Jon Stewart put John Fetterman in the hot seat, challenging him on why he has been so “complimentary” to Donald Trump.
The Democratic senator appeared on Stewart’s Weekly Show podcast on Wednesday, where they addressed the Pennsylvania senator’s MAGA coziness. Fetterman insisted that he;s been fair to both sides of the political spectrum. “I’ve been criticizing some of the Republican views, but overall describing what garbage is garbage,” the senator said.
One example Fetterman gave is his opposition to Graham Platner, the former Democratic Senate hopeful out of Maine who withdrew from the race following accusations of sexual assault. “I think the responsibility is to police your own ranks,” Fetterman said.
“If you are accused of roughing up your ex-girlfriends, yeah, that’s a nonstarter for me,” he also told Stewart, adding that he opposed Platner before the allegations emerged. The host immediately pointed out the irony of his stance on the matter in light of his now favorable views on Trump, who has repeatedly been accused of assault going back decades, including being found liable for sexual abuse in 2023.
“You called President Trump a jagoff in 2016,” Stewart replied, to which Fetterman admitted, “I put it on a shirt. I sold ‘em.”
Stewart continued, “And now, you’ve been very complimentary to him.” Fetterman started to object to the characterization, but Stewart went on. “If your concern with Graham Platner is you didn’t think he was very nice to women, you’re ignoring an awful lot of evidence for the current president about his relationship with women.”
Though Fetterman cited Platner as an example, his takes on his own party more generally echo MAGA’s own—including his characterizations of Democrats who criticize Israel or who embrace Democratic Socialism, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom he said should run under the Democratic Socialists of America banner. The DSA is “just an organization,” Stewart fact-checked. “We have a two-party system…there is no other party.”
Stewart asked the senator, “You think that the left is pro-Iran? Not the country, but the regime?” Fetterman replied, “If anyone in the Democratic Party is fine with Iran building a nuclear bomb, I disagree with that person,” and added he would always support “whatever’s necessary” for Israel to “protect themselves and to prosecute Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, too.”
Fetterman told the host that he supports Israel because history has shown “Things end really badly” when Jewish people are persecuted. “Sure!” Stewart said, but “The Jewish community and Israel are not the same thing, brother-man. That is not the same thing.”
“My point is,” Stewart explained, “There seems like there’s a way to go about this that embraces, as you said, the 90 percent of things that you agree with and try and utilize that energy to reform a party that has a worse public image than herpes in terms of getting things done. This feels like it’s playing into the hands of Republican caricatures.”
Fetterman replied that Democrats need to figure out what Trump is doing right. “We keep losing, and now we keep returning back to some of the extreme things—that’s not a caricature, that is a fair assessment of where we are.”
