Trump has a natural pull. And even Democrats can’t resist.
Now a major Democrat Senator was just exiled from his party for teaming up with Trump.
A Senator Who Votes His Conscience — And Pays For It
There is something revealing about the Democratic Party’s current posture toward John Fetterman. The Pennsylvania senator has committed the unforgivable sin of occasionally voting with Republicans — choosing, as he has said himself, “country over party” — and the party machinery is now treating him as an enemy rather than a colleague.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a leading candidate for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, went on CNN this week to publicly nudge Fetterman back into line. The message was dressed in measured language, but the underlying demand was clear: fall in line, or we’ll make your life difficult.
“Look, I don’t know what Sen. Fetterman is going to do,” Shapiro told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I know that Pennsylvanians voted for a Democrat to represent them in the United States Senate. So, I think he needs to honor that and continue with his service to Pennsylvania, and, hopefully, get back to what he was elected to do and reflect the will of the people.”
The irony here is rich. Fetterman won his seat in 2022 by running as a straight-talking, blue-collar outsider who wore hoodies to work and told the progressive left to cool it on defunding the police. Now, because he has voted his conscience on a handful of key issues — including supporting Markwayne Mullin’s DHS confirmation, breaking with his party on the government shutdown fight, and backing portions of Trump’s agenda — the very machine that celebrated him as an authentic populist is trying to muscle him back into conformity.
A Man Who Keeps Saying ‘I’m A Democrat’
The attacks from inside the party have been remarkably nasty. DNC Vice Chair Malcolm Kenyatta posted on X: “Almost every day now my US Senator comes on this site to attack his constituents and many people who worked hard to elect him. Suggesting that they have ‘derangement syndrome’ for opposing this administration. You’re a mess @JohnFetterman.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries weighed in separately, telling CNN in April that Fetterman “knows better,” — a particularly condescending construction from a man whose party lost the White House, the Senate, and nearly the House in 2024.
For his part, Fetterman has been forthright about where he stands. Despite reports that some Republicans are trying to persuade him to switch parties, he told Politico plainly: “I’m a Democrat, and I’m staying one.”
The relationship with Shapiro has clearly curdled. Fetterman wrote in his memoir “Unfettered,” released last November, that he and the governor “no longer speak” and that the relationship deteriorated into an “ugliness” from which “we have never recovered.” Shapiro has declined to say whether he will support Fetterman’s re-election in 2028, telling reporters: “I don’t know if he’s running for re-election. I think he needs to decide if he’s running, and then we’ll make a decision from there.”
What It Really Reveals About Today’s Democratic Party
Fetterman represents one of just six Democratic Senate seats in states that Donald Trump won in the 2024 election — a category of Democrat the party desperately needs if it ever hopes to rebuild a majority. He voted with Republicans roughly 26 percent of the time in 2025. That’s not a betrayal; that’s a senator doing the job that Pennsylvania sent him to do in a state that has drifted unmistakably toward the GOP.
The Democratic Party’s response to Fetterman’s independent streak is to ostracize him rather than ask what he might be learning from his constituents. That instinct — punish the dissenter, reward conformity — is a large part of why the party keeps losing working-class voters who feel the party no longer speaks for them. Fetterman has been listening. His party, apparently, has not.
