Sen. John Fetterman in an interview with the Capital-Star at his home in Braddock, Pa. (Jared Wickerham/For the Capital-Star)
There’s a classic Charlie Daniels Band song that comes to mind when musing on the supine strangeness of these times. It’s called “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and it’s been on my mind ever since I heard U.S. Sen. John Fetterman would be the first major Democrat to make the trek to Mar-a-Lago to “open communications” with President-elect Donald Trump before the inauguration.
When Fetterman, now the senior senator from Pennsylvania, was asked why he is the only Democratic senator willing to go to Mar-a-Lago given what it has come to mean symbolically, he quipped that he planned to demand that Trump make him “the pope of Greenland.”
It’s a clever line, but it’s likely not many of the folks who worked hard to get Fetterman elected as a bulwark against the kind of politics that Trump has promised to unleash on the country are laughing.
Clever lines are often followed by clichéd rationalizations, so Fetterman came armed with plenty of those too when confronted by reporters about the novelty of a prominent Democrat participating in what has become a signature form of Trumpian humiliation theater.
Fetterman’s reasons for doing what no other Democratic politician will do boiled down to a variation of: “I’m the senator for all Pennsylvanians, not just Democrats. Why shouldn’t I meet with the next president of the United States on his turf and on his terms to find ways to work with him on behalf of all Pennsylvanians? It’s my job.”
https://x.com/SenFettermanPA/status/1877463863144190023
It’s the same righteous excuse every craven tech billionaire, servile Republican pol and spooked media figure makes when booking flights to Palm Beach to “open communications” with a man they considered an opportunistic buffoon 10 years ago and a seditionist as recently as four years ago.
But even politicians as imposing as Fetterman are susceptible to the hubris that they can bend reality as well as the politician they consider the alpha dog at any given moment. Surely they, and they alone will prove to be the exception to the usual rule of genuflection, ring kissing and exposing one’s belly for the entertainment of the pol who has summoned them.
There’s always some poor sucker with a plan to beat the Devil at his own game. It usually doesn’t end well.
Decades before Trump emerged on the political scene, this Faustian archetype got a heroic country bluegrass twist in 1979’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”
“I guess you didn’t know it, but I’m a fiddle player, too / And if you’d care to take a dare, I’ll make a bet with you. / Now you play pretty good fiddle, boy / but give the Devil his due / I’ll bet a fiddle of gold against your soul / ‘Cause I think I’m better than you. / The boy said, ‘My name’s Johnny and it might be a sin / but I’ll take your bet and you’re gonna regret / I’m the best there’s ever been.”
By the end of the Charlie Daniels song, Johnny does some heavy shredding on the violin that not only saves his soul, but earns him the golden fiddle that had eluded so many others who thought they could match wits — and raw skill — with someone who expected fealty even before he “opened up his case.”
“The Devil bowed his head because he knew that he’d been beat / And he laid that golden fiddle down on the ground at Johnny’s feet.”
“The Devil Went Down to Georgia” had a happy ending in the Southern Rock telling of the story because the Devil in those days played by a set of rules everyone acknowledged and accepted from the start. There was a shared sense of what winning and losing looked like. That’s not the case anymore.
Fast forward several decades to John Fetterman going down to Mar-a-Lago. He’s no fool. He knows what happened to MSNBC talk show hosts Mika Brezinski and Joe Scarborough when they traipsed down to pay respect to Trump practically before all of the ballots were counted. He knows they continue to be mocked because their mission was to “open communications,” too.
How did that work out for them?
Meanwhile, Fetterman sees tech-billionaires (Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Cook), politicians and homegrown oligarchs of lesser magnitude engaging in ritual adulation of Trump over canapés and Diet Cokes at Mar-a-Lago every time he turns on Fox News.
Even the Village People dropped their animosity and rancor at Trump for playing their music during the campaign. They’ve agreed to headline one of the inaugural concerts, so expect many rounds of “Macho Man” to ring out over D.C. next week.
But isn’t it churlish to point out these hypocrisies when Barack Obama was grinning it up with Trump at Jimmy Carter’s funeral? Obama was calling his successor a fascist days before the election. Yeah, but as usual, Michelle Obama kept it real by refusing to be a part of such a degrading photo op and stayed in Hawaii. She’s skipping the inauguration, too.
John Fetterman must see himself as the heroic Johnny of the Charlie Daniels song. He just knew he was going to be the one to take the Devil’s golden fiddle from him fair-and-square. The only thing at stake was his reputation with the broken-hearted supporters back home who might see brutal realpolitik as backstabbing.
Fetterman wasn’t willing to share his angle going into his weekend meeting with Trump. Photos haven’t been released post-meeting, but Trump did an interview shortly after the encounter with the Democrat he once accused of abusing heroin, fentanyl, meth and cocaine during the U.S. Senate race that Fetterman won over Dr. Mehmet Oz.
“It was a totally fascinating meeting,” Trump said. “He’s a fascinating man, and his wife [Gisele] is lovely. They were both up, and I couldn’t be more impressed.”
That’s high praise coming from a twice impeached, convicted felon who might be facing prison time right now if he hadn’t won back the presidency in the craziest presidential race ever. Trump offered no specifics about his meeting with the Fettermans except to pour on the flattery.
“He’s a commonsense person. He’s not liberal or conservative. He’s just a commonsense person, which is beautiful,” Trump said, begging so many questions.
For his part, Fetterman has yet to comment on the meeting, but one assumes that if he performed at the level of Johnny in the Charlie Daniels song, he would’ve proclaimed from the rooftops that he beat that ol’ Devil for that golden fiddle.
Who knows? Maybe he’s been promised that papal throne in Greenland and doesn’t want to blow it.
Whether going down to Mar-a-Lago is charitably described as “opening communications” with or “kissing the ring” of President-elect Trump, all agree it is, at best, a transparent attempt to assure the most vengeful man in American politics that the past, whatever it is and regardless of how bitter it once was, is dead.