John Fetterman Raises Over $1 Million Since NBC Interview

Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman has raised more than $1 million since Tuesday, his campaign announced, since NBC aired an explosive interview with the recovering candidate. Fetterman used a closed captioning device for assistance after suffering a near-fatal stroke in May. His campaign hasn’t raised money so quickly since Dr. Oz’s crudité gaffe, in which his opponent feigned relatability by price-checking ingredients for the appetizer at a misidentified grocery store. While the interview itself faced a frenzy of backlash for using ableist rhetoric against the Democratic candidate, a follow-up comment made by the NBC reporter has since become GOP fodder for right-wing supporters attempting to discredit the nominee in the contentious race. “In small talk before my interview [with Fetterman], it wasn’t clear he understood what I was saying,” NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns said of Fetterman, though other journalists have attempted to dismiss the allegation. “This is just nonsense,” tweeted Kara Swisher, a reporter who recently interviewed Fetterman for her podcast, and herself suffered a stroke in 2011. Addressing the criticism during a Facebook Live interview with PennLive, Fetterman said: “I always have been very honest about saying, ‘I need captioning.’ I know that you are speaking and sometimes I will hear it, but if I am being asked a very specific kind of question, I need to know exactly what that is. If someone wants to hold that against me, they might regret that, but the truth is that half of Americans that watch TV use captions, too.”