Losing My Perspicacity, May 5, 2025

But a year after his release from the hospital, Fetterman’s behavior had so alarmed (former Chief of Staff Adam) Jentleson that he resigned his position. In May 2024, he wrote an urgent letter to David Williamson, the medical director of the traumatic-brain-injury and neuropsychiatry unit at Walter Reed, who had overseen Fetterman’s care at the hospital. “I think John is on a bad trajectory and I’m really worried about him,” the email began. If things didn’t change, Jentleson continued, he was concerned Fetterman “won’t be with us for much longer.”

His 1,600-word email came with the subject line “concerns,” and it contained a list of them, from the seemingly mundane (“He eats fast food multiple times a day”) to the scary (“We do not know if he is taking his meds and his behavior frequently suggests he is not”). “We often see the kind of warning signs we discussed,” Jentleson wrote. “Conspiratorial thinking; megalomania (for example, he claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news — he declines most briefings and never reads memos); high highs and low lows; long, rambling, repetitive and self centered monologues; lying in ways that are painfully, awkwardly obvious to everyone in the room.”

Members of his team told me this was an early warning sign that something was off with their boss. In early February 2023 — after Fetterman had indeed been sworn in — members of the Senate gathered at the Library of Congress for a caucus retreat. Fetterman, fresh off a hard-fought victory in the cycle’s marquee race, should have been riding high. Only he wasn’t. A staffer recalled getting a text from a person at the retreat asking if their boss was okay. Fetterman was sitting at a table by himself, slowly sipping a Coke and refusing to talk with anybody. Later that day, another staffer heard an alarming report from a journalist: Fetterman had just walked, obliviously, into the road and was nearly struck by a car.

Brown tried his best to get a conversation going, but according to two people present, Fetterman was virtually “catatonic.” He could barely string two sentences together, talking so quietly that everyone in the room had to strain to hear him. Fetterman then stood up and began walking around the office in tight loops, a move the two staffers described as doing “figure eights.” After Brown left, Fetterman paced from one room inside his office complex to another and back again. At one point, one of his aides said, he walked into the hallway peering over his shoulder, as if he were being followed by shadowy figures.

The staff got in touch with a Senate physician, and everyone agreed: Fetterman needed to get to Walter Reed. He was admitted on February 15.

But it wasn’t just staffers who were upset. There was also Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, who had become something of a political celebrity in her own right: She is a kindhearted philanthropist (the proprietor of a “free store” in Braddock that gave away goods and clothing), a formerly undocumented immigrant from Brazil, and a vocal progressive. In early November, just weeks after the attack, Gisele arrived at her husband’s Senate office and, according to a staffer present, they got into a heated argument.

“They are bombing refugee camps. How can you support this?” the staffer recalled her saying with tears in her eyes.

“That’s all propaganda,” Fetterman replied.

Later, a still visibly upset Gisele pulled the staffer aside. She asked him if members of Fetterman’s team were pushing him to take these stances for political reasons. The staffer told her that the opposite was true: Many of them were as upset as she was. “If you’re pushing back on this, there’s no hope,” the staffer recalled her saying. “This is horrible news.”

Sen. Fetterman has refused to hold town hall meetings in Pennsylvania to hear from his constituents. In fact, the only public event where Fetterman will face the people of the Commonwealth is a joint appearance with Republican Sen. Dave McCormick and his wife Dina Powell, a former Trump administration official, to promote a children’s book written by the Republican power couple.

Enough is enough. Fetterman no longer represents the interests of those who elected him, he seems disinterested in serving in his important position, and his actions in the Senate are actively harming Pennsylvanians. As a Democratic County Party leader, who worked tirelessly to elect Fetterman in 2022, who stood by him through the hardship of his recovery from stroke and depression, his complete abandonment of the core values of our Party has become untenable.

John Fetterman said he heard what sounded like gunfire and saw a man running away. So he reacted by getting his kid inside to safety before he called 911.

What Fetterman did next, however, still haunts him nine years later as he campaigns for the Democratic nomination for the Senate in Pennsylvania: He chased the man down with a shotgun and detained him until police arrived.

It turned out that the man was jogging and wearing running clothes. According to a police report, the manwas unarmed and said the sound of gunfire was actually fireworks, although two witnesses thought they heard shots.

The heads of embattled US public broadcasters, National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), defended themselves against efforts by the Trump administration to cut off taxpayer funding, with both telling a Sunday political talk show they were looking at legal options.

PBS’s chief executive, Paula Kerger, told CBS News’s Face the Nation that Republican-led threats to withdraw federal funding from public broadcasters had been around for decades but are “different this time”.

Kerger said: “They’re coming after us on many different ways … we have never seen a circumstance like this, and obviously we’re going to be pushing back very hard, because what’s at risk are our stations, our public television, our public radio stations across the country.”

"CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President's authority," the corporation wrote in a statement issued Friday morning. "Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government."

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The CPB noted that the statute Congress passed to create it "expressly forbade 'any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors."

Congress said that such funds "may be used at the discretion of the recipient" for producing or acquiring programs to put on the air.