Sen. Fetterman is at it again. In a new interview with NBC News he continues his support for Israel, says Sen. Menendez should be out of the Senate and repeats that something needs to be done to control the southern border.

“I’m not a progressive,” Fetterman told NBC News. “I just think I’m a Democrat that is very committed to choice and other things. But with Israel, I’m going to be on the right side of that. And immigration is something near and dear to me, and I think we do have to effectively address it as well.”

Fetterman insisted he can be pro-immigration while also favoring policies to restrict the flow of migration to manageable levels, disagreeing with progressives who oppose new limits on asylum and bash some of the ideas in the negotiations as cruel.

“It’s a reasonable conversation — until somebody can say there’s an explanation on what we can do when 270,000 people are being encountered on the border, not including the ones, of course, that we don’t know about,” he said. “To put that in reference, that is essentially the size of Pittsburgh, the second-largest city in Pennsylvania.”

Let’s start with his statement that he’s not a progressive. It turns out he has said this before, back in the summer of 2022 when he was still a candidate.

At the time, I think everyone assumed this was a slick bit of politicking. Fetterman was running for office in a purple state and wanted to avoid turning off blue collar Democrats who might hesitate to vote for someone they considered too far left. But there was good reason to think underneath that posturing Fetterman really was progressive. After all, he had run for office before and during his 2016 campaign he drew comparisons to Bernie Sanders.

John Fetterman, the populist mayor and long-shot Democratic Senate candidate, was one of the first elected officials in the country to endorse Bernie Sanders for president. He is, like Sanders, a political outsider. A tattooed giant—6-foot-8, more than 300 pounds—he’s spent the past 11 years presiding over Braddock, Pennsylvania, a largely black town outside Pittsburgh that was wrecked by the collapse of the local steel industry. Income inequality is at the center of his campaign. “I think there’s a great deal of overlap” between Sanders’ platform and his own, he tells me, “whether it’s a $15-an-hour living wage or health care, trade deals, a rigged economy.” Ideologically, the only real difference between the two men is that Fetterman is more in favor of gun control.

So in 2022 it seemed as if Fetterman was just tacking right to get elected. But he’s in office now and it’s starting to look like he really isn’t a progressive. He’s certainly way out of step with the left on Israel and on immigration. His line about controls on immigration isn’t completely new. He said almost the same thing to Politico earlier this month:

Fetterman, a progressive favorite, urged Democrats to acknowledge the large numbers of migrants streaming across the southern border. He cited the nearly 270,000 border encounters that U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported in September.

“Honestly, it’s astonishing. And this isn’t a Fox News kind of statistic. This is the government’s,” he said. “You essentially have Pittsburgh showing up there at the border.”

Fetterman’s chief of staff told NBC the Senator has always had these beliefs.

Fetterman chief of staff Adam Jentleson said the senator has “always had” the policy positions he’s espousing today, even though Republicans wanted to paint him as a socialist in 2022 and “some folks on the left are pretending” he has since changed his beliefs.

But last April Fetterman’s campaign released a video which was much more in line with progressive views on the border. Here he is citing the Statue of Liberty and calling for citizenship for those who want to be part of America.

It’s pretty clear to a lot of people, left and right, that Fetterman really has changed. GOP strategist Christopher Nicholas said he was most surprised to see Fetterman coming out so hard against Sen. Mendendez.

“I know how clubby the Senate is, having worked for Arlen Specter for 18 years. So I get it,” Nicholas said. “But I find it perplexing that you haven’t had a lot of other Democratic members of the Senate saying it. Perhaps that’s because he’s a freshman and he hasn’t been totally inculcated into the ‘Here in the Senate we do things differently’ line of thinking.”

I wrote about his earlier call for Menendez to resign here. This must be causing some anxiety for Senate Democrats but so far they haven’t reined him in. Maybe they never will. Consider Sen. Kyrsten Sinema who started out as an anti-war leftist but who has since bucked her party on a number of issues and is now considered a border hawk. Some Democrats really do seem to drift right in office. Fetterman seems to be one of those, at least for now.