politics

Some highlights. These quotes are only from the first quarter of the article. The article is very long, but maybe worth reading. "Struggle" in the title refers to Fetterman's staffers saying that he is unfit for the job as Senator.

(“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.”

He drove his car so “recklessly,” Jentleson said, that staff refused to ride with him. He had also bought a gun.

With the Democratic Party out of power and fighting with itself about how to move forward, it would be easy to imagine a “Fetterman 2028” machine kicking into gear.
Instead, many of his former staffers are hoping it never happens.

Former and current staffers paint a picture of an erratic senator who has become almost impossible to work for and whose mental-health situation is more serious and complicated than previously reported.
When I spoke with Fetterman in April and shared those concerns, he denied anything was amiss. He told me that he felt like the “best version” of himself and later texted that the staff turnover at his office was typical of Washington.

New York Times reached out to Fetterman’s team about a donation the campaign had received from a super-PAC associated with FTX, the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency company started by Sam Bankman-Fried. The Times reported that the PAC had spent $212,000 supporting Fetterman

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.

Doctors there determined there had been no new stroke and 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. Fetterman then stood up and began walking around the office in tight loops, a move the two staffers described as doing “figure eights.”