John Fetterman casts Senate votes in a hoodie and shorts, misses his family, and other takeaways from his NYT interview

As he settles into life in Washington, D.C., U.S. Sen. John Fetterman continues to open up about his health and how he’s adjusting to his new job.

Fetterman, who suffered a stroke days before Pennsylvania’s primary last year, returned to the Senate a little over three months ago after being hospitalized for clinical depression.

Recently, Pennsylvania’s junior senator sat down with sat down with the New York Times. Here are six takeaways from his Q&A.

Fetterman is taking questions from reporters in the U.S. Capitol hallways, using an iPad’s voice-to-text feature as an aid for the auditory processing disorder from his stroke.

When he returned to Capitol Hill in April, his chief of staff told The Inquirer that Fetterman wanted to engage more with his colleagues and reporters, and they’d figure out a system to make sure he could do that.

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

Fetterman had been closely guarded from the press for over a year as he continued to recover from his May 2022 stroke that kept him off the campaign trail for three months in last year’s election and then quietly battled severe depression.

Now, Fetterman will talk with reporters and has started inviting them to his office for off-the-record conversations, the New York Times reported.

Fetterman said being apart from his wife and three kids, who still live in Braddock in western Pennsylvania, is “the worst part of the job” of being a U.S. senator. But they won’t move to join him in Washington for the remainder of his six-year term, he added.

“That would be disrupting their lives,” Fetterman told the New York Times. “I can’t do that to them.”

Being away from his family was one of the catalysts to his worsening clinical depression and hospitalization that kept him out of the U.S. Senate for six weeks.

For Fetterman, the national interest in him — inspiring hundreds of articles — doesn’t make sense.

“I don’t get it. I’ll never understand it,” Fetterman said. “In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray’s character says something like, ‘You think I’m arrogant? No, I don’t even like me.’ That’s me. I don’t even like me. That’s the truth.”

» READ MORE: A look at John Fetterman's health journey, from his stroke to his hospitalization for depression

Despite the media obsession with the burly senator, Fetterman remains the less popular of Pennsylvania’s two senators. According to a Quinnipiac University poll from June, Fetterman has only a 39% approval rating and a 50% disapproval rating, with 10% of participants who didn’t have an opinion. U.S. Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) had a 44% positive job approval rating, with 32% of respondents who disapprove of him and 24% who had no opinion.

Casey is up for reelection in 2024.

Fetterman told the New York Times that he recently realized he didn’t need to be in a suit to vote from the threshold of the U.S. Senate chamber.

“I’ve been able to reduce my suit time by about 75%,” Fetterman said.

Male senators are required to wear a suit and tie when they’re on the Senate floor. But Fetterman’s newfound loophole lets him stay in his comfy clothes while casting his voice votes from the threshold of the chamber.

Fetterman’s signature Carhartt hoodie and gym shorts are part of his political brand — and part of the reason why some Pennsylvanians have said they relate to him.

Fetterman said he’s confident that President Joe Biden can serve another term, despite concerns about his age. If elected to a second term, Biden would be 86 by the end of 2028.

“I’ve spent enough time around him,” Fetterman said, who appeared with Biden in Philadelphia in June after the I-95 bridge collapse. “He’s sharp, he’s aware, he is absolutely up to the task.”

But he still sees former President Donald Trump’s strength in Pennsylvania. Trump hosted a rally in Erie on Saturday, and maintains a dominating lead in Republican primary polls.

“You’re still seeing Trump signs everywhere in Pennsylvania,” Fetterman said. “You have to respect his strength in all of that. Trump would be very competitive in Pennsylvania.”

However, Fetterman thinks Trump would need to over perform to win in the state.

“I think there’s a hard ceiling in Pennsylvania he can’t get past,” he added.

In addition to his spot in mainstream media as a left-wing darling, he’s a consistent target of right-wing media outlets criticizing him as unable to do his job post-stroke.

He still occasionally mixes up words, which he did in his latest sitdown interview with the New York Times.

“We can fight for things that are meaningful. That we should have no hungry. Hanger. Hangry. Hanger. Hangry,” Fetterman said, before laughing.

“Fox News will go crazy if that makes your story,” he added.