Quick Take: John Fetterman, Exploited

With friends like this, who needs enemies...?

Senator Fetterman and his éminence grise on their first day at the office

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Senator John Fetterman’s hospitalization for severe depression, just six weeks after he assumed office, is 2023’s least surprising news story so far. We all knew that something like this would happen, right?

Also unsurprising is the reaction of the usual media suspects. Having acquiesced in—or colluded with—his handlers’ coverup of Fetterman’s condition after he suffered a severe stroke on the eve of the Pennsylvania Democratic primaries, they’re now trying to reframe a horrible story about the mistreatment and political exploitation of a sick man as a tale of heroism and candor.

Really, it’s enough to gag a maggot.

When Fetterman stroked out, his political handlers—with his wife very much in the lead—did all they could to minimize what had happened. Gisele Barreto Fetterman described the stroke as a minor blip. It was no big deal, she insisted; after a brief time-out, her husband would be fit to resume his campaign for a Pennsylvania Senate seat.

This was a lie. And much of the media went along with it.

The stroke left Fetterman significantly disabled, with severe speech and auditory problems. We know now that he was clearly unfit to continue as a candidate. As any physician will attest, the months immediately following a stroke are critical. The patient must spend those days and weeks concentrating on recovery and rehabilitation, to the exclusion of all other matters. If he does not, that time is lost—and with it goes the chance for the fullest possible recovery.

John Fetterman was deprived of that chance, thanks to the selfish ambitions of his wife and his political team.

So now the journalists who played a role in that atrocious breach of trust are striving to clean up the story. In their telling, it’s all about the challenges faced by disabled people. It’s about John Fetterman’s courage and, of course, it’s about the wonderfulness of his ever-supportive wife. Here’s a cringe-inducing example of the fawning over Gisele, from The Atlantic. How the writer, Sara Stewart, managed to complete this piece without losing her lunch, I don’t know.

It strikes me as doubtful that John Fetterman is feeling at all courageous. Hospitalized for severe depression, he must be acutely conscious of the road that led him there. Depression, as I well know from the similar experience of a family member, is one of the aftereffects of stroke. The patient knows that he’s not the man he used to be, and fears that he’ll never make it all the way back. The extent to which he does recover is contingent on the work he puts into recovery, which is a long, arduous, frequently disheartening process. It’s then, when the patient’s spirits are at their lowest ebb, that the love and support of friends and family are most vital.

John Fetterman got none of that. To put it shortly, brutally, but truthfully, he was hung out to dry by the people who should have placed his best interests above their own political ambitions. In an alternate reality where they did the right thing, Fetterman might have recovered sufficiently to resume his political career at a later date. Instead, he was pushed past the limit of his endurance, and his victory in the 2020 election was a poisoned chalice.

The political dimension of this story is beside the point. Had Fetterman dropped out, the Pennsylvania Democratic Party would have had no trouble finding another candidate to put up against Dr. Mehmet Oz, the decidedly unimpressive GOP contender. But no, instead they ran a guy who had better things to do—like recover his health.

Shame on them all.