Trump Openly Pitches Fetterman to Switch Parties: "I'd Love to Have Him as a Republican"

WASHINGTON

President Donald Trump is done hinting. On Saturday, stepping off Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews after a rally in Tennessee, he was asked point-blank about Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania — the Democrat who keeps breaking with his own party — and whether he'd welcome him into the GOP.

"I'd love to see it. I think he's great," Trump told reporters, per the New York Post's coverage of the exchange. "It's going to be hard for him to get the nomination as a Democrat, but I'd love to have him as a Republican."

He went further than the usual pleasantries. Trump described Fetterman as a "great guy" with "magnificent parents," whom he said he'd spoken with previously, and added that the senator is "a very solid person" with "great common sense." Then came the part that will echo through the midterm campaign: "If you look at the polls, he does better as a Republican than he does as a Democrat," Trump said.

Let's be clear about what this is: an open recruitment pitch for a sitting Democratic senator, delivered weeks before a midterm election that will decide whether Republicans keep the Senate. Trump doesn't do this for just anyone. He does it because Fetterman has spent this Congress making life miserable for his own party — and because Pennsylvania's other senator, Republican Dave McCormick, is the kind of guy Fetterman apparently gets along with just fine.

The long audition

Fetterman has been flirting with this idea — intentionally or not — for months. Last month, he recorded a video introducing McCormick at the Republican Midterm Convention, praising his fellow Pennsylvania senator and suggesting there were extremists in his own party. "I'm always going to stand with America," Fetterman said in the video, per 90.5 WESA's reporting. "I'm always going to reject the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life."

Then there was the TribFest moment last month: asked why he doesn't run as an independent, Fetterman told the audience, "Because I'm a lifelong Republican" — before catching himself. "I guarantee you that will break through. That will get clipped," he said, per the New York Post. It did.

The Post also reported that Fetterman has used Republican fundraising platforms to solicit donations and maintains a close friendship with Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala. — details that read like a trail of breadcrumbs whether or not he intends them that way.

The numbers behind the noise

Here's the part the headlines tend to skip: for all the drama, Fetterman still votes with his party most of the time. He has voted with Senate Democrats nearly 90% of the time since joining the chamber in 2023, the Post reported. But during the current session, that figure has fallen to just under 81% — a notable slide, previously reported by Fox News Digital.

He's broken with Democrats on immigration, on Israel, and on the Iran war — the issues where he's loudest. But an 81% party-line rate is not exactly a Republican voting record, and Fetterman's team would be the first to tell you so. He wrote in The Washington Post back in May that he would be a "terrible Republican who still votes overwhelmingly with Democrats," per WESA. A representative for Fetterman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday, WESA reported.

That May quote is the crux of the whole story, honestly. Fetterman is adamant he's a Democrat — a Democrat who hates the left's fringes, but a Democrat. The problem, politically, is that the flirtations keep making it extremely difficult for him to win the Democratic nomination for another term — a prospect Trump himself raised on Saturday. Pennsylvania Democrats are watching a senator who records videos for the GOP convention and then shrugs. That's not nothing with a primary on the horizon.

Why the timing matters

The midterms are November 3, and Democrats need to pick up four seats to retake the Senate — a once-remote prospect that has grown less remote as Trump's unpopularity and the economic fallout from the Iran war have intensified the GOP's headwinds, WESA noted. In that math, Fetterman is pivotal: if Democrats do pull off the four-seat swing to a 51-seat majority, his vote suddenly carries enormous leverage — which would reduce his incentive to leave.

History says party switches can be chamber-shaking. The last senator whose defection shifted control was Vermont's Jim Jeffords, who left the GOP in 2001 to hand Democrats a narrow majority. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter's 2009 switch from Republican to Democrat helped give Democrats a supermajority. Pennsylvania, it turns out, is where Senate majorities go to change.

Trump's Clarksville, Tennessee rally on Friday was the opening act of a midterm sprint with early voting already underway, and polling shows a real enthusiasm gap the GOP is scrambling to close. Recruiting the Senate's most famous Democrat — or at least making Democrats fight over him — is exactly the kind of mischief Trump loves, and it costs him nothing. Whether Fetterman ever takes the meeting is a different question, and so far, every answer he's given has been no.

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