BS BULLETIN:
- Sen. John Fetterman revealed that President Trump privately reached out to check on his seriously ill father — a gesture the Pennsylvania Democrat says Trump had no political obligation to make.
- Fetterman offered the story while explaining why he refuses to join Democrats who portray Trump and his supporters as irredeemably evil.
- The Democratic senator says his party has a bigger problem: too many Democrats appear more interested in hating Trump than rooting for America to succeed.
John Fetterman has a Donald Trump story you probably won’t hear in a Democratic campaign commercial.
It’s about his dad.
The Pennsylvania Democrat revealed during an interview with Greta Van Susteren that Trump privately checked in with him about his seriously ill father.
Fetterman wasn’t asking for anything. There was no camera. And according to the senator, Trump simply wanted to know how his dad was doing.
“He didn’t have to do that,” Fetterman said. For Fetterman, that mattered.
His father, Karl Fetterman, has faced serious health problems, and the senator has previously spoken publicly about making time to check on him while he recovered from a heart attack.
Fetterman’s parents are also Trump voters. He’s spoken openly about that fact while explaining one of his biggest problems with his own party: He knows and loves people who voted for Trump, so he refuses to describe tens of millions of them as Nazis, fascists or enemies of democracy simply because of their ballots.
The private check-in about his father apparently reinforced that instinct.
Fetterman isn’t suddenly MAGA. He hasn’t become a Republican. And he certainly doesn’t agree with everything Trump does.
But he’s increasingly unwilling to pretend that political disagreement requires personal hatred.
That’s put him in an extraordinarily strange place politically.
Trump has praised Fetterman. Republicans increasingly like him. And Pennsylvania Democrats increasingly don’t.
Recent polling has shown Fetterman with dramatically stronger numbers among Republicans than among voters in his own party — an almost unimaginable reversal for the man once celebrated as one of progressives’ rising stars.
The Daily BS reported earlier this month that Fetterman has even vowed never to campaign against Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Dave McCormick, whom he now calls a friend.
His relationship with Trump is different, but the philosophy behind it sounds increasingly similar. Fetterman has argued repeatedly that rooting for a president to fail means rooting for the country to fail. “If you’re rooting against the president, you are rooting against the nation,” he has said.
And lately he’s been considerably less interested in pleasing Democrats who disagree.
Just days ago, Fetterman unloaded on the socialist wing of his own party, calling some of its figures “fancy-pants rich idiot socialists” and “deeply unserious, deeply ridiculous hypocrites.”
“I strongly reject these kinds of people,” Fetterman said. “I think that makes me a good Democrat.” And if the Democratic Party decides otherwise? “Maybe I don’t have a future in that party.”
That may ultimately be the bigger story surrounding John Fetterman.
He’s not becoming Donald Trump. He’s simply refusing to hate Donald Trump. In today’s Democratic Party, that distinction alone can apparently make you a revolutionary.
DBS WIRE SOURCES
- Twitchy — Fetterman Credits Trump’s Private Check-In on His Ill Father as Media Paints Him a Villain
- RealClearPolitics — Fetterman: ‘Fancy-Pants’ Socialist Hypocrites Aren’t the Future of the Democratic Party
- Washington Examiner — Fetterman Says MS NOW Won’t Invite Him on Its Network
- ABC News — Democratic Sen. Fetterman Accepts Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Invitation
- The Daily BS — Fetterman Vows He’ll Never Campaign Against One Republican: ‘He’s My Friend’
