If a worker at a Sheetz gas station approached their job the way John Fetterman does, they’d be fired within a week. It’s one of the many irrational things about our economy and system of labor. If you make ten bucks an hour selling hot dogs and coffee to truckers, you have little room for error. Misplace a $20 bill, flout the company dress code, or pull the infamous “no-call, no-show,” and in an at-will employment state like Pennsylvania, you can lose your job that same day. But if you pull down a much higher rate of pay, at taxpayer expense, and the stakes of your job are far higher, apparently any notion of professional standards or accountability disappears. You can wear your gross sweatpants to formal events, be a massive jerk to anyone who even slightly questions you, blow off sick children and veterans who need your help, and just plain fail to show up for work. In short, you can get away with being John Fetterman.

Ever since he got elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, a steady stream of reports have been coming out that indicate Fetterman is horrible at his job, and at existing in public generally. Back in 2024, he got into a car crash on a Maryland highway, which police records describe as his fault; soon afterward, former members of his staff told the New York Times that he “often made video calls and read news articles on his phone while driving,” to the extent that they were scared to get in a car with him. This was around the time Fetterman stopped pretending to care about his constituents’ concerns. That same year, when a Pennsylvania environmental activist asked him about methane gas pipelines, he responded by rolling his eyes, ignoring her question, filming her on his phone, and then escaping into an elevator. Criticism from the public, apparently, is beneath him now.

There are some people Fetterman listens to, though. This May, New York magazine reported that the senator takes key advice on Israel and Palestine from a man named David Safier, who is “not an official staffer or paid outside adviser,” but a pro-Israel activist who, according to Fetterman’s actual staffers, “just kind of appeared” at his office. Safier’s involvement in policy conversations is reportedly extensive, including helping to arrange private talks with Israeli leaders, and his “influence has grown” as Fetterman increasingly isolates himself from other congressional Democrats. The whole relationship is strange and worrying, and it may help explain why the senator continues to support Israel no matter how many blatant war crimes it commits.

But all of that is just a prelude, compared to the reporting that just came out from the Wall Street Journal. In an extensive new investigative piece from journalists Will Hobson and Siobhan Hughes, we see even more evidence that Fetterman “shows little interest in the work of a senator,” often ignoring and blowing off the constituents who need him most in order to spend more time “cultivating relationships with conservative media figures and advocating for Israel.” Wading through more than a dozen reports from sources on Capitol Hill, together with leaked text messages from the senator himself, Hobson and Hughes recount story after story following this pattern, each more distasteful than the last.

There’s the time Fetterman canceled a meeting with “three paralyzed military veterans,” claiming he felt sick—only to show up for an interview with Fox News less than an hour later, looking perfectly fine. There’s the time he refused to attend a funeral for three dead policemen, killed on duty, because it was three hours long and had a “formal” dress code. (No hoodies allowed.) But the incident that shows his basic failure as a human being, let alone a public servant, most clearly is his interaction with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). It’s a nonprofit hospital, and like many such facilities, faces funding challenges after the Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” cuts. But as a text exchange reveals, Fetterman isn’t terribly concerned about that:

FETTERMAN: Why do I have to keep meeting with chop

 

AIDE: Because they are worried about vaccines and Medicaid cuts

 

FETTERMAN: Well I’m not

FETTERMAN: I’m convinced they just want free trips to DC

More than any of the other leaked texts, this feels like a glimpse into the core of Fetterman’s values, or lack thereof. Here, he was faced with a group of doctors who were badly worried that children might lose access to their medical treatments—something that’s already happening all over the country, with rural hospitals and those that serve low-income patients closing by the dozen. But Fetterman’s response was to say, well, I’m not worried. I don’t care. They’re just freeloaders looking for a tour of the Capitol. You’d have to be a really special piece of work to even formulate that thought, let alone type it out and hit “send.” And you certainly have no business in public office, where you’re supposed to be accountable to the people of your state, if that’s your attitude toward them.

Reading the Wall Street Journal’s exposé, one thought comes inexorably to mind: you’d never catch Zohran Mamdani pulling that crap. There’s a striking contrast between the two leaders, because Fetterman never misses an opportunity to slam Mamdani in the media, calling him “not even a Democrat, honestly” and labeling him a “clown” for his hostility to Benjamin Netanyahu. But who’s wearing the floppy shoes and the red nose here? In the ten months since he took office, Mamdani has been reminding America that public officials can actually use the government to make people’s lives better, whether it’s crooked landlords, expensive childcare, or just potholes. He’s made a point of listening to New Yorkers who have little power or money, announcing that “no problem is too small to fix”: apparently, his team scours social media for people who point out a bad piece of pavement in their neighborhood, and just sends someone to repair it, sometimes that same day. If those people had John Fetterman to call on, they’d still be waiting months later. He’d just ignore their messages, and go record his next interview with Jesse Watters about how great the war with Iran is.

