SE Hoya Containment Thread (aka Politics)

"Trump Deports 4-Year-Old US Citizen With Stage-4 Cancer"

When John Fetterman was released from Walter Reed hospital in March 2023, Adam Jentleson, then his chief of staff, was proud of his boss for seeking help for what the senator’s office and his doctor had said was a case of clinical depression. His six weeks of inpatient care had been the latest medical setback for the Pennsylvania Democrat, who had had a stroke mere months before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, nearly derailing his campaign against Republican Mehmet Oz. But a year after his release from the hospital, Fetterman’s behavior had so alarmed 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.”

Fetterman was, according to Jentleson, avoiding the regular checkups advised by his doctors. He was preoccupied with the social-media platform X, which he’d previously admitted had been a major “accelerant” of his depression. He drove his car so “recklessly,” Jentleson said, that staff refused to ride with him. He had also bought a gun.

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.

[...] A week later, Democratic Ohio senator Sherrod Brown came to pay Fetterman a visit in his new Capitol Hill office. They seemed destined to get along [...] But their meeting went awry. 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.

Those first days in the hospital were rough. Fetterman was experiencing delusions. He thought that if he took a bed at the hospital, he would be arrested. He told doctors that he believed members of his family were wearing wires to secretly record him. In one chaotic moment, Fetterman grew convinced that a political rally was being held in the hospital’s lobby and that he needed to break out of his room to attend.

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.

The endless fights over Israel, which saw Fetterman draw further into himself, coincided with setbacks in his recovery regimen. At that point, Fetterman hadn’t gotten his blood drawn for months, despite bloodwork being a crucial component of the plan. In the final weeks of 2023, a Senate physician called the office, according to a staffer, to say that he had seen Fetterman “acting bizarrely” near the underground trolleys that shuttle people between the Capitol and nearby office buildings. He had witnessed Fetterman, seemingly unaware of his surroundings, walk directly into a group of people, nearly bowling them over.

[...] Gisele then texted that she had told her husband that his staff and doctor were worried about him but that he told her “that’s not true and I guess I am not talking to you today” before hanging up.

One staffer told me there would be entire days when they couldn’t let anyone outside the office be around him because he was in “some sort of state” and might say “really ****ed-up **** to constituents.” Sometimes he would just “shut down,” according to one former staffer. He was saying “unhinged ****,” according to one text, and spending more time on social media. Stern wrote to the group that it seemed to him like Fetterman was “spiraling” and that his constant “doomscrolling” — “I think he’s on essentially all day now?”

“He engages in risky behavior,” he wrote in the letter. “He drives recklessly: he FaceTimes, texts and reads entire news articles while driving — and I don’t mean while stopped at a light or something, he reads and FaceTimes while driving at high speeds.”

Less than a month later, Fetterman caught a red-eye flight back from Los Angeles after taping an episode of Bill Maher’s show. His staff urged him to have someone pick him up from the airport and drive him home, but he refused. Just before 8 a.m., according to a police report, Fetterman was traveling at “well over” the 70-mph speed limit on I-70 when he smashed his Chevy Traverse into the back of a 62-year-old woman’s Impala, totaling both cars. Gisele, who had been in the back seat, suffered a pulmonary contusion and spinal fractures. Fetterman, calling from the side of the road, told a staffer he had fallen asleep at the wheel and handed the phone to a police officer.

“It’s a miracle no one died,” the officer said.

While many Democrats were shell-shocked by Trump’s victory, Fetterman seemed unfazed. [...] The Mar-a-Lago pilgrimage was a start, but Fetterman went further. He was the only Democrat to vote for Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi. He posed for a thumbs-up photo with Elise Stefanik, then the nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. And he came close to supporting Pete Hegseth, the nominee for secretary of Defense who had been dogged by reports of excessive drinking, financial mismanagement, and sexual misconduct.

