The New Yorker Radio Hour - John Fetterman’s Move to the Right on Israel

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

Many Democrats saw John Fetterman as a progressive beacon: a Rust Belt Bernie Sanders who – with his shaved head, his hoodie, and the zip code of Braddock, Pennsylvania – could rally working-class white voters to the Democratic Party. But at least on one issue, Fetterman is veering away from the left of his party, and even from centrists like Majority Leader Chuck Schumer: Israel’s war in Gaza. Fetterman has taken a line that is not just sympathetic to Israel after the October 7th attack by Hamas; he seems to justify the civilian death toll Israel has inflicted on Gaza.  “When you have that kind of an evil, or that kind of a movement that came out of a society,” he told Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “whether it was Nazi Germany or imperial Japan or the Confederacy here in the South, that kind of movement has to be destroyed. . . . that’s why Atlanta had to burn.” Wallace-Wells shares excerpts from his interviews with Fetterman in a conversation with David Remnick, and they discuss how Fetterman’s support for Israel is driving a wedge among Pennsylvania voters, who will be critical to the outcome of the Presidential election. John Fetterman’s War was published in the June 24, 2024, issue. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Nothing about John Federman's journey to the Senate was at all routine. He was a small town, Pennsylvania mayor, with a shaved head and a goatee, and the zip code for the town of Braddock tattooed on his arm. He has a pension for cursing, sometimes loudly, and he won the Senate race against Mehmet Oz, Dr. Oz, a celebrity favorite of Donald Trump. And through it all, he kept making waves, dressing in shorts and a hoodie on the Senate floor,

an act which prompted a motion to require senators to dress more professionally. Many Democrats saw Federman as a potential progressive beacon, a rust belt Bernie Sanders, someone who could rally working class voters to the Democratic Party. I ran as a proud progressive. I was the only candidate in the entire country to endorse Bernie Sanders for president. I was the only candidate to be for the full legalization of marijuana. I led with immigration. My wife, Giselle, who's in the audience, a former dreamer.

But at least on one issue, Federman is veering away from many of his colleagues in the party, and that is Israel's war in Gaza. When a measure was introduced in the Senate officially supporting a two-state solution, And Federman was one of the only two Democrats who refused to support it. He's been not just sympathetic to Israel's losses on October 7th, but insistently uncritical of the Netanyahu government, even after losses in Gaza began numbering in the tens of thousands. Now, Pennsylvania is a crucial state in the presidential race,

and Federman's ability to rally Pennsylvania voters or not rally them may be hugely consequential for Joe Biden. who could ill afford to lose that state. Staff writer Benjamin Wallace Wells has been reporting on Federman for a profile that we just published in The New Yorker. Ben, two years ago,

while John Federman was running for Senate in the state of Pennsylvania, he had a stroke, and after he was elected, he checked himself into the hospital suffering from really profound depression, as far as we know. What's been the impact of the stroke

and the depression on his working life as a senator now? I mean, it's pretty striking. You know, for one thing, the stroke and then the depression effectively took him out of circulation for the first half of his first year as a senator. You know, additionally, he tends to keep a pretty light schedule. You know, he doesn't get into Washington often until Tuesday. You know, he returns home at the end of the day Thursday. He skips the Senate caucus lunch.

And so just at a practical level, it sort of delayed his introduction to the end of the day, the normal, you know, social life of being a U.S. Senator and just the working life of being in D.C. But, you know, more obviously on a day-to-day level, it changes almost every conversation he has. Everybody that he talks to, every conversation he engages in, runs through a transcription app, which prints out, you know, the words that other people are saying and that he is saying on his phone. So he's looking at his phone while he's talking to somebody else, and then their words show up, And I noticed when you were talking with him, unless you were using very measured sentences, he would get confused because the transcription would show up correctly. Yeah, exactly. It's nothing happening in his mind. It's just that, you know, the audio detection and transcription is imperfect. And so, you know, complex sentences, things with caveats, you know, all of that kind of gets muddled or lost. And so you end up self-editing. You know, you end up asking very direct kind of questions.

What does Federman say about his own health, particularly about his depression now? He says that he's through it effectively. And, you know, he is pretty transparent about how difficult it was. You know, he talks about feeling ambivalent about whether he lived or died. You know, he and his wife both talk about it in terms of, you know, self-harm. It sounds like there's a pretty serious episode. I also would say he's pretty sick of talking about it at this point. point, and like he'd like to put it in his past. Based on his work in local and state government,

what was the general perception of Federman among Democrats when he first entered the Senate? Who was he going to be? I think the perception was he was going to be a progressive. You know, he had been a pretty staunch supporter of Bernie Sanders' first campaign in 2016. He built his political brand around many of those issues. Weed legalization was a huge one for him, but also, you know, $15 an hour minimum wage, also Medicare for All. He had sort of tapered some of that association. He pulled back a little bit from that in the campaign in which he won in 2022. But, you know, as lieutenant governor, he had been a huge champion of pardoning people with very long sentences and of criminal justice reform generally. So I think there was a pretty fair expectation that this

would be, you know, if not quite another Bernie, one of the most left-leaning members of the U.S. Senate. And what happened? Well, October 7th is one way of thinking about it. You know, most notably, most strikingly, and most publicly, he followed, you know, the horrors of the October 7th attack by committing himself to the Israeli cause in a way that, you know, just about no other Democrat and in many ways no other politician was.

