Fetterman will meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, culminating months of working more openly with the GOP

Sen. John Fetterman will be the first sitting Democratic senator to meet with President-elect Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, the culmination of the Pennsylvania lawmaker’s sustained public openness to work with Republicans in Washington.

The meeting this weekend comes as Democrats reexamine their long-held resistance to Trump as he takes office. Fetterman has continuously said his party needs to cool its hand-wringing and figure out how to get along with Republicans in Trump’s Washington.

And while the moderate model of lawmaking is a departure from his previous image as a progressive darling, it’s more in line with Pennsylvania’s purple electorate that narrowly supported Trump in 2024 — and twice in the last three elections.

“I’ve been encouraging my colleagues in D.C. and others saying, like, ‘This is what’s democracy. That’s how it works. That’s where we are,’” Fetterman said in an interview with reporters at the Pennsylvania Farm Show last week, where he talked about meeting with some Trump cabinet nominees.

As Trump’s inauguration nears, Fetterman has shown the most receptiveness — and, sometimes, enthusiasm — to work with Trump of any Democrat in the Senate.

Now the highest-ranking official representing Pennsylvania in Congress, Fetterman has met with several Trump cabinet nominees, has said he thinks Trump deserves to be pardoned, and this week helped further the president-elect’s immigration agenda by cosponsoring a GOP-led bill that the Senate advanced on Thursday.

» READ MORE: Fetterman cosponsors GOP-led Laken Riley bill, one of the few Democrats backing it

Fetterman publicly confirmed his future meeting with Trump in a post on X, in which he said he’s a senator ”for all Pennsylvanians.”

“And because nobody is my gatekeeper, I will meet with anyone to secure some wins, including President Trump,” Fetterman added.

While his forays across the aisle have aggrieved some Democrats who are staunchly opposed to Trump, Fetterman has also gained praise from the center and the right, including Elon Musk. The billionaire who aggressively focused on delivering Pennsylvania for Trump in the 2024 election posted on X this week that Fetterman is “based and truthful.”

An outspoken lawmaker known for bucking dress codes and partisan norms, Fetterman has been a lightning rod for media coverage for much of his political career, but his actions aren’t all that abnormal, especially to average voters who consistently say they want to see bipartisanship in Washington, said J.J. Balaban, a Democratic strategist.

“You don’t get to be a successful politician in a purple state without having a respect for the views of the voters,” Balaban said. “And some Democrats have forgotten that wielding power requires kind of listening to the voters.”

With a Republican-controlled Senate, most of Trump’s appointees are well-poised to coast to confirmation. But Fetterman has taken the somewhat unconventional step of openly embracing some of them in the politically divisive moment.

Fetterman met with Trump’s agriculture secretary nominee, Brooke Rollins, and said at the Farm Show that he plans to vote to confirm her. He has said he also supports secretary of state nominee and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio; New York Rep. Elise Stefanik for U.N. ambassador; and former Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy for transportation secretary.

Fetterman has even expressed an openness to voting for his former Senate opponent, Mehmet Oz, as administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services if Oz protects Medicare. And he met with defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, one of Trump’s more controversial cabinet candidates.

Pennsylvania’s delegation to Washington has gotten more Republican with the additions of Sen. Dave McCormick and two new GOP House members, all of whom Fetterman said he looks forward to working with.

“Pennsylvania is the quintessential purple state in the nation, and this really represents what America is politically and we’re going to find a way to get along,” Fetterman said.

Fetterman added that he will miss his “dear friend,” former Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, but looks “forward to making a new one and working with [McCormick].” Fetterman and McCormick recently had dinner with their wives in Pittsburgh. (Fetterman lives about 20 minutes outside the city, in Braddock, and McCormick lives in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood.)

» READ MORE: Pennsylvania’s political pendulum swung to Republicans in 2024. Will it stay there?

McCormick, Pennsylvania’s new junior senator, shared a similar sentiment about working with Fetterman in a post on X about their recent dinner in which they discussed “where we can work together to best serve PA,” including their joint support for Israel and a desire to stop the distribution of fentanyl around the country.

It’s good practice for politically opposed senators from the same state to get along, said Ross Baker, a former Rutgers professor who has written extensively on Senate relationships. And Fetterman’s openness to the GOP right now should make that easy for the duo.

McCormick isn’t Fetterman’s only Republican ally in the chamber. One of his first friends in the Senate was Sen. Katie Britt (R., Ala.), whom he met at freshman orientation and whose office was near his when they entered office in 2022. Britt visited Fetterman when he was being treated for depression at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and the two bonded over having young kids and tall people in their families. (Britt’s husband is a former professional football player about the same height as Fetterman, who is 6 feet, 8 inches.)

Now, Fetterman and Britt are doing Fox News interviews to promote Britt’s bill, the Laken Riley Act, which Fetterman cosponsored. The bill would require federal detention of undocumented immigrants accused of theft, burglary, and other crimes, and give more authority over immigration policy to state attorneys general.

His pressure campaign appears to be working. Several Democrats who voted against the legislation last year are now supporting it, likely fueled in part by the 2024 election, where a stricter crackdown on illegal immigration appealed to many voters.

Immigration rights activists blasted Fetterman and called immigration yet another issue he seemed to have changed his position on after starting his political career as an unabashed progressive.

“Sen. Fetterman is really missing the big picture here on how this will change the entire system and impact people who pose no public safety threat at all, including DACA recipients,” said Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council.

As the Democratic Party looks for answers on how to communicate with voters following its major November 2024 losses, Fetterman told a small crowd of rural Democrats from around Pennsylvania at the Farm Show luncheon in Harrisburg last week that the party needs to be talking to them, Democrats in GOP strongholds, on how to move the needle in their communities.

“Fewer pieces in the New York Times, more conversations with people that live in 75-25 kind of counties,” Fetterman said, after opening up the room to local Democratic Party chairs to air their ideas and grievances for the party.

Fetterman has long promoted himself as a champion of rural and working-class voters — two constituencies that helped Trump win the state this year.

» READ MORE: Donald Trump won Pa. with more votes than any statewide Republican candidate in history. Here’s how he did it.

The largely rural counties in the middle and northern parts of Pennsylvania that had previously made up the core of Trump’s base swung even harder toward him this year. And in Rust Belt areas and former manufacturing towns, white working-class voters who had leaned toward Trump beginning in 2016 turned out for him in even larger numbers.

In introducing Fetterman to the small group of rural Democratic leaders last week, party chair Sharif Street complimented Fetterman for “telling it like it is” and his ability to talk “about issues in a plainspoken way that people can relate to.”

Fetterman said his party ignores at its peril the bleeding at ballot boxes that occurred across the country’s more rural pockets.

“I am a true believer in your cause and the things that you consistently do to deliver blue outcomes in Pennsylvania,” Fetterman said. “After what happened, that makes it even more now valuable. And I’m always going to show up in all these rooms to thank you for what you’ve done.”

Diane Bowman Shenk, the chair of the Perry County Democratic Committee, said she appreciated Fetterman’s comments about the importance of rural voters and his focus on those communities.

But Bowman Shenk said she disagreed with his most controversial position: his staunch and unequivocal support for Israel in its war with Hamas, in which more than 46,000 Palestinian people have been killed.

She’s known Fetterman for years, and wants to talk with him about his position. She hopes he will change his mind.