[...] Fetterman became so torn by the decision that, on the day of a procedural vote that would move Hegseth’s nomination closer to completion, he floated the idea of not voting at all. “What if I left?” he asked his staff. Instead of voting, he said, maybe he should just sneak out of Washington and hole up at his parents’ place in York, Pennsylvania. “I felt like I was looking at a six-eight 8-year-old,” the staffer said.

The back-and-forth led to what one person in his office at the time called a full-blown meltdown. According to a contemporaneous text message from this staffer sent to a colleague, Fetterman had become so distraught about the Hegseth vote, as well as chatter in the media that he might switch parties and become a Republican, that he spent part of the day locked in his office, fighting with Gisele and crying while FaceTiming with staff. “He says that they are trying to cancel him again but we don’t know who ‘they’ are,” a staffer said in a text.

Fetterman’s struggles seemed to be occurring in a vacuum of his own making. He was friends with Welch of Vermont and Republican senator Katie Britt of Alabama. The three of them dined on occasion and swapped stories about their families. But beyond that, he was isolated. He deleted himself from the Democratic-caucus group chat. He rarely, if ever, attended hearings. During the first quarter of this year he missed more votes than any other senator.

[...] some of Fetterman’s behavior was leaking out into public. Last year, the Sunrise Movement posted a video of Fetterman mocking and filming one of his constituents, a climate activist who was calmly trying to ask him about his stance on pipelines. Earlier this year, a passenger on a flight to Pittsburgh filmed a video of Fetterman getting into an argument with the pilot about wearing his seat belt in a way that was visible to the crew. “If you want to go to Pittsburgh, it’s simple,” the pilot explains. “You’re going to have to follow our instructions or be asked to get off the airplane.”

Moments like these were becoming increasingly difficult for staff to explain. And behind the scenes, things were worse. In March, Fetterman suddenly took an early-morning trip to Hartford, Connecticut, without telling his team why — leaving them at a loss for what to tell Gisele when she demanded to know why he was missing one of their kids’ birthdays. Fetterman objected to this characterization, saying to me, “I took a weekend trip in March to visit the grave site of my friend from grad school who died in 1993 — a trip my staff and family knew about.”

When he was in Washington, there were entire days in which his schedule was cleared because he seemed like he was in no mood to be around others. And when he did have meetings, they sometimes went south. In early February, Fetterman met with Jeremy Ben-Ami, the leader of the progressive Jewish organization J Street. Over the course of Israel’s campaign against Gaza, J Street has walked a difficult line, calling itself “pro-peace” and “pro-Israel,” a Zionist institution that isn’t afraid to take shots at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The organization lives in a gray area, but during the meeting, it became clear that Fetterman saw things in black and white.

“You can’t reform a carton of sour milk,” Fetterman told Ben-Ami, according to notes from the meeting, referring to the Palestinians. Fetterman said he did not believe in a two-state solution and claimed he had never met an Arab person who would condemn Hamas. [...] Fetterman went on to make statements that shocked people. In opposing a cease-fire, he said, “Let’s get back to killing.” A person who heard the conversation told me, “He said, ‘Kill them all.’”

[...] I tried to move the conversation to Trump’s tariffs and other issues before leaving, but it was plainly clear that his mind was elsewhere. His voice was low. He barely bothered to look up. His sentences were clipped. “I feel like there’s been kind of a tone shift here,” I said, trying to catch his eye. “Can you tell me what you’re feeling? What you’re thinking?”

For the first time since I had returned to his office, he looked right at me. “No, everything’s great,” he said, deadpan. “Everything’s great. I don’t know what you’re referencing.”

“You establish the rules before the game,” he wrote. “You don’t change them after the game is done.”

Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was meeting last week with representatives from a teachers union in his home state when things quickly devolved.

Before long, Fetterman began repeating himself, shouting and questioning why “everybody is mad at me,” “why does everyone hate me, what did I ever do” and slamming his hands on a desk, according to one person who was briefed on what occurred.