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Sen. Mitch McConnell is back — but is he really? After three months of total absence from the public eye, that’s the question many are asking about the Kentucky Republican. In June, McConnell suffered from a “bad fall” that left him hospitalized. For months, rumors circulated that he had actually died, was on life support or was otherwise incapacitated. McConnell, who became the longest-serving Senate party leader in U.S. history before relinquishing that role last year, is now 84. He’s had serious health issues in recent years, such as freezing up during a press conference in 2023, an incident also blamed on a fall.
During McConnell’s prolonged absence, during which he still collected a paycheck, there was virtually no public info on his condition. A few images were released, but no video or audio that made clear he was able to speak, let alone fulfill his duties as a lawmaker. Many observers, including Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, assumed he would never return to the Senate.
So to see McConnell being pushed around the U.S. Capitol in a wheelchair on Monday, as the Senate returned for its final legislative sprint ahead of the midterms, came as a shock to many observers. He even voted on something! I’m sure it was important, whatever it was. I didn’t check.
Yet some people still aren’t convinced he’s really back, or at least not in any meaningful sense. A 10-second video of the press yelling at McConnell to speak or give a thumbs up — with seemingly zero response from the senator — has gone viral. Even Trump acolyte Laura Loomer shared it, saying “Mitch is brain dead. You can’t look at his face and say he’s not a vegetable. He’s not even responding to cognition tests. It’s like wheeling a corpse around. Worse than what the Democrats did with Joe Biden to be honest. He looks incapacitated.”
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Other MAGA sympathizers have echoed these remarks, often invoking Biden or the film “Weekend At Bernie’s.” Judging from the clip, McConnell has the demeanor of someone recovering from anesthesia: He’s staring straight ahead with a fixed smile. But if you watch the full clip from TMZ, he actually offers a small wave and a thumbs-up before being loaded into a van, although he doesn’t speak. At least we can confirm he has retained some motor skills, and it’s possible he couldn’t hear the press yelling at him or just decided to ignore them.
McConnell blamed his slow recovery on the “lingering effects of childhood polio.” Perhaps that’s true. Perhaps he’ll live another decade, reverse his announced retirement and keep on promoting Trump’s agenda while enjoying the taxpayer-funded healthcare he’s worked so hard to deny for other Americans.
I also watched video of McConnell on the Senate floor during the vote, when he didn’t seem to do or say anything. Then I asked myself why I was playing Mitch-truther in the first place. Even if I were a doctor, I wouldn’t be able to diagnose him via random clips on the internet. Loath as I am to disagree with Loomer on anything (please read my sarcasm carefully), we really don’t know much about McConnell’s health.
In a statement on X, McConnell said he still wasn’t “quite back to 100%,” and blamed his slow recovery on the “lingering effects of childhood polio.” Perhaps that’s true and perhaps he’ll live another decade, reverse his announced retirement and keep on promoting Trump’s agenda while enjoying the taxpayer-funded healthcare he’s worked so hard to deny for other Americans. Or maybe the internet trolls and meme-crafters are right and he’s basically a potato with no agency, a “shell” of his “original self,” to paraphrase the way Donald Trump recently described the Supreme Court justices he installed.
Beshear said that he’s glad to see that McConnell has returned to work, but argued that more transparency is necessary. “I still think he has an obligation to prove to the people of Kentucky that he has the capacity to represent us and represent us well. That means being able to come day after day, to serve on committees,” Beshear told LEX News on Tuesday.
On the one hand, it’s somewhat terrifying that someone with as much power and responsibility as McConnell can dip out for almost an entire summer while still dictating how other Americans may live their lives. The secrecy and lack of transparency around McConnell is fueling all sorts of understandable questions. But we don’t need to make assumptions about someone’s mental or physical state to understand that term limits, or perhaps even age limits, for Congress may be necessary, or that McConnell’s tenure has been marked by pandering to corporations, blind support for war, and the deregulation of polluters and big political donors at the expense of regular people. It’s ludicrous that we sometimes need to check politicians for a pulse, but we should also check whether they have a soul.
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from Troy Farah