The Worst Democrat

John Fetterman during his 2022 Senate run, and before his stroke, fooled me. He fooled me good.

Fetterman back in 2022, taking on Oprah's Dr. Oz for a U.S. Senate seat, ran a campaign with which I was not familiar. Unlike every other high-profile congressional campaign of my lifetime, Fetterman – who had served as Pennsylvania's lieutenant governor before running for Senate – straight up refused to engage Oz's bad-faith political attacks.

Fetterman and his campaign surrogates simply would not bite. In not taking the typical Republican bait on issues like taxes and abortion and guns, Fetterman countered Oz's bad faith with no faith at all. He pointed and laughed and moved on. He mocked and joked both online and offline and left Oz and Republicans furious and flustered.

It was a nice change – a decidedly weird campaign that did not reward the right wing's bad faith. It was, I thought, a model for how to run a modern Democratic campaign. We learned again in 2024 – for a time, at least – that weird can work in opposing a radicalized Republican Party that operates (almost) exclusively in the worst possible faith.

That's all a distant memory today.

Fetterman, maybe or maybe not due to the stroke he suffered in 2022, is the first tried-and-true Trump Democrat, in the tradition of shameful Reagan Democrats who came to prominence in the mid-and-late 80s. Their pledge, like Fetterman's today, was that they would never try to make anything better for anyone, that they would operate exactly like Ronald Reagan – by far the most radically right-wing president in the history of western democracy as of 1980 – but have a D by their name.

Though Fetterman still votes with Senate Democrats at an 80 percent clip, he lives to antagonize his liberal colleagues and seems to enjoy his role as a troll. The only time Fetterman doesn't look like a total fucking slob is when he meets Big Daddy at the White House or at the State of the Union. That's a troll move.

I wrote back in January 2025, as Fetterman basked in the glow of Trump's defeat of Kamala Harris, about the senator's attempts to make anti-Trump Americans feel absolutely crazy about the state of the country and their opposition to the nation's first tyrant. "They wanted the candidate who would best protect and project their version of the American way of life," Fetterman said shortly after Trump's 2024 victory. It was as unsubtle a nod to white supremacy as you'll get from an elected Democrat.

It's as if Shrek was terminally online, desperate for the approval of his Trump-worshipping father, and suffering from the effects of a massive stroke. Shoutout to the surprisingly woke Connor Lamb, who very much needs to take down Shrek in 2028.

Fetterman's latest troll maneuver was casting the deciding vote to advance the nomination of roided-out former UFC loser Markwayne Mullin to be the next head of Homeland Security after Kristi Noem's facial reconstructions no longer pleased the king. Fetterman voted for Mullin because, in his words, Mullin is still among the only coworkers who will talk to Fetterman. What went unsaid: Advancing Mullin to the full Senate would trigger the libs. And that's what Fetterman lives for today.

I got mad online, as I do, about Fetterman siding with Republicans on Mullin's disastrous nomination. That prompted a back and forth with The Editorial Board's John Stoehr, a Bluesky mainstay and an excellent follow on the only legitimate microblogging site. Eventually we did a Q&A on Fetterman, that fascist collaborator, and John (Stoehr, not Fetterman) published it on his site. Check it out and let me know if you, like me, were tricked by Fetterman's working class schtick and his refusal to play by the normal, stale Democratic Party rules during his run for Senate.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.