(Headline USA) Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., was featured in a glowing cover story by Time magazine’s Molly Ball that praised him for taking weeks off of work to battle depression.
The story, titled “How John Fetterman Came Out of the Darkness,” uncritically paints Fetterman as a champion for mental health and ignores the many ways his cognitive decline has affected his ability to perform his job.
Fetterman admitted during the interview that he didn’t even want to attend congressional orientation after winning the election, and that his wife, Gisele, had to force him to go.
“Think of the insanity of that,” said Fetterman, who had previously served as Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor and had a stroke shortly before the primary in which he secured his senatorial nomination.
“I work for two years. And at the end of that, after nearly dying, after the most infamous debate in American politics, I was going to not show up for orientation,” he continued. “That’s what depression does.”
Fetterman checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in February after purportedly being diagnosed with clinical depression. He said that his humiliating debate with Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz was the “trigger” for his downward spiral.
“The debate lit the mitch,” he said twice before finally correcting himself, “Lit the match.”
Fetterman said he knew he needed to debate Oz but that the result was catastrophic.
“I knew that the voters deserve to have what, what the stroke has done to me—transparency that way,” he said, adding that afterward he knew he was a “national embarrassment” and a “debacle.”
“I knew at that moment that I was going to be considered—consider myself—like, a national embarrassment,” he said.
Fetterman also revealed that, shortly before he was checked into Walter Reed, he believed he experienced another stroke.
The doctor overseeing Fetterman’s treatment at the time described him as “passive, very flat, very unemotional, almost mute.”
Ball, the author of the puff piece, may best be known to conservative audiences for her notorious February 2021 Time story gloating about the secret cabal that conspired to manipulate the 2020 election in favor of Democrat Joe Biden.
The secret history of the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 electionhttps://t.co/xG3S60cP2L
— TIME (@TIME) February 5, 2021
