Last week, Senator Jon Fetterman held what would normally be a friendly meeting with Pennsylvania’s largest teacher’s union.
Representatives from the Pennsylvania State Education Association and the National Education Association praised Fetterman for defending public education. But when the subject turned to asking Fetterman to take stronger actions against the Trump administration’s education cuts, the senator’s mood took a turn.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Fetterman started yelling and banging his fists on a desk at the five union representatives before him, asking them what they wanted from him. He shouted “everybody is mad at me,” “why does everyone hate me,” and “what did I ever do,” beginning to repeat himself.
The meeting quickly fell apart, with a staffer for the senator ushering the representatives into the hallway before she broke down in tears. The outburst from Fetterman seemed to show a disturbing pattern in the senator’s mental health, especially since just one day later, a story was published by New York magazine painting a picture of Fetterman as unrecognizable to his own staff following a 2022 stroke.
In a statement to the Inquirer, Fetterman defended the meeting as “a spirited conversation about our collective frustration with the Trump administration’s cuts to our education system.”
“As a proud product of PSEA, I will always support our teachers, and I will always reject anyone’s attempt to turn Pennsylvania’s public schools into a voucher program,” the statement read.
The Inquirer spoke to several former Fetterman staffers anonymously who said that Fetterman wasn’t living up to his duties as a senator. His sharp, zero-sum advocacy for Israel and antipathy towards Palestinians amid Israel’s war on Gaza has alienated staff and constituents. He frequently misses meetings and votes, avoids colleagues, and spends many hours on Capitol Hill alone in his office.
“It’s pretty impossible to overstate how disengaged he is,” said one former Fetterman staffer. “He doesn’t read memos, he’s taking very few meetings…. The job is just a platform for him to run for president, that’s all he cares about.”
Fetterman has the third-worst voting attendance record in the Senate this year, missing 29 of 236 votes, and in the past two years, he has the lowest voting attendance record of any senator. He’s only made one public appearance in Pennsylvania since August. It’s a shocking turn for a man who started his political career as the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, helping to rebuild the rust-belt town. Now, it seems that he ought to leave politics and focus on his health and well-being.
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