Instead, the figure Fetterman most closely resembles is Donald Trump. Fittingly, Fetterman spoke at the Republican midterm convention yesterday—although even there, he didn’t actually show up, but sent in a pre-recorded video from a steel plant where he promised to “work with President Trump to fight and defend the steel way of life.” It was Trump, more than a decade ago, who pioneered a style of politics where serving the public is never even considered—where everything is about bluster, ego, and callous selfishness. Plenty of people have picked up that style and run with it, from Ted Cruz to Matt Gaetz, and now Fetterman is just another. Between Trump mocking a disabled reporter in 2015, and Fetterman apparently playing sick to avoid meeting disabled veterans today, there’s not really much daylight.

Now, Fetterman is facing mounting calls to resign. “If there is a decent bone left in your body, just quit. It’s an insult to decent people in our state for you to treat them and the office this way,” says former state representative Conor Lamb, who ran against Fetterman in the Democratic primary in 2022. Representative Brendan Boyle of Philadelphia calls him a “disgrace,” and says that “Pennsylvania deserves better.” Representative Joe Walsh, too, says that “He’s just not doing the job of a United States Senator. Not even close. He’s not well. He needs help. He should resign.”

It’s an open question exactly how unwell Fetterman is, though it does seem that he’s never been the same since his near-fatal stroke and six-week hospital stay for clinical depression. But really, it doesn’t matter. He shouldn’t be in Congress whether he’s well or not. The Wall Street Journal reports that he frequently skips votes and congressional hearings, missing “11 of the 12 full hearings that year of his assigned committees—Homeland Security, Commerce and Agriculture.” Apparently he’s even sought out, and received, advice from Republican Senator Katie Britt about how to get marked “present” for official duties and then leave. As the Intelligencer put it, he has already “quiet quit.”

In any other job in the United States, if you only show up whenever you happen to feel like it, you will get fired. If it happens to the rest of us, it should happen to senators, too.

In another recent report, Spotlight PA writes that instead of doing anything useful, Fetterman often uses his working hours “to scroll on his phone, reading X and Apple News for mentions of his name.” That means there’s a decent chance he’ll read this, too. So John, I’m talking to you directly. It’s time to go, and deep down I think you know it. Only a few years ago, you were genuinely liked and admired by huge numbers of progressive Democrats. (Although somewhat less so by this magazine.) When you had your stroke, people felt sympathy for you. Now, all that’s gone. Virtually everyone who helped you get elected in 2022 has turned away from you in disgust, and rightly so. Even Tré Easton, who used to be one of your closest advisors, now describes you as a “soulless ghoul[…] an embarrassment to the commonwealth and fundamentally unfit for public office.” Self-awareness is not your strong suit, but on some level, you have to know he’s telling the truth. You have become totally derelict in your duty to the people of Pennsylvania, and loyal only to AIPAC and Fox News. And as Dostoevsky wrote, “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” There will be no great legislative achievements, no government programs bearing your name. When the summations of your career are written, if anyone bothers to remember you at all, you’ll be remembered as the guy who kept sending more bombs for Netanyahu to kill children with. At this point, the only halfway dignified route left to you is to resign, retire to a quiet home in Braddock, and never speak in front of a microphone again.

Otherwise, it’ll be a long, embarrassing two years until 2028 comes. Right now, your poll numbers with Pennsylvania voters show that you’d lose a re-election bid even if the other option on the ballot was simply “someone else.” The abstract concept of your absence is more popular than you, and the margin is not close. And Pennsylvania has a crop of rising leftist politicians—from Summer Lee, to Chris Rabb, to Malcolm Kenyatta—who make no secret of their disdain for you. A lot of people would like nothing better than to “put an ogre on a pike,” as Abdul El-Sayed colorfully put it. Ask your fellow-travelers, Diana DeGette, Dan Goldman, and Sharif Street, how that story goes. You don’t want to be sitting alone on election night, watching those results roll in. Leave quietly, while you still have a choice.