Rather than continue fixating on the 2020 election defeat that ended his first presidency, Donald Trump could instead “do something positive”, including resolving the US war in Iran, Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman said in an interview on Sunday.

“I don’t know why the president is dragging up all this stuff,” Fetterman remarked on CNN’s State of the Union, three days after Trump dedicated a televised, primetime address to claims about Chinese meddling in the 2020 White House race that he lost to Joe Biden. “You’re the president. Do something positive – and you are talking about 2020; that’s been settled over six years ago.

“It’s deeply unhelpful and that distracts [from] important things, especially like the Iranian war right now.”

His comments to CNN came amid a stretch that could prove to be an inflection point in his political career. On Wednesday, he said he would consider leaving the Democratic party if ever it became “the anti-Israel party”, a comment that he delivered after more than 100 US House lawmakers voted in favor of halting Israeli military aid over incursions into Gaza and Lebanon.

Fetterman has emerged as a prominent advocate of Israel among Democrats since he joined the Senate in 2023. He acknowledged some attempts by Republicans to convince him to defect to their party as some of his Democratic colleagues have backed away from their traditional support for Israel amid accusations that the government of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netyanyahu committed genocide in Gaza.

But he said he has no interest in such a switch because he disagrees with most policies favored by Republicans, who have been led by Trump across two Oval Office terms interrupted by Biden’s presidency.

Trump for years has lied about his loss to Biden at the polls in 2020 by saying electoral fraudsters rigged the contest against him.

Nonpartisan voting experts have determined the election was secure. And as he successfully ran for a second presidency in 2024, Trump conceded on a podcast that he lost to Biden, arguing it was “by a whisker”.

Yet Trump later asserted that statement was sarcastic. And on Thursday, Trump revisited his failed run against Biden by claiming China interfered in the race, prompting warnings from opponents that the president – who has grappled with low approval ratings – was poised to meddle in the forthcoming midterm elections.

A 2021 US intelligence community assessment concluded that no foreign actor, including China, attempted to alter any technical aspect of the 2020 voting process. The assessment found that while Russia had conducted influence operations aimed at denigrating Biden’s campaign, China did not deploy any interference efforts intended to change the outcome of the election.

American intelligence assessed that China did not see either Trump or Biden as advantageous to its ambitions – and it was therefore not worth the risk of damaging the US-Chinese relationship by interfering.

Speaking to CNN host Jake Tapper on Sunday about Trump and the 2020 election, Fetterman said the results of that race – which saw Biden earn Pennsylvania’s electoral college votes – were “absolutely secure, fair and accurate”.

“Pennsylvania … picked Joe Biden in 2020,” Fetterman, who was the state’s lieutenant governor at the time, added. “That’s a fact.”