Gisele Fetterman says she would ‘never’ run for office and doesn’t want her husband, John Fetterman, running for president
Barreto Fetterman talked about the political career of her husband, Sen. John Fetterman, on the Citizen McCain podcast and said she doesn't want him to run for president.
Gisele Barreto Fetterman said she does not want her husband, Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.), to run for president and dismissed “bizarre” speculation about her own political ambitions in a new interview with Meghan McCain for her podcast Citizen McCain.
In a clip obtained by Fox News Digital, Barreto Fetterman said she would “never” consider running for office.
“I have never told anyone in my life that I would run for office or had any desire to,” she said. “You couldn’t pay me to run for office.”
In the wake of her husband’s hospitalization for clinical depression in 2023, Barreto Fetterman said, rumors spread about her own political aspirations. At the time, in an op-ed for Elle magazine, she wrote about being cast as “an ambitious, power hungry wife, secretly plotting to fill his Senate seat.”
“That was the running news for months,” she said.
Barreto Fetterman also addressed whether her husband has any intention to launch a bid for president.
“That’s a question for him, but I certainly wouldn’t be supportive of that,” she told McCain, whose father, the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, was the Republican nominee for president in 2008.
In a second clip, Barreto Fetterman reflected on life under the spotlight, criticizing the media for their coverage of her husband’s hospitalization for depression. She said media trucks surrounded her family’s home in Braddock, Pa., when the senator checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
“They knew John wasn’t in there. They were looking for me,” she said. “They were surrounding literally the whole outside of my house.”
“My husband is a public figure, but I am a private citizen, and journalists don’t seem to really care,” Barreto Fetterman added.
In response to a question from McCain about whether the media have “learned any lessons” about respecting the privacy of people experiencing health issues, Barreto Fetterman said, “Definitely not.”
“I think they’re rewarded by clicks and how many people read the article,” she said. “I think it’s rewarded, so the goal is to be more and more terrible.”
The interview follows the release of Barreto Fetterman’s book, Radical Tenderness: The Value of Vulnerability in an Often Unkind World, earlier this month. Barreto Fetterman also made a recent appearance on WHYY in Philadelphia to discuss the book.
The full episode of Citizen McCain is set to air on Wednesday.