John Fetterman’s strong support of Israel, progressivism distancing, ‘The Joker’ and other takeaways from The New Yorker’s profile

The fascination with Sen. John Fetterman’s (D., Pa.) political shift continues with a lengthy New Yorker feature published online Monday.

The story, titled “John Fetterman’s War” and written by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, poses the question of whether Fetterman is “trolling the left or offering a way forward for Democrats.” The piece is featured in the magazine’s July 1 edition.

From the senator’s staff exodus to the impact of his stroke, and parallels with former President Donald Trump, Wallace-Wells offers eye-opening tidbits and a few provocative quotes. Here are some of the highlights:

Fetterman’s staff began to leave his office this past winter, “one by one,” the article notes, summarizing a trend The Inquirer began to document back in March. Fetterman’s office told the New Yorker that the rate of turnover isn’t abnormal; some of those who stepped down still work with Fetterman in other ways, and the reasons for the departures were complicated. While this isn’t untrue, “differences over Israel” were a common thread, Wallace-Wells wrote.

“I’ve carried out things for Fetterman previously, or for other electeds I’ve worked for, that I don’t one hundred percent agree with,” one aide who left told Wallace-Wells. “If you’re in this business, you’re never going to agree with the principal all the time.” But Fetterman’s stances on Israel were “so in your face, troll-y, and kind of reductive in a way. Like, people are dying. This isn’t a troll.”

Some staffers told themselves that Fetterman would have more credibility to criticize Israel in the future by being such a strong supporter early on, but they realized over time that he wouldn’t be loosening his support, Wallace-Wells wrote.

And his unconditional devotion to the Middle East ally has seeped into other parts of his platform. Fetterman and his wife, Gisele Fetterman, opted to sit out of a Pride celebration this year because it would likely draw pro-Palestinian protesters, according to Wallace-Wells.

Wallace-Wells makes comparisons to Trump throughout the piece, first suggesting that Fetterman could be his parallel in the Democratic Party, but then suggesting that Sen. Bernie Sanders (D., VT) may do it better.

He wrote that if Trump “represented a Republican version of what the politics of industrial decline might look like, then Fetterman, a left-of-center populist from Western Pennsylvania, could embody the Democratic one.” But later in the piece, he describes a conversation with Fetterman in which the senator said it was inevitable that Trump would win the GOP nominee over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis because Trump “broadcasts on a very specific frequency that brings out people who don’t give a s— or know who is mayor or supervisor.” He said his former competitor Dr. Mehmet Oz and former gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano tried to replicate Trump’s strategy, and badly lost doing so.

“There’s only one Pennywise,” Fetterman said in the piece, in reference to the murderous entity in the Stephen King novel It. “And everyone else who tries to pretend that—they just look like a clown at a birthday party.”

Later in the piece, Wallace-Wells said that aides who broke with Fetterman over Israel had experienced a reckoning. Many had emerged from Sanders’ movement, which fused populism and progressivism. Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bring the progressive aspect, but they aren’t antiestablishment populists, Wallace-Wells argued, and Fetterman brings the populist angle but isn’t truly a progressive.

“Maybe Sanders, like Trump, was Pennywise, too,” Wallace-Wells wrote, suggesting that Fetterman’s break with the left has left him unable to capitalize on his base in the way Trump and Sanders can.

Whether Fetterman is the Trump of the left, or not, he’s been clear about his disdain for the former president. Still, their commonalities have become increasingly visible in the public debate over Israel’s war on Hamas. As Wallace-Wells pointed out, Fetterman now appears regularly on Fox News, makes “stylized rebukes of progressive activists,” and told the New York Post he’s “not woke.” Both communicate their platform aggressively when it comes to Israel, which can carry a certain kind of appeal for those who hold the subject dear.

The article includes a scene in which Yeshiva University board member Janet Hod, who is originally from Pennsylvania, was eager to meet Fetterman when he spoke at the school’s commencement to be honored for his support of Israel. Wallace-Wells wrote:

“I’m a huge Trump person — huge,” Hod said. “But he — she indicated Fetterman— is right up there with Trump.”

» READ MORE: Fetterman removes Harvard hood in protest during Yeshiva University commencement speech

Fetterman came into the mainstream political consciousness as a progressive but has been distancing himself from the label in recent years. Back in January he told The Inquirer’s Julia Terruso that he was “not a progressive.” “It’s not new news,” he said told her in an interview at the Capitol.

Wallace-Wells said Fetterman often argues that his stray from his perceived progressive values isn’t so much about his support for Israel, but that the once-fringe issues that he stood for like a $15 minimum wage and marijuana legalization are now accepted by the party, the journalist notes.

» READ MORE: John Fetterman’s fight with the left is no longer just about Israel

And Wallace-Wells makes the case that keeping Trump out of the White House could rely on the Democratic Party’s “ability to distance itself from the activist left,” as Fetterman has been doing.

» READ MORE: Trump rallies in North Philly as he tries to win over voters in Pennsylvania’s bluest big city

Fetterman’s behavior can be seen as “vice signalling,” which counteracts “the performative do-gooderism of the left,” according to Fetterman’s former chief of staff Adam Jentleson.

“The cumulative effect of Fetterman’s clothes, his cursing and snark, his blunt anti-élitism, and his push for legal weed was to try to displace some of the Yale Law School atmosphere that occasionally threatens to fog in the Democrats,” Wallace-Wells wrote.

Since his stroke, Fetterman has used transcription software on a tablet to provide closed captioning. But when Wallace-Wells asked questions that were “too long, with too many caveats, or whose syntax the machine could not make sense of” when they were in the car together, Fetterman’s aide reworded the question in a simpler way “that sometimes lacked the original’s context or subtlety,” the journalist wrote.

» READ MORE: ‘So grateful’: Inside John Fetterman’s hopeful first week back in the Senate after his treatment for depression

“I often felt that I was talking with an extremely intelligent person through a nuance-deletion machine,” he wrote. “A lobbyist who recently met with Fetterman and received a simple, black-and-white response to a question on a complex issue was left wondering, ‘How much of this is the stroke?’”

But Fetterman described his stroke as a reset that let him come back “unrestrained,” according to the piece.

“He compared himself to the Joker,” Wallace-Wells wrote. “‘It’s like in Batman—the original one, with Jack Nicholson,’ [Fetterman] said. ‘I’ve already been dead once. It’s very liberating.’”