Fetterman to be first sitting Democratic senator to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago

CV NEWS FEED // Sen. John Fetterman, D-PA, announced Thursday that he will meet with President-elect Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home in South Florida in the coming days. Trump is scheduled to begin his second White House term in a week and a half.

CBS reported that Fetterman’s trip to Florida “will mark the first known time a sitting Democratic U.S. senator is meeting with Trump at his Palm Beach residence since the election.”

POLITICO noted that the meeting “is expected to take place this weekend, according to two people familiar with the plans.”

“Yes, we are going to have a conversation,” Fetterman told CBS. He added that he thought it was “pretty reasonable” that Trump, as the incoming president, would like to speak with him. “And no one is my gatekeeper.”

The Democratic senator later clarified in a statement to FOX News: “President Trump invited me to meet, and I accepted.”

“I’m the Senator for all Pennsylvanians — not just Democrats in Pennsylvania,” Fetterman added in his statement. “I will meet with and have a conversation with anyone if it helps me deliver for Pennsylvania and the nation.”

The meeting’s announcement came just days after Fetterman publicly broke with the majority of his party and co-sponsored the Laken Riley Act (H.R. 29), a pro-border security bill that would require the detention of illegal migrants convicted of various crimes.

The bill passed the House Tuesday with 48 Democrats joining all voting Republicans in support. By contrast, 159 House Democrats voted against it.

In defense of the legislation, Fetterman told FOX News later that day, “We have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of migrants here illegally that have [been] convicted of crimes…. Who wants to allow them to remain in our nation after that?”  

“I don’t know why anybody thinks that it’s controversial that they all need to go,” he said. 

He then appeared to criticize the majority of his party’s lawmakers for opposing the bill, noting that if fewer than seven Senate Democrats out of a total of 47 members of the party’s caucus end up voting for the bill, “that’s a reason why we lost.”

Various sources have listed Fetterman as a possible potential candidate for the 2028 Democratic Presidential nomination.

>> LIST OF DEM SENATORS BACKING LAKEN RILEY ACT GROWS <<

Fetterman has also appeared to extend an olive branch to Trump and his voters on several occasions since the Democratic Party lost the 2024 presidential election and control of the Senate. 

The senator told ABC in late December that he is not “rooting against” Trump.

“If you’re rooting against the president, you are rooting against the nation,” he added. “And, and I’m not ever going to be where I want a president to fail.”  

“I happen to love people that are going to vote for Trump, and they are not fascist,” Fetterman said later in the December ABC interview. “And also, ‘fascism,’ that’s not a word that regular people use.”

Failed 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris made headlines back in October when she suggested Trump is a “fascist.” Multiple analysts later asserted that Harris’ widely panned October comments served as the turning point when her chances of winning the presidency began to plummet.

Fetterman’s home state of Pennsylvania was a major battleground in last year’s election. Trump carried the state by 120,000 votes, or just shy of two percentage points.

Also on Election Day 2024, then-incumbent Sen. Bob Casey, D-PA, who had served alongside Fetterman, narrowly lost re-election to his Republican challenger Dave McCormick, in what was widely considered an upset.