President Donald Trump scored major bipartisan backing for his maximum pressure campaign against Iran’s terrorist leadership. In an interview with the Washington Reporter, Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) said that it was “fantastic” that Trump “killed as many of their leadership [as possible],” which Trump has been doing alongside Israel for over a year. Fetterman’s interview is the Reporter’s first featured interview with a current Democratic Senator.
While many Democrats in Congress are voting to hamstring Trump’s ability to bring the Iranian regime to heel, Fetterman told the Reporter that his message to the Iranian leadership is clear: “they are the bad side. We are the good side.” The lawmaker frequently criticized many in his own political party and in the media in his interview with the Reporter for equating America and Iran.
“Many in the left media work to make it seem that there’s a moral equivalence” between the two belligerents, he said. “My message to [Iran] is to stop being committed to destroying Israel, stop backing proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas. Then there’d be peace in the region. They are one of the most destabilizing forces in the world.”
“I would remind people that just a couple months ago they killed over 30,000 or more of their young people in the street,” Fetterman added.
In the days since Fetterman’s interview with the Reporter, Trump has been doing what the Pennsylvania lawmaker suggested, striking the country day after day — with a notable uptick after the tragic and sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), one of the Senate’s staunchest Iran hawks.
In vote after vote on congressional war powers, Fetterman is often the lone Democrat to side with almost every Senate Republican in voting to allow Trump to carry out the war with Iran. Following the vote of over half of House Democrats to cut off all aid to Israel, Fetterman finally laid out his red line with his longtime political party.
“If our party ever becomes — and just makes it official — the anti-Israel party, that’s when I would leave because that’s been a moral clarity for me,” he said at the Hill Nation Summit.
Fetterman’s unorthodox moves have made him a near-pariah in his own political party. While recent polling has found that he boasts a plus-seven approval rating in Pennsylvania, that support is due almost entirely to 77 percent of Republicans approving of his job; only 19 percent of Democrats approve of his work in D.C., and over half of respondents in his state want him to leave the Democratic Party.
