John Fetterman torched the Democrat Party and wondered if it was possible for the left to ever win back huge chunks of the electorate.
The Pennsylvania Senator has staked out territory as a maverick willing to buck his party since Donald Trump won in November.
In an interview, Fetterman slammed the party’s attitude toward both Trump and the voters as hysterical scolds.
He even said that Democrats have ‘turned their back’ on white men and is ‘not sure if [it’s] possible’ to win them back because they’ve become the party’s scapegoat for everything wrong.
‘Men’s the problem. Men are to blame. Or their masculinity is toxic. Or unless you’re able to conform to our very strict kinds of definition of what we think’s appropriate, well, then, hey, I’m going to find an alternative. And they [men] have done that,’ he said.
He said the entire party has become a save haven for ‘shaming and scolding’ that has caused voters to abandon them.
‘I think their [Democrats’] primary currency was shaming and scolding and talking down to people and telling them, ‘Hey, I know better than you,’ or ‘You’re dopes,’ or ‘You’re a bro,’ or ‘You’re ignorant,’ or, you know, ‘Don’t you—how can you be this dumb?’
He also said that Democrats need to stop referring to Trump voters as fascists.
‘I know, and I love people that voted for Trump, and they’re not fascist, you know, they don’t support insurrection and those things,’ he said.
‘And if you go to an extreme and you become a boutique kind of a proposition, then you’re going to lose the argument. And then we have done that,’ Fetterman added.
He also criticized Democrats for refusing to consider many of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, including now-Attorney General Pam Bondi, whom he voted for.
‘She was the Attorney General of the third-largest state [Florida] in the nation, and she was a DA for 17, 18 years. So, in terms of qualifications, she absolutely was a serious person,’ he said.
Bondi was confirmed with just Fetterman’s loan Democrat vote in a 54-46 margin.
‘And in her politics and other issues, I wouldn’t agree with those things. So if everything is a no, or everything is a freakout, or you refuse, or you demand purity in every interaction, then you’re never going to get anything done,’ Fetterman said.
Fetterman, an unwavering supporter of Israel in a Democrat Party often torn apart by Middle East relations, even expressed curiosity about Trump’s plot to take over Gaza.
‘I think it was more to kind of shake things up and start a very more honest conversation on Gaza,’ he said, while admitting it was ‘not serious.’
In January, Fetterman eschewed party lines to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
That made him the first Senate Democrat to make the trek down to Florida to sit down with the 78-year-old since he won the presidential election.
Fetterman also wrote in a post on X that he would ‘meet with anyone to secure some wins, including President Trump.’
Their meeting was first reported by CBS News as the lawmaker revealed he is willing to reach across the aisle after the president-elect won his state in the November election.
The move by the Pennsylvania Democrat is the latest in a series of actions that have drawn wrath from some liberals since he was elected to the Senate in 2022.
Fetterman was a co-sponsor of the Republican-led Laken Riley Act and voted for the bill in the Senate after it passed in the House.
The legislation introduced by Republicans expands the detention of immigrants convicted of crimes including burglary and shoplifting.
Fetterman argued if immigrants in the U.S. illegally commit crimes, it should not be controversial to detain them.
But the bill also expands the powers of state attorneys general who claim their states have been harmed by immigration policies to sue the federal government.
Some immigrant advocacy groups have warned it would hand state officials veto power over federal immigration policy, cause chaos over immigration cases in the court system and threatens due process.
But Fetterman is one of several Senate Democrats who came out in support of the bill.
The senator has also faced criticism from liberals for his willingness to meet with some of Trump’s other more controversial Cabinet picks including sitting down with Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whom he eventually voted against.
Fetterman has pushed back that it is his job as a senator to vet nominees and that means meeting with them.
For more than a year now, the Pennsylvania Democrat has also stood up to anger from progressives for his staunch support of Israel since the October 7, 2023 attack while calling for the return of hostages taken by Hamas.
In 2022, Fetterman won the Pennsylvania Senate race with more than 51 percent of the vote or by more than 260,000 votes.
But Pennsylvania flipped red in 2024 when Trump was elected in the presidential race with just over 50 percent of the vote despite Fetterman campaigning heavily first for President Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris.
Their meeting will be a far cry from the attacks lobbed from both sides on the campaign trail.
Trump was a leading critic of Fetterman as he helped campaign for his opponent, Dr. Oz, in the 2022 midterms.
He even baselessly accused the then-Senate candidate and lieutenant governor of using drugs and called him a ‘raging lunatic’ and a ‘marxist.’
Fetterman blasted Trump for lying about him in the midterm. In the 2024 election, he warned of the dangers of the Republican ticket while hitting the campaign trail for Harris.
