On Wednesday, mounting anger and frustration among Democratic voters across Pennsylvania exploded into the streets. And while the main target was President Donald Trump, Democrats also had some choice words for one of their own: Sen. John Fetterman.
“It seems like as soon as he went to Mar-a-Lago, things changed,” said Patty Lengel, who traveled from Lebanon Pa. to take part in a Harrisburg protest. “He went down to kiss the ring.”
Fetterman is the only Democratic Senator to travel to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump at his home, as Fetterman did last month. And by some reckonings, since that time Fetterman has been the most pro-Trump Democrat in the Senate.
He is, for example, the only Democrat voting in favor of several Trump cabinet appointments, including attorney general Pam Bondi, who falsely insisted that Trump had won Fetterman’s home state in 2020, and to this day refuses to say that Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election. He was among a group of Democrats who voted for the Laken Riley anti-immigration bill — even though it didn’t contain protections for immigrants brought to the country as children, who he had pledged to protect. And Fetterman has said that Trump’s recent proposals to take over Greenland and to expel Palestinians from their homeland in Gaza — a proposal he called “provocative” — are foreign-policy ideas worth discussing.
Fetterman has been silent as Democrats have been raising alarm bells that the unelected billionaire, Elon Musk, is taking apart the government without regard to constitutional protections. Fetterman has found time to defend Trump nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for using nicotine pouches in recent days on his social media — but as of mid-day Thursday hasn’t posted once about Musk.
All of which helps explain why, when PublicSource covered a protest Wednesday in Downtown Pittsburgh, scores of demonstrators were chanting “Fetterman! Fetterman! Do your job!”
Chris Borick, a professor of political science at Muhlenberg College, said Fetterman’s willingness to even consider what many experts call a proposal to “ethnically cleanse” Gaza raises a key question: Is there anything Trump could say that would cross a moral line for Fetterman?
“[Fetterman’s] actions in response to the president's statement of Gaza certainly don't give an example of a clear red line where he says, I'm not going that far,” Borick said.
A spokesperson for Fetterman acknowledged receiving questions from WESA and said the office would send a response by the deadline — but a response never arrived.
‘Why would he hang out with Trump?’
Both of the Pittsburgh area’s Congressional leaders — diehard progressive Summer Lee and the more moderate Chris Deluzio — came out firmly against Trump’s proposal for Gaza, and have been sharply critical of other policies since he took office.
Lee spoke last week about Democrats’ role during a visit to a Homewood senior center, where residents were eating lunch and preparing to play Bingo.
“As chaos reigns in this land,” Lee said, many in the room might be wondering “how we are, the Democrats or anybody else, going to fight back.”
But the first politician that the seniors wanted to know about wasn’t Trump: It was Fetterman.
“Why would he go to Florida and have lunch and hang out with Trump knowing how tricky Trump is?” asked Helen Alexander, a question which led to a smattering of applause.
Lee joked that her response was “off the record” and then tried to emphasize that she was talking about Democrats in general. Still, some of her answer related to Fetterman alone.
“Why somebody, a Democrat, would go to talk at Mar-a-Lago is beyond me,” Lee said. "I also just don't believe in going to people's houses to do business anyways.”
A number of seniors in attendance had voted for Fetterman and supported his earlier work as mayor in the predominantly Black town of Braddock. And many rank-and-file Democrats have expressed frustration with the party leadership as a whole.
Donna Taylor, of Wilkinsburg, said she was upset that some Democratic leaders, including House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, weren’t taking a harder stand against Trump. By contrast, she said, she liked how aggressive Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy had been.
At least for the time being, Taylor said, she still supported Fetterman. But she hadn’t heard about his voting record on Trump’s nominees, or his support for the Laken Riley Act. And she said she was “disappointed” in the actions she did know about.
“I understand that you should talk to [Trump], but he should not have went to his palace up there in Florida to talk to him,” she said. “Why couldn't you wait until he got to D.C. to talk to him?”
“What makes you think [Trump’s] going to work with you?” Taylor asked. “He just uses people. You understand? That's all he does. He uses people.”
Signs of slipping support?
From the standpoint of political self-interest, a shift toward Trump makes sense. Pennsylvania Democrats didn’t just come up short in the race for president last year: They lost all three statewide row office elections and the re-election bid of Fetterman’s former U.S. Senate colleague, Bob Casey. GOP-friendly shifts in voter registration suggest the trend may not be easy to reverse.
And at least one survey suggests that many Pennsylvanians like what they are seeing from Fetterman: A Morning Consult job-approval tracking poll last month showed Fetterman with his highest net approval since taking office.
But Fetterman has begun to lose some support from the progressives and moderate Democrats who got him to Washington in the first place.
