People Are Real

The tragedy of John Fetterman.

Hey fam: Last night Sarah, Tim, and I did an AMA for members. (You can catch the replay here.) This morning Sarah and I extended the questions into a super-sized Secret Pod. Look for this later today in your feed.

Not gonna lie: This show is an instant classic. You’re going to love it.

Today’s newsletter is open for everyone, but the Secret is just for Bulwark+ members. If you join just for this episode, you won’t regret it. Promise.

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: Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., talks with reporters after the senate luncheons in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, April 29, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

1. Fetterman

I’m pretty sure I was the first person to suggest that John Fetterman could run for president. I love the guy. I think some version of him could be powerfully attractive in American politics in the near term.

But this story about Fetterman in New York Magazine is a tough read. Some excerpts:

When John Fetterman was released from Walter Reed hospital in March 2023, Adam Jentleson, then his chief of staff, was proud of his boss for seeking help for what the senator’s office and his doctor had said was a case of clinical depression. His six weeks of inpatient care had been the latest medical setback for the Pennsylvania Democrat, who had had a stroke mere months before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, nearly derailing his campaign against Republican Mehmet Oz. But a year after his release from the hospital, Fetterman’s behavior had so alarmed Jentleson that he resigned his position. In May 2024, he wrote an urgent letter to David Williamson, the medical director of the traumatic-brain-injury and neuropsychiatry unit at Walter Reed, who had overseen Fetterman’s care at the hospital. “I think John is on a bad trajectory and I’m really worried about him,” the email began. If things didn’t change, Jentleson continued, he was concerned Fetterman “won’t be with us for much longer.”

His 1,600-word email came with the subject line “concerns,” and it contained a list of them, from the seemingly mundane (“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.”

Fetterman was, according to Jentleson, avoiding the regular checkups advised by his doctors. He was preoccupied with the social-media platform X, which he’d previously admitted had been a major “accelerant” of his depression. He drove his car so “recklessly,” Jentleson said, that staff refused to ride with him. He had also bought a gun. “He says he has a biometric safe and takes all the necessary precautions, and living where he does I understand the desire for personal protection,” Jentleson wrote, referring to Fetterman’s rough-and-tumble town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. “But this is one of the things you said to flag, so I am flagging.”

Another red flag, Jentleson added: “Every person who was supposed to help him stay on his recovery plan has been pushed out.” Fetterman was isolated, had “damaged personal relationships,” and was shedding staff. The turmoil in his office continued over the following year. Since winning election in 2022, he has lost his closest advisers, including three of his top spokespeople, his legislative director, and Jentleson. His circle of trust has shrunk, and people I spoke with made it clear that they expect more staffers to depart.

There’s more and there’s worse.

For me, the story is a reminder of a truth I frequently forget: These people are human beings, too.

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If you’ve been up close with high-level politicians you know that they often don’t seem like real people.

There is a level of charisma and gregariousness to (most) successful politicians that is waaaaayyyyy out to the right-hand side of the bell curve.

You watch Bill Clinton, or George W. Bush, or Chris Christie, or Kamala Harris work a room and they’re savants. The EQ equivalent of Rain Main counting cards.

Let me give you an example.

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In 2004 I spent a lot of time following John Kerry around on the campaign trail. Kerry is typically seen as a wooden and uncharismatic politician. And compared to Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan he is.

But Kerry would walk into a VFW Hall with a couple hundred old white guys who were never going to vote for him, and he’d take questions for an hour, and at the end of the event I’d watch these vets telling one another, I don’t agree with him on much and I ain’t gonna vote for him. But you know what? He’s a good guy. I like him.

If John Kerry had that kind of juice, you can barely imagine what a guy like Clinton was like, in the flesh.¹

This is a super power and the politicians who have it might as well be meta-humans.

And yet, they are still people. They bleed. They age. They decline.

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One of my struggles in the Trump era has been getting my head around shamelessness. If Bill Clinton was a shameless liar—and he was, in all of the normal political ways—how do you describe someone like Donald Trump?

Pathological? Sociopathic? I didn’t really have the framework to understand how a real person could act like Trump.

And I absolutely did not have the framework for understanding how an entire class of actors—from Ted Cruz, to Marco Rubio, to Matt Schlapp, to JD Vance—could suddenly move from the “ordinary” shamlessness of political life to . . . whatever Trump was?

That’s one of the reasons it’s so comforting to watch Rubio’s soul being tormented. We can see that Rubio is paying a price internally for his choices. The way a real person would.

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This is all the long way of saying that if even a quarter of what’s in this piece about John Fetterman is true, then I hope he resigns from the Senate and gets the help he needs.

He’s a real person.

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2. Biden’s Economy

I can’t even.

Ross now thinks that the Biden economy was good, actually. I’m not sure which is worse—this, or the fawning interview with the white nationalist. Either way, the NYT is choosing to make its audience dumber.

I’m interested in what the business logic is here.

First, let’s assume that there is some.²

Could it be that Douthat drives reader engagement for the NYT? Or is a meaningful source of subscription revenue? Or ad revenue?

If so, would that mean that the Times audience is less liberal than is generally assumed?

Or maybe, the Times audience is exactly as liberal as we assume, but has a masochism kink?

I’d like to hear your genuine theories about why this guy still has a job.

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3. Tariffs and the Auto Industry

If you have 37 minutes and want a deep dive on how Trump’s tariffs touch the auto industry, you’ll get a lot of value from this video.

1. Someone—I think it was Joe Klein?—observed that Clinton would “put on the big ears” when listening to a person, and the voter would feel like they had been pulled into a black hole where he and Clinton were the only people in existence and Clinton cared about nothing except hearing what the voter had to say.

2. I’m only assuming it for the sake of argument. It is equally possible that Douthat’s NYT career is attributable to non-business logic. Either that he fits with the paper’s meta self-conceit; or that he has a patron high up in the organization.

I just don’t want to assume that there isn’t some business logic.