There Are Reportedly Serious Concerns About John Fetterman's Health Following His Stroke

Beyond the obvious characters at the very top of the establishment, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more contentious political figure than Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman.

Sporting a Carhartt hoodie and Steve Austin-style goatee, Fetterman rocketed to the national spotlight in 2022 during a closely-contested race for Pennsylvania Senate against quack celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz. Fetterman eked it out with just under 300,000 votes — and then the controversies began almost immediately.

Though he platformed progressive causes like worker's rights and a minimum wage increase, the working-class darling quickly flip-flopped on issues that helped win his election, like fracking and police reforms.

He was also soon hit with a near-fatal stroke, which only seemed to accelerate his transformation from progressive idealist to right-wing yes-man — a fact he bragged about to edgelord pundit Bill Maher, of all people.

"It’s just freeing in a way," Fetterman said of the medical episode, which left him with auditory processing issues. "And I just think after beating all of that, I just really want to be able to say the things that I have to really believe in and not be afraid of if there’s any kind of blowback."

Since that interview, the Democratic senator has only lurched farther from his original base. Fetterman was among the seven Democrats who voted to confirm Trump's pick of Kristi Noem as secretary of homeland security. He's likewise a staunch ally of the ultra-right Israeli government, which he "fully supports" reinforcing with US troops. Earlier this year, the senator called Trump's widely-decried plan to forcefully displace Palestinians from the Gaza Strip a "provocative part of the conversation."

Now a searing profile in New York Magazine by political writer Ben Terris exposes deep new concerns, often from the people closest to Fetterman, that he's struggling with long-lasting psychological or neurological issues that could explain at least some of his erratic public behavior. As such, the piece raises classic tough questions — not unlike some faced by former president Joe Biden over a similar period — about the fuzzy lines between cognitive wellbeing, mental health, and the ways that crises in both can cause ideological beliefs and personal behavior to shift in ways both subtle and not.

It was already known that in 2023, Fetterman was diagnosed with clinical depression, for which he spent six weeks in inpatient care.

"An aide found Fetterman wandering on Capitol Hill a short time later," during the runup to that incident, Terris wrote. "Worried that he had suffered another stroke, the staffer whisked him to George Washington University Hospital. Doctors there determined there had been no new stroke, but that the 'dizziness and confusion' he’d experienced was partly owed to severe dehydration."

"He could barely string two sentences together, talking so quietly that everyone in the room had to strain to hear him," Terris' account continued. "Fetterman then stood up and began walking around the office in tight loops, a move the two staffers described as doing 'figure eights'... 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."

Eventually, the senator's chief of staff at the time, Adam Jentleson, penned an urgent letter to the medical director in charge of Fetterman's traumatic-brain-injury and neuropsychiatric care.

"I think John is on a bad trajectory and I'm really worried about him," Jentleson wrote, adding that Fetterman was showcasing a number of red flags that demanded immediate intervention, ranging from not taking his meds and buying a gun to a near-obsession with fast food, which the senator ate "multiple times a day" in spite of his recent stroke.

"He engages in risky behavior," noted Jentleson. "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 after writing the letter, Terris notes, Fetterman caused a collision in Maryland involving speeds of "well over the 70 mph speed limit." His Chevy Traverse was destroyed, and his wife suffered spinal fractures.

Throughout 2023 into 2024, Fetterman was likewise exhibiting signs of growing dependence on social media, despite his doctor's urging him to minimize screentime for the sake of his health. "I think he's on essentially all day now," said Eric Stern, a consultant who worked for Fetterman, adding that the politician was prone to constant "doomscrolling."

As Fetterman's mental and physical health deteriorated, his political statements became overtly violent. "Let's get back to the killing," he said in response to the Israel-Hamas ceasefire earlier this year, advocating to "kill them all." When Israel eventually broke the ceasefire with a salvo that killed over 400 Palestinians — women and children included — Fetterman declared on X-formerly-Twitter, "I will continue to support whatever Israel needs to confront this cowardly terrorism."

Fetterman declined to comment on the record about whether he was still taking his meds or taking "more serious" ones for conditions beyond depression, though he did go off record with Terris for a mysterious four-minute period when pressed on the issue.

How far the rabbit hole goes is anyone's guess, in other words. There are increasing calls for Fetterman to step down from his role as senator, and growing opposition from the voters who put him in office to begin with. Fetterman's term in Congress isn't officially up until 2029, but at the current rate of decay, it would be at least moderately surprising if he lasted long enough to seek reelection.

Time will tell.

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