activism and advancement of the Democratic Party’s agenda. With that false premise, they then set out to create the very same thing for the right. But this inability to believe that a reporter might report a story for reasons not of ideology but of public interest reveals a broader form of sophistry—one that not only is endemic on the right but also has grown more common on the left—in which a partisan mind builds its worldview entirely in response to the perceived bad faith of the other side.

Suppose you observe, accurately, that many liberals downplayed evidence of Biden’s mental decline. Now you can use that as a license to dismiss evidence of mental decline in any politician you favor. As long as the hypocrisy of the opposing side is your only point of contact with the facts of the case, you have no standard of internal consistency that you need to follow. Your position on Biden’s fitness can be that the libs are liars for denying it, and your position on Fetterman’s fitness can be that the libs are hypocritical because they used to defend Biden. Of course, when they were defending Biden, many libs did the same thing, turning every question about his ability to handle the job into a game of Why aren’t we questioning Trump’s fitness?

The misguided assumption beneath this hyper-partisan fallacy is that refusing to hold one’s own side to account is an advantage. The conservative movement operates largely on a poisonous distrust of any mainstream institution dedicated to upholding standards (journalism, science, academia). Growing swaths of the left, having seen Trump ride to power on a wave of cult-like obedience, have now decided that maintaining any standards for their leaders is a sucker’s game.

But looking the other way as Biden’s mind was slipping was not a shortcut to defeating Trump. It was an act of self-sabotage. Although conservatives may take longer to pay a price for failing to restrain their mad king, their policy of dismissing all doubts about the mental fitness of their leaders and allies of convenience—a habit now causing them to rally behind Fetterman—is a shaky foundation upon which to build a movement.