Sen. John Fetterman was recently discharged from the hospital and then proceeded to give his first interview after being discharged. That interview, done with CBS News, did not go well. In fact, it could be characterized as a disaster.
Why? Because Sen. Fetterman can’t keep his eyes forward. As the Western Journal noted, “In his first interview since leaving Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Fetterman’s inability to keep his eyes forward is an indication that he’s constantly reading from a captioning screen, translating interviewer Jane Pauley’s questions and possibly even cuing him on his own answers.”
It’s not clear what Sen. Fetterman is looking at, if anything. But he clearly isn’t looking forward, and so it is a very bad look for a senator who people already think isn’t “all there” mentally. Watch that here:
Six weeks after entering Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for inpatient treatment for depression, Sen. @JohnFetterman shares his struggle with depression, his health, and more in an intimate interview with Jane Pauley this "Sunday Morning." pic.twitter.com/3o2926I48B
— CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 (@CBSSunday) March 31, 2023
The Western Journal went on to note both that that video was Fetterman’s best on-camera moment in the interview, as it’s what they selected for the commercial, and that the rest of the interview went even worse. In its words:
And that was just the preview — presumably the interview moments that showed Fetterman at his best.
The actually interview as it aired is much worse. A patched-together puff job by propagandists trying to convince the country that the junior senator from Pennsylvania is on the job, despite his debilitating depression.
It doesn’t work. The 10-minute segment is packed with filler footage and photos from Fetterman’s healthier days, before the stroke in May 2022 that deeply diminished his physical and mental capacity, but did not prevent him from winning the Democratic primary. (The party that has President Joe Biden in the White House is nothing if not consistent.)
This is far from the first disaster of an interview Sen. Fetterman has done. Shortly after his stroke, he appeared on MSNBC for an interview and admitted to using captions to read what he was being asked since he couldn’t hear correctly. Admitting that, he said:
“I sometimes will hear things in a way that’s not perfectly clear. So I use captioning so I’m able to see what you’re saying on the captioning. But it gets much, much better where I take in a lot,. But to be precise, I use captioning, so that’s really the maiming, excuse me, that’s the major challenge. And every now and then I’ll miss a word. Every now and then. Or sometimes I’ll maybe mush two words together. But as long as I have captioning, I’m able to understand exactly what’s being asked.”
The MSNBC journalist interviewing him asked, “We’ve asked for your medical records. We’ve asked to have a conversation with someone from your medical team, to interview your physician. You’ve declined those requests. Why?”
Responding, he pointed to a six-month-old letter from his doctor, saying, “I feel like we have been very transparent in a lot of different ways. When our doctor has already given a letter saying that I’m able to serve and to be running,”
NBC: "Can voters trust that you will be ready to do this job?"
Fetterman: "Yeah, of course," after reading the question off a giant MacBook that he needs to understand what is being said to him. pic.twitter.com/McBRfyd3R3
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 11, 2022
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video
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