And that had some policy sort of arms. You know, he was a very rare senator not to be willing to sign on, to a resolution affirming a two-state solution. But it also was just sort of, you know, he's somebody who's very much a media presence and a kind of, it's very good at getting media attention. And he just was always aligning himself with the Israeli cause in a sort of, you know, maximalist way. What are the roots of that?

Well, there aren't many roots, you know. I mean, the interesting thing about Federman on this issue is that he's not Jewish. He had never been to the Middle East. He serves on no foreign policy committees. He had said he was pro-Israeli in a kind of offhand way in a campaign context. But he'd never had to weigh in on this at all. He did experience, he had one experience that some people think was important, which is that the tree of life shooting,

the shooting at the synagogue in Pittsburgh that killed 11 worshippers, a crazed anti-Semite, that's a place very near to where. His kids go to school. He became close with the rabbi. He suspended his at the time as the lieutenant governor campaign to go. He commemorates the date of it. So there is that. But, you know, beyond that, people on all sides of the Israel issue looking back have had a hard time finding much of any evidence that would point him in the direction he took. His account is that he was incredibly moved by the accounts of survivors, by the hostage families he met with. and that he also, and I think this is significant,

had sort of an underlying feeling going back a couple of years that the Democratic Party should not be defined by its left wing and that its left wing was beginning to go too far. And so that, I think, becomes important in the context of the Israeli Gaza War. I'm talking with Ben Wallace-Wells about Senator John Federman of Pennsylvania. We'll continue in a moment.

His sympathy for the hostages and the people killed on October 7th is more than understandable. How has he reacted to Israel's incursion and war on Gaza, which estimates are at around 35,000 dead at this point? His top line is, I'm for no conditions. He will not criticize the Netanyahu government. He will downplay any human rights concerns about children or aid convoys

or innocent people, be it. struck, killed, disrupted. He says, I will re-center every conversation about Israel on Hamas and on October 7th, you know, and make clear that it is Hamas's fault what is happening. And so he has, you know, not just had an attachment to and a sympathy with the hostage families and the victims of the attacks, but his politics, his read of what is happening is really, you know, completely defined by that in a way that permits no, no conditions. as he says. Ben, let's hear a bit of your conversation with him about this. To do those kinds of awful, terrible kinds of things, and they film that. Yeah. And what part of the

human soul is that, where does that come from? Yeah. That does those kind of a thing. And with, with not just like a duty, but with actual glee. And they were just excited to be doing. Yes. And it's like, oh, by the way, I'm about ready to go massacons. rape and torture a bunch of people. By the way, where's the battery for the GoPro? You know, like, it's just twisted. And that's the kind of evil

that it should not be allowed to survive or at least not be functional. Fetterman lives in a small town outside Pittsburgh called Braddock and a group of pro-Palestidian protesters showed up to the house. What happened there and how did Fetterman

handle the encounter? It's pretty striking. So it's the middle of the winter. It's a time when the Senate is in recess. His house is a former auto showroom in the middle of this sort of run-down little industrial town. So it's sort of the only prominent striking building in the town. It's very visible. Also notably has a flat roof. And so the protesters get there and their plan is to read excerpts of Palestinian narratives of the war. and there's about 250 of them. They're getting set up, and they notice, you know, this enormous figure up on the roof, and it's Federman.

And he's, you know, six foot eight. He's got the build of the college football player he once was. It's, you know, evening, and he stands up on his roof, and he spreads this enormous Israeli flag. And everything's sort of silent for a minute. Then the protesters start chanting anti-genocide chants. He's up there for two years. maybe three minutes, he goes back inside.

Well, here's Federman and his wife, Giselle. I think that you shouldn't target homes, especially if there's children. Yeah. Because essentially what those two peace groups did is they docks my children who are under 18 and federal crime. Yeah.

So I think you can protest anywhere you'd like, but I think docs in children. There should be consequences for having. You can protest it. Anything that's... but they chose to come out here. And I was up on the roof listening to it. And then they started to get ugly and started yelling about genocide.

And my 10-year-old was in here. Yeah. And then I was just like, you know, just, I don't really know why it's anything other than just an appropriate. I just showed the Israeli flag. I'm not sure why that would be provocative or anything. Now, Ben, draping himself in the flag, if you want to get rid of protesters, I don't know, it sounds like waving a red flag at them somehow.

