Democratic Senator John Fetterman is coming to President Donald Trump’s defense in a new Inside Politics interview on CNN. The growing outcry over Trump’s administration’s tendency toward authoritarianism is getting out of hand, Fetterman says.
“If you compare him to an actual autocrat, that… it’s just not that,” the Pennsylvania Senator and Democratic black sheep told CNN Sunday of his fellow party members calling Trump a fascist. “This is not an autocrat, this is a product of a democratic election.”
Critics have increasingly directed these terms toward the MAGA White House amid Trump’s ongoing centralization of executive power, his immigration crackdown, his increasing use of ultra-nationalist rhetoric, his attacks on political opponents, his penchant for outlandish displays of military strength, and his longstanding cult-like appeal among members of his base.
Fetterman echoed calls for Democrats to tone down criticism of the second Trump administration. Many on the right have accused Democrats of contributing to the spread of political violence in the United States that claimed the life of conservative activist Charlie Kirk earlier this week. Fetterman urged his party “to turn the temperature down.”
“Don’t ever compare anyone to Hitler, and those kinds of extreme things. Look what happened to Charlie Kirk—a man was shot,” the Senator said. “We can’t compare people to these kinds of figures in history.”
Senior ranking members of the Democratic Party have unilaterally condemned Kirk’s assassination at a campus event in Utah Wednesday. Former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama condemned the political violence while former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for unity and offered “prayers and thoughts” for Kirk’s family.
Trump, meanwhile, has said he “couldn’t care less” about healing the rapidly widening political divide in the aftermath of the far right activist’s killing. He has laid the blame for Kirk’s death squarely at the feet of “radical left lunatics” despite an ongoing lack of clarity as to the alleged killer’s motives, further adding “we just have to beat the hell out of them” in order to “get that problem solved.”
While Fetterman’s apparent support of Trump in the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination may be controversial, it’s hardly the first time the Pennsylvania Senator has spoken out in defense of his nominal political opponent, or criticized his own party.
The Democrat’s perceived drift from the party line has coincided with mounting rumors of poor mental health and even aggression toward aides. Fellow party members in the Senate are reportedly holding private meetings to discuss how best to manage the internal turbulence caused by his increasingly erratic public behavior and statements.
His latest comments are already encountering backlash online. “Fetterman is either too thick to understand, or too dishonest to say, that whether or not you are the ‘product of a democratic election’ is irrelevant to whether you behave as an ‘autocrat’ once you’re in power,” as former MSNBC pundit Medhi Hasan, who’s criticized Fetterman in the past, put it.
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