Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) said Sunday on CNN that President-elect Donald Trump is trolling Democrats with his cabinet picks so far and that he's trying to get his political opponents to freak out.
"State of the Union" host Jake Tapper asked, “You have said that Democrats shouldn’t be ‘freaking out over every single thing Trump does.’ Are you freaking out at all about any of these cabinet picks, I wonder?”
Fetterman said, “There are some that I would be excited to vote for, like my colleague from Florida or the representative from New York, of course. Then there are others that are just absolute trolls, just like Gaetz and those things. That’s why, you know, Democrats, you know, like Trump, that gets the kind of thing that he wanted. You know, like the freakout and all of those things.”
Fetterman's point is that some of the things Trump does are for shock value or to get attention, and that he thinks Democrats need to be better at not giving it to him.
He continued, “It’s still not even not even Thanksgiving yet. And if we’re having meltdowns, you know, every tweet or every appointment or all those things, I mean, it’s going to be four years.”
Fetterman pointed out before the election that Trump was strong in Pennsylvania and predicted he could win the state, even though polls were extremely close.
He said to Tapper, “I’ve also claimed that Trump is the strongest, that he’s been in the three cycles here. And now things that were really unique that happened the assassination attempt that was in Butler, that’s 45 minutes from where we’re sitting right now.”
Trump's polls took a significant leap when a gunman tried to assassinate him on stage during a Butler, Pennslyvania rally on July 13.
While there was initial excitement for Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democrat nominee to replace an obviously failing President Joe Biden, there proved to be no substance there and voters were just not willing to support her.
Fetterman has been an odd man out among Democrats at times since being elected in 2022 despite having a major stroke just months earlier.
He has spoken out in strong support of Israel when many in his party wanted to disavow its war on Hamas.
Prior to the election, he expressed his belief that Biden, and then Harris, would win while warning that Trump was stronger than expected in his state.
He has always marched to the beat of his own drummer--for instance, he usually wears hoodies and athletic shorts even while conducting official business instead of suits and ties.
He's a unique voice among Democrats, and makes sense a little more often than most of them, even if he's totally wrong about others.