Why did he do what he did? I think he wanted to make a stand. You know, I think that he knew that, you know, a video of him on top of a roof holding a huge Israeli flag is something that will get photographed and shared. And he didn't want to be the guy who's pro-Israel halfway if he was going to do it. He wanted everybody to know about it. I think there's also another element, which is that, you know, it is confrontational with the protesters. It does make it somewhat about them, you know.

It calls attention to what they're doing to maybe their, what he would say is excesses to their kind of crossing a line and coming to his home. And I think he probably didn't want them to get away with it. Well, let's hear a little bit more from Federman, and here he is talking about Hamas. I do think it's a fact that when you have that kind of an, you know, evil and that kind of a movement that came out of a society, whether it was Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, or the Confederacy here in the South. That kind of movement has to be destroyed into submission. And that society that gave birth to it has to now reach a point where I have to turn our back to that kinds of views and that kinds of pursuits. and now both Japan and Germany,

who are pacifists, nations, and the Confederacy surrendered, and that's why Atlanta had to burn. That's why Atlanta had to burn. What does that mean to him? That's why Gaza has to burn? That's certainly how I took it. That seemed to me pretty clearly his implication.

What he was saying was, you know, it's not just the political or terroristic leader, of Hamas that needs to be ended in this war. It's the underlying what he says, society that supports it that has to have its opinions changed by force. That's, to me, a pretty eyebrow-raising, striking and very extreme construction of what Israel must do in a sort of defense of the war. It's not just saying, you know, we're at war with Hamas, with the leadership of this militant organization. It's saying we're at war with the people of Gaza. What's complicated to understand about that is that in the Democratic Party, even Chuck Schumer, who's the Senate majority leader and who himself is Jewish, and he comes from a congressional district when he was in the House that was heavily Jewish and has never been a leftist outlier on this issue.

has turned very, very critical of Netanyahu and his conduct of the war. So to hear this from John Federman, who came into the Senate, as a progressive, as somebody who identified on the left, is, to my mind, surprising. Absolutely. Not only somebody who came into the Senate as a progressive and was identified as on the left, but, you know, came in just a year and a half ago and is not, you know, somebody who has been embedded in this issue. for him to be moving, you know, past Chuck Schumer and past many centrist Democrats, many pro-Israel Democrats, is, yeah, unexpected in every way.

Has he been critical of President Biden on this issue? A little bit, you know, when President Biden sought to pause arms shipments to Israel over the Rafa operation, he was a very, very rare Democrat who stepped out and said, no, I think that's a bad idea. The arms shipments should continue. This thing keeping with this sort of no conditions. But in general, I would say he is eager to say not only that he is aligned with President Biden generally, but that what he is doing is in service of President Biden's reelection, that in order for the Democrats to remain viable in places like Pennsylvania,

in order for Biden to win this election, he's got to keep from having the party become hostage to the left, effectively. Famously, we've got six swing states. Pennsylvania is crucial. If Biden doesn't win Pennsylvania, it's really trouble. What role does Federman play there? I think, you know, six months ago, both I and the Federman people would have said a really big role. You know, Federman in his own campaigns was pretty crucial at helping the Democrats reach white voters, often without college degrees and rural parts of the state, the exact kind of people who are swinging either away from the party or even more towards Trump. Now, you know, it's complicated. When I was there, it was Pride, and he wasn't able to go to Pittsburgh Pride or even Gettysburg Pride, which was their backup plan, because they were worried about there being too many protesters. And so, you know, even his presence in a kind of mundane way now stirs up all this conversation about the antipathy of the left towards Biden administration on Israel, but the Biden campaign also. I think the Biden campaign would really prefer not to have be part of the story. So, you know, I don't know. I could see a situation in which he's a real asset to the Biden campaign. And I think he does really believe in Biden. But I could also see a situation in which it just becomes so complicated and so sort of self-negating that everybody involves says, maybe this is not a great decision. Maybe we're better off not dealing with this. And he takes a pretty small role. We'll see.

And what would that mean if he takes just a small role? In other words, how influential is he in Pennsylvania? If he's not a strong surrogate for Biden there, do you see that affecting the outcome of the election? There is something that is interesting here, just in that, you know, the promise that he once had was exactly that he would play this role in this coming election, and now it seems that's a little less likely to be the case.

Things are pretty entrenched. Biden and Trump have their fans and people who hate them. And, you know, as interesting as Fetterman is, I don't know that he has the power or the profile to change that basic line of scrimmage. Thanks, Ben. Good to talk with you. Thank you. You can read John Fetterman's War by Benjamin Wallace Wells

at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program. I want to thank you for joining us. See you soon. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell.

This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuckerman. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccett. And we had additional help from Ursula Summer. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trurina Endowment Fund.