Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman is advising his fellow Democrats to "chill" about Donald Trump.
Fetterman pointed out during an NBC News interview on Friday that Trump "hasn't even been inaugurated yet."
He warned Democrats that they needed to "pace themselves" since it’s still very early days for the Trump presidency round two.
“And that’s the thing. If you’re already exhausted, freaking out, and it’s not even Thanksgiving, then you really ought to pace yourselves. Because he hasn’t even been inaugurated yet,” he said. “So you really have to chill out, and you’re going to have to be more discerning or discriminate on what’s going to freak you out, or what’s just trolling, Because it’s not the weather, it’s the climate now for the next four years."
Some of the "freaking out" this week is no doubt in response to Trump's Cabinet picks. The former president has already tapped former Congressman Matt Gaetz to serve as his attorney general, former Congresswoman and one-time Democrat Tulsi Gabbard for his director of national intelligence, and Fox News's Pete Hegseth to serve as defense secretary.
During a pre-election rally at Madison Square Garden, Trump said he planned to place Robert F Kennedy Jr in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services and X/Tesla CEO Elon Musk as the head of the to-be-born "Department of Government Efficiency."
Fetterman said that Trump is probably enjoying the collective freakout, and insisted his decision to name Gaetz — who has been the subject of an ongoing ethics investigation centered on whether or not he had sex with a minor — to America's top legal advisory role was "just nothing but trolling."
“That’s got to be candy for [Trump] to have and watch everybody get triggered. I’ve said this before, it’s like, clutch those pearls harder and scold louder, that’s not going to win,” Fetterman said. “And that’s been demonstrated in this cycle.”
Despite seeing Gaetz as a troll pick, Fetterman did say he thought Trump's decision to pick Senator Marco Rubio for Secretary of State was a "strong choice" and said he was "looking forward to voting for his confirmation."
In addition to Trump's cabinet picks, Fetterman also discussed the Democrats' electoral issues, and named one "challenge" specifically; the "bros."
“We have a challenge. We have our own kind of ‘childless cat ladies’ situation: ‘Bros.’ People refer to these young guys as bros, and clearly that’s not a positive term,” Fetterman said.
Centrist Democrats have trotted out "bro" or similar sentiments twice as a way to disparage progressive men within the party; Hillary Clinton's supporters used the phrase "Bernie bro" in 2016 to suggest that the angry, young, men who supported the democratic socialist candidate primarily did so out of sexist hate for Clinton, rather than a sincere belief in his ideas.
In 2008, some Clinton supporters lobbed similar accusations of sexism at male supporters of then-candidate Barack Obama. The "Obama boys" — according to their detractors — were glassy-eyed idealists who simply wouldn't fall in line behind Clinton because of her gender.
After 16 years of Democrats finger wagging at the energized "boys" and "bros" under their tent, they now have an issue: the bros won't vote for them.
"I think this election was a serious flex for bros," Fetterman told Politico after the election. He compared Democrats' use of the term to Vice President-elect JD Vance's out-of-touch and sexist insistence that liberal women were "childless cat ladies."
"But it’s the same thing. I mean, is the term ‘bros’ positive? And the media use that so liberally, pejoratively," he said. "Like, well, they’re unsophisticated, they’re shallow, or they’re crass. And we dismiss them."
