Sen. John Fetterman says his mental health struggles have been ‘weaponized’ against him, shaming him into attending votes and hearings

Facing increasing scrutiny about his mental health and ability to perform his job, U.S. Sen. John Fetterman said he has been unfairly shamed into showing up for Senate votes and public hearings that he believes are a waste of his time, according to a New York Times article.

The first-term Pennsylvania Democrat, whose former staffers told the Inquirer earlier this month he isn’t doing the basic job of a U.S. senator, said in the Times interview published Saturday that he seeks to prove he is capable of performing his duties after the media has “weaponized” his absenteeism on Capitol Hill to depict him as mentally unfit.

Fetterman has said he is following a strict protocol from his doctors after his six weeks of treatment for clinical depression in 2023 and a stroke in 2022.

“My doctor warned years ago: ‘After it’s public that you are getting help for depression, people will weaponize that,’” Fetterman said during an interview with the Times in his Capitol office last week. “Simple things are turned. That’s exactly what happened.”

He told the Times: “It shook me that people are willing to weaponize that I got help.”

The interview comes after an extensive New York Magazine article in which Fetterman’s former chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, shared concerns about the unconventional lawmaker’s mental health, whether he was taking necessary medication, and questioned whether he was up to the task.

Here are the three takeaways from the Times interview with Fetterman. He did not return requests for comment Sunday from The Inquirer.

In the Times interview, Fetterman, who has missed 29 of 236 votes since January, according to data compiled by GovTrack.us, the third-worst record in the Senate, dismissed such duties as committee work and casting procedural voters on the Senate floor as “performative.”

In damage-control mode, Fetterman has recently began attending hearings and votes he routinely skips, saying he prefers to spend time with his family.

In the interview, Fetterman portrayed himself as a victim of unfair attacks.

“This became the Belichick girlfriend story of politics,” Fetterman said, referring to the recent media attention around the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill football coach. “It just keeps going and going.”

Fetterman, who has only appeared publicly once in Pennsylvania since August, said that being away from his children was the “worst part of his job” — and that he has missed votes to spend more time at home. Most of Fetterman’s skipped votes were on Mondays or Thursdays, which are sometimes travel days for senators commuting to and from Washington, The Inquirer has reported.

“The votes I missed were overwhelmingly procedural,” he told the Times. “I had to make a decision: getting here and sticking my thumb in the door for three seconds for a procedural vote or spend Monday night as a dad-daughter date.”

He said he also often missed Thursday votes because he likes to check in with his father, who is ailing.

 “I would go visit my dad instead of a throwaway vote,” he said.

Despite support from friends in Congress, Fetterman does not attend the weekly Democratic caucus lunch in the Capitol — and has quit the caucus group chat. Fetterman told the Times he couldn’t figure out how to turn off notifications on the group chat, and that the bulk of the conversation was not important.

“It’s mostly just happy birthdays,” he said. “Some days, it’s just emojis.”

As his distance from fellow party members and the public has grown, Fetterman scoffed at the suggestion he is being courted or exploited by Republican colleagues, who have defended him.

“That’s insulting and patronizing to say,” he said. “There’s no political upside for them to be nice to me. They realize what it is, and it’s a smear.”

Fetterman dismissed the growing concerns about his mental well-being as the “griping of anonymous sources with axes to grind,” according to the Times.