A meeting between Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman (D) and members of a teachers union was cut short due to outbursts from the lawmaker.
Representatives from Pennsylvania State Education Association and the National Education Association met with Fetterman last week. They thanked him for defending public education but asked him to do more to push back on the Trump administration’s education cuts. That’s when the meeting went off the rails.
Fetterman reportedly grew frustrated and started yelling at the group of five union representatives, asking what they wanted from him as he banged his fists on the table.
The senator also questioned why “everybody is mad at me?” “why does everyone hate me, what did I ever do?” the Associated Press reports citing a source who was briefed on the meeting.
Another source told the AP that a member of Fetterman’s staff moved to quickly end the meeting and ushered the visitors into the hallway, where she broke down crying.
The staffer was comforted by the teachers who were also shaken by Fetterman’s behavior.
The incident reportedly took place one day before New York Magazine published a story in which current and former Fetterman staffers raised concerns about the senator’s mental health.
The report included a 2024 letter Fetterman’s former chief of staff Adam Jentleson sent to Dr. David Williamson, Fetterman’s neuropsychiatrist at Walter Reed, saying that he was worried Fetterman was “on a bad trajectory.”
Among the concerns raised by Jentleson in his letter was that Fetterman probably wasn’t taking his meds or properly following his recovery plan after he was discharged from Walter Reed in 2023 after checking himself in for treatment of clinical depression.
“We do not know if he is taking his meds and his behavior frequently suggests he is not,” Jentleson wrote to Williamson.
“We often see the kind of warning signs we discussed: conspiratorial thinking; megalomania (for example, he claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news — he declines most briefings and never reads memos); high highs and low lows; long, rambling, repetitive and self-centered monologues; lying in ways that are painfully, awkwardly obvious to everyone in the room, such as swearing up and down that he didn’t say something everyone heard him say a few minutes prior,” Jentleson continued.
Fetterman dismissed the report, saying “it’s a one-source story, with a couple anonymous sources, hit piece from a very left publication. There’s really nothing more to say about it.”
He also suggested that Jentleson is lying.
“There’s been conflict here. And I’m like, hey, ‘I believe X, Y and Z,’ and I’m not sure why, why people have chose to create these circumstances, but that’s where we’re at, and it’s just a hit piece,” he said.
But, Jentleson told CNN he stands by the allegations and hopes Fetterman “gets the help he needs.”
