If a worker at a Sheetz gas station approached their job the way John Fetterman does, they’d be fired within a week. It’s one of the many irrational things about our economy and system of labor. If you make ten bucks an hour selling hot dogs and coffee to truckers, you have little room for error.
Page A2From§Eachthe midnight edition — 11 September 2026
National Review says Fetterman's about to jump, Current Affairs says push him, his party got there first
As it ran on the front
Start with the word Sen. John Fetterman used: smears. On Sept. 8th he told CNN the Wall Street Journal's report — that he dodges constituents while cultivating conservative outlets — was "lies, half-truths, innuendos, smears and anonymous" sourcing. That's a fair description of anonymous reporting, and it deserves defending, because sources aren't proof, because reporters get things wrong, because three wheelchair-bound veterans traveled to his office in early September and were told the senator was too sick to see them, and the Washington Examiner reported he skipped that meeting to appear on television instead. So the report isn't wrong, it's — it's actually just accurate. Moving on.
Rep. Brandan Boyle, a fellow Pennsylvania Democrat, called Fetterman a "lazy trust fund baby" and "a disgrace" on Sept. 4th, which is the kind of language you expect from an opposition researcher, not a colleague, and colleagues don't usually turn on their own like that — colleagues absolutely do this when they think one of their own is dodging the job. Boyle didn't specify what he meant by disgrace. He didn't need to. The veterans story had already run that same week.…
…(cont) By Sept. 7th, Rep. Chris Deluzio — Iraq War veteran, voting rights attorney, union organizer — said he was weighing a 2028 primary run against Fetterman, careful to say only that he "might." A hedge that careful, from a member of the senator's own party in the senator's own state, is not typically how you describe getting smeared. It's how you describe watching the exits.
Then Sept. 10th did something no operation could have staged. National Review published "John Fetterman Prepares to Jump," reading the senator's convention speech as the end of his career as an elected Democrat. The same day, Current Affairs published a piece arguing he should resign, comparing his attendance to a Sheetz cashier who'd be fired the same day for a single no-call, no-show. Two publications that agree on essentially nothing else looked at the same week and filed the same verdict, three days after Deluzio, six days after Boyle.
Smears, half-truths, innuendo. That's the senator's line, and the trouble with it is math: it requires a socialist magazine and the flagship of movement conservatism to be running the same operation, in the same week, for opposite reasons, without ever citing each other. Or it requires the veterans, the television appearance, the congressman, and the challenger all to be describing the same missed meeting. One of those is a conspiracy. The other one is just Tuesday in Pennsylvania.
“Guy at the end of the bar figures it out fast: when a magazine that wants Medicare for everybody and a magazine that wants government out of everything land on the same conclusion in the same week, that's not bias, that's the paper trail talking. Fetterman calls it smears, but his own party's congressman called it a disgrace days before the Wall Street Journal even ran the piece. When your own side heads for the exits before the other side does, that's not smears — that's a math problem, and the veterans waiting in that office are the ones paying for it.”
“Look, National Review is just calling balls and strikes here — his own party already turned on him, we're just reading the box score out loud. Is it convenient that a left-wing magazine landed on the exact same conclusion the same week? Sure, but that doesn't make us wrong, it makes them— actually, yeah, it kind of makes us both right for once. Anyway, "lazy trust fund baby" was their word, not ours.”
The receipts
His career as an elected Democrat appears to be nearing its end. His GOP ‘convention’ speech was just another sign.
· Pennsylvania Democrat blasts Fetterman as 'lazy trust fund baby' from the morgue, 4 Sep 2026
· Fetterman rejects 'smears,' 'half-truths' in Wall Street Journal report from the morgue, 8 Sep 2026
· Fetterman 2028 primary threat looms as Democrat Chris Deluzio says he ‘might’ run from the morgue, 7 Sep 2026
· Fetterman called ‘lazy trust fund baby’ after report claims he repeatedly blew off responsibilities from the morgue, 4 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.