John Fetterman says Joe Biden would have beaten Donald Trump again

John Fetterman, one of Joe Biden’s loudest defenders during calls from within his own party to step down, still believes that the incumbent president could have beaten Donald Trump a second time.

The freshman senator from Pennsylvania elected in 2022, was one of the many Democrats whorefused to call for Biden to step aside in the wake of a whispery, wandering performance at a June debate with Trump in Atlanta.

But Fetterman, who suffered a stroke and battled his own issues with speech impairments in the final days of his winning 2022 campaign, took things a step further as he suggested that Biden’s critics in the Democratic Party were helping Trump win — a charge that seemed at odds with polling that showed Biden behind the former president long before the outpouring of Democratic whinging began.

In a mid-July interview that ended up taking place just days before Biden dropped out of the 2024 race, Fetterman told Fox News Sunday: “That whole abandon Biden thing — that’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard...I mean, if you are more inclined to vote for a Democrat or be a Democrat, if you’re willing to walk away from Joe Biden — you’re by defecting helping Trump.”

On Sunday, he had hardly changed his tune and told CNN’s State of the Union that he believed Biden would have defeated Trump a second time, despite what all available polling and the trajectory of the race after the June debate indicated.

Dana Bash, the show’s host, asked Fetterman about those comments specifically and whether they’d been born out by the reality of where the race is now at the beginning of September.

“No,” Fetterman seemed to concede, before adding: “But what I said was, I do believe, fundamentally, that Joe Biden would have beaten Trump. And it