John Fetterman has always been an eccentric character on a star-crossed path.
He is the only United States senator who has adopted a hoodie as his official uniform.
He is also the only one who suffered a stroke on the eve of his primary victory, making it difficult for him to speak, but won the general election anyway.
And the Pennsylvania Democrat doesn’t toe the line on all party positions, especially when it comes to his fierce support for Israel.
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But now comes a troubling story in New York Magazine that casts the senator in a much darker light.
The New York Times put it this way: Fetterman’s former chief of staff “was so alarmed with his ex-boss’s erratic behavior last year that he wrote a lengthy letter to his doctor warning that the senator was spiraling out of control and that his mental health issues could cost him his life.”
The staffer, Adam Jentleson, added in writing Fetterman’s Walter Reed doctor: “I’m worried that if John stays on his current trajectory he won’t be with us for much longer.”
Other former staff members told the Times that colleagues were sometimes “frightened” to be in his presence when he was manic, and that his “volatile” behavior has gotten worse since the election.
Fetterman issued a statement saying that “my ACTUAL doctors and my family affirmed that I’m very well.” He called the magazine story a “hit piece” and promoted the idea that its author, Ben Terris, was “best friends” with Jentleson and that they “sourced anonymous, disgruntled staffers with lies or distorted half-truths.”
Terris, for his part, disclosed in the article that Adam Jentleson is a “personal friend.” So it wasn’t a state secret.
Jentleson wrote to the medical director who supervised Fetterman’s hospitalization for mental health problems in 2023: “He does not see his doctors. I am not sure when he last saw a cardiologist, but I don’t think he’s seen one since he was released. He long ago ordered us to stop putting regular drop-bys with Dr. Monahan on his schedule, despite the fact that he had agreed to those as part of the plan.” Brian Monahan is the Capitol and Supreme Court physician.
Fetterman was the first Democratic senator to visit Trump, who carried Pennsylvania and the other swing states, at Mar-a-Lago.
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Jentleson wrote another doctor: “We do not know if he is taking his meds, and his behavior frequently suggests he is not.”
Among other things, wrote Jentleson, his ex-boss drives recklessly and recently bought a gun. There are “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.”
Joe Biden, who does his first post-White House interview today, with his wife on “The View,” is a whole other story.
His problem was not depression but making other Democrats depressed when he insisted on running for a second term. We now know how his wife and his staff protected him from the press and even his own staff to avoid revealing his mental decline.
And that blew up on them in the horrible debate with Trump. Ron Klain has gone on the record with his frustration that his longtime boss walked out on one prep session and fell asleep by the pool.
Now comes a new revelation in a forthcoming book by Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal, Tyler Pager of the New York Times and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post.
The Times writes, citing the book, that “his top White House aides debated having him undergo a cognitive test to prove his fitness for a second term” in the early weeks of 2024.
Here was the dilemma, according to “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America.” And that’s an accurate title.
Biden’s closest aides “worried that the mere fact of his taking one would raise new questions about his mental abilities.”
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Which is precisely what would have happened. Rather than persuading the former president not to run, they wouldn’t even let him do a soft-focus Super Bowl interview.
During this period in 2022, the Times published an interview with David Axelrod, the former Obama White House official turned CNN commentator. Axelrod said Biden “looks his age”–then 79–and added: “The stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue.”
Axelrod angrily called Klain, then the chief of staff, to ask why he was fueling doubts about a Democratic president.
“There’s no Obama out there, Axe,” Klain told him, according to the book. “Who’s going to do it if he doesn’t do it?”
This was also around the time that special counsel Robert Hur, declining to prosecute Biden on the classified documents he voluntarily turned over, called the president “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” That seems incredibly mild now. Biden held a news conference to declare his memory was fine, but referred to the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico.
Talk about good days and bad days. Everyone has bad days, but it has national and international resonance when it involves a senator or a president.
None of this should be used to stigmatize those with mental health or mental acuity problems. But there are red flags here that deepen our understanding of what’s really happening.
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