Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) is on a mission to remake his political image into one that is palatable to a new political state of affairs and recognizes the fact that his home state of Pennsylvania just voted for President-elect Donald Trump.
Fetterman’s latest rebranding effort began with meeting with some of Trump’s more controversial Cabinet nominees, and ended with making a Truth Social account. And in his first post on the platform, sounding more like a Republican than a Democrat, urged Trump to be pardoned for the “bulls**t” hush money case in New York City that allowed the Democratic Party to label Trump a convicted felon on the campaign trail.
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“The Trump hush money and Hunter Biden cases were both bulls**t, and pardons are appropriate,” Fetterman said in his post. “Weaponizing the judiciary for blatant, partisan gain diminishes the collective faith in our institutions and sows further division.”
And after his meetings with Trump’s nominees, Fetterman took his flirtations with Trump and MAGA even further. After meeting with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the president-elect’s nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations, Fetterman proudly professed his support for her nomination and said he supported defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which has been coopted by Hamas.
The next day, Fetterman made even more waves when he met with Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth and left the door open to supporting his nomination.
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“Honestly, I’d never heard of him before he was nominated. So it’s an opportunity to just have a discussion on … issues. I suspect there are some things we might agree on in terms of military, whether its China or Israel, and maybe disagree, perhaps on Ukraine,” he said before the meeting. “But I think it’s an opportunity to have a conversation.”
After the meeting, he refused to say whether he planned to vote for or against Hegseth’s nomination.
But as encouraging as Fetterman’s new openness to Republicans and conservative causes may be, he should still be treated as the Democrat that he is.
According to its official scorecard, in 2023, Fetterman voted 100% of the time with the stated position of the AFL-CIO, an umbrella organization for labor unions that espouses far-left policy positions on everything from immigration to abortion and economics.
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On the flip side, the conservative Heritage Action for America gives Fetterman a 7% score for the entirety of the 118th Congress, ranking him as one of the Senate’s most liberal members and below the average 11% score for Senate Democrats.
Fetterman may be doing his best to give the impression that he has moderated and recognizes that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has rejected his party and embraced Trump. But until he backs it up with his voting record, no one should fall for his political tricks.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