Allegheny County Council member Dan Grzybek posted on X on Wednesday that he regretted supporting Fetterman over former Rep. Conor Lamb in the 2022 Democratic primary. Grzybek once knocked on more than 1,000 doors for Fetterman. At the time, Fetterman had championed himself as a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders and more progressive than Lamb.
But Fetterman has since disavowed the progressive label and Grzybek said Fetterman has done the least of any Democrat to oppose Trump. Fetterman is missing more votes than nearly any other member of the Senate, Grzybek said, and Fetterman’s staff hasn’t responded to his efforts to reach out both in person and over the phone.
“I think I can unequivocally say that I was very wrong and that Conor Lamb would have been a far better Senator than Fetterman,” Grzybek wrote on X.
Heather Mull, a Democratic committee member in Pittsburgh’s 15th Ward, said Fetterman’s attempts to tack to the middle were not working for her. While she said she sees herself as moderate and voted for Lamb over Fetterman, she said Fetterman’s recent moves struck her as nakedly political.
“I feel like now he's polling better among Republicans in the state of Pennsylvania than he had been so I think he's got his eye down the road and I don't appreciate that aspect,” she said. “I feel like he's as transactional as Donald Trump.”
Pennsylvania state Rep. Chris Pielli, a Democrat from the suburbs of Philadelphia, wants to see Fetterman call out the ways in which the Trump administration is breaking Democratic norms.
“I can understand where you always want to work with any president to an extent,” Pielli said. But Trump, he said, “is acting unilaterally like some sort of dictator. So that's when I'd like to see our senators step up and make sure that they're protecting us. So I'll leave it to Senator Fetterman to do that. And I would love to talk to him more in detail.”
‘He ran against Joe Manchin, and he turned into Joe Manchin’
Republican political strategist Samuel Chen said Fetterman was receiving such blowback partly because of how polarized politics has become. He said in the past it was normal for elected officials to reach across the aisle after a losing election cycle, if only to try to get things done for their constituents.
“So many of our elected officials are focused on campaigning and winning and the PR side of their job and they're not as focused on the governing part,” he said. “And Fetterman is very focused on the governing.”
Chen thinks Fetterman has gotten so much blowback in part because he has turned out to be so conservative on foreign policy issues.
“Fetterman is probably more conservative than definitely his own party, but even probably a good portion of the Republican Party on foreign issues, foreign affairs,” Chen said.
Fetterman, he noted, got his reputation as a progressive by supporting domestic issues like legalizing marijuana, criminal justice reform and promoting LGBT+ and abortion rights.
But Fetterman never had to address international relations issues as a mayor or as lieutenant governor. Chen believes people were surprised that Fetterman turned out to be so hawkish on Israel.
The political experts who spoke to WESA said that Fetterman’s biggest political risk going forward is the potential to face an opponent in the Democratic primary in 2028.
It’s too early to say whether such a challenge would be successful. But Mike Mikus, a longtime Democratic political operative, said Fetterman appeared to be losing support the fastest among those paying the closest attention — those most likely to vote in a primary election.
“He is going so far so fast it's giving people whiplash, and anybody paying attention will view him as somebody who can't be trusted because he'll say or do anything to get elected,” Mikus said.
It will be easy to attack Fetterman in a primary, Mikus said, because he once cast himself as a “Bernie Bro” who accused Conor Lamb of sharing the conciliatory stances of former West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin.
“He ran against Joe Manchin, and right after this election, he turned into Joe Manchin,” Mikus said.
Mikus and other experts said the outcry against Fetterman more closely resembles the early outcry against former Arizona Sen. Krysten Sinema, who lost the support of the base in her party without picking up much conservative support despite her attempts to play the role of “maverick.” Sinema ultimately did not run for reelection.
Like Fetterman, Sinema was elected as a progressive in a swing state. She was one of the first openly bisexual candidates and, like Fetterman, had an attention-grabbing wardrobe. But Sinema was often the sole Democrat to oppose her party on key issues, like how to fund their plans to expand the child tax credit.
Unlike Manchin or Sinema, Fetterman had been a solid vote for the Democratic agenda of Joe Biden — however much he angered progressives with his stance on Israel.
But Fetterman’s attempt to pivot to the center since the election, Mikus said, risked coming across as “flip-flopping,” undermining Fetterman’s core image as “authentic.”
“He spent years building a brand: His brand was that he was an unapologetic progressive. … He sold merchandise saying Donald Trump is a jag-off,” Mikus said. “And now he's doing everything he can to get in Donald Trump's good graces. It is a political miscalculation the likes of which I've never seen.”
Tom Riese contributed reporting to this story.