Fact Check: Sen. John Fetterman Did NOT Say He Would Vote For Trump
Did Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman say he’d be voting for Donald Trump? No, that’s not true: Fetterman was answering an interviewer’s question about why Pennsylvanians who vote for him — a Democrat — might also vote for Trump. He used the first person when explaining these voters’ mindset, but was not talking about himself.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X on September 23, 2024, with the caption “John Fetterman Just Said He’s Voting For Trump???” The post showed a video with a superscript that read:
DEMOCRATS PANIC:
John Fetterman makes SHOCKING admission on Trump!
BAD NEWS FOR KAMALA!
This is how the post looked on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Sep 24 12:44:57 UTC 2024)
The clip is from an interview Fetterman gave Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine at a conference on September 19, 2024, which the publication uploaded to YouTube (archived here) the next day. The snippet that appears on X omits the first part of Goldberg’s question, which makes it clear that the topic is the voting intentions of Pennsylvanians, not Fetterman’s own political preferences (see the 6:18 mark of the YouTube video):
People you live with, people who vote for you, your friends, people you grow up with, what do they see in Donald Trump that makes them want to vote for him?
Fetterman, whose ability to speak was affected by a stroke he suffered in 2022, gave a slightly rambling answer in which he spoke from the voters’ point of view:
I think, I know some people that are like, ‘I personally think he’s a terrible person,’ or ‘I’m appalled by some of these things. But I fundamentally think that I’ll still vote for him.’ And I think a lot of Republicans already agree with that … And I also want people to understand, you know, and it’s not science, but there is energy and there is kinds of anger on the ground in Pennsylvania. And people are very committed. And Trump is going to be strong. And that’s — we have to respect that. You know, can’t even understand it. And it’s not like a science that can explain it. But you have to just know that it’s real.
Fetterman never said he would vote for Trump. He endorsed Kamala Harris for president in an X post (archived here) on July 22, 2024, the day after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race. Fetterman was the first person to greet Harris as she got off her plane for a campaign appearance in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on September 13, 2024, as seen in a C-SPAN video on YouTube.
Lead Stories was covering the Johnstown event and took these photos of Fetterman:
(Source: Photo by Lead Stories on Sep 13 2024)
(Source: Photo by Lead Stories on Sep 13, 2024)
More Lead Stories fact checks about the 2024 presidential election are here.
