Kentucky governor requests update on McConnell’s health amid questions about his condition in hospital, live

For years, Republicans ridiculed Democratic officials who vouched for Joe Biden’s competence, even as the then-president’s public appearances increasingly raised questions about his age and stamina. Conservative commentators dismissed those assurances as scripted talking points designed to shield an aging politician from accountability. Now, right-wing activists who spent years demanding transparency are accusing Republican leaders of perpetrating their own cover-up.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the longest-serving Senate party leader in American history, has not been seen in public since he was hospitalized on June 14 after emergency responders were dispatched to his Washington residence. Police scanner audio reviewed by multiple outlets describes a “cardiac arrest” and CPR in progress on an “unconscious” person at that address. McConnell’s office has never confirmed the call was about him or why he was hospitalized. His communications staff have repeated a single talking point for three weeks: The senator “continues to improve” and is “working closely with staff.”

The absurdity reached its natural conclusion this week when The Hill accidentally published, then hastily deleted, an article headlined “DO NOT USE: A look back at Mitch McConnell’s time in the Senate”, the kind of pre-written obituary every major outlet keeps on file for aging public figures. It was a small, almost slapstick detail, but it captured the surreal nature of the moment.

Every statement from McConnell’s office now receives from conservative commentators the same suspicion once directed toward Biden’s White House staff and his Democratic allies.

Without facts, people substitute assumptions. In the vacuum created by this official news blackout, the MAGA media universe has turned the situation into a conspiratorial circus. Every statement from McConnell’s office now receives from conservative commentators the same suspicion once directed toward Biden’s White House staff and his Democratic allies. Without a shred of evidence, right-wing influencer Laura Loomer declared on social media that McConnell is “brain dead” and languishing in a “vegetative state.” A self-described independent journalist, Desirée Townsend, backed Loomer up, claiming to various right-wing media outlets to have heard the same from her own sources and describing herself as camped outside the hospital waiting for the family to decide when to withdraw life support.

But the defense mounted by McConnell’s allies has been so clumsily orchestrated that it has only fueled the conspiratorial fire.

CNN’s resident MAGA pundit Scott Jennings took to the airwaves and social media on Tuesday to claim he had just shared a 17-minute phone call with McConnell. According to Jennings, the senator’s voice “sounded strong,” and they spent their time chatting about the geopolitical situation in Iran, the war in Ukraine, the history of the vice presidency under Teddy Roosevelt and the Graham Platner scandal. As Louisville’s WLKY reported, less than an hour after Jennings’ 1 p.m. announcement, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso released nearly identical, highly polished statements claiming the senators had also spoken with McConnell. Barrasso’s spokesperson, Kate Noyes, claimed their 20-minute call covered everything from Senate races and the Platner scandal to Supreme Court rulings on coordinated spending limits and the upcoming defense authorization bill. She assured the public that McConnell was “fully engaged.”

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The coordinated rollout only fueled additional skepticism among conservatives already predisposed to suspect institutional cover-ups. Years spent insisting every medical ambiguity concealed a scandal have conditioned conservative audiences to distrust institutional reassurances. Still, frustration has spread well beyond the movement’s conspiracy theorists.

CNN conservative commentator Brianna Lyman, a writer for The Federalist, openly questioned what appeared to be clearly coordinated messaging. “It seemed like a weird talking point,” she observed, noting that the descriptions of the alleged discussions centered on everything but McConnell’s medical recovery. Breitbart Washington bureau chief Matthew Boyle demanded that McConnell’s office produce proof of the senator’s condition “one way or another right now.” The Blaze founder Glenn Beck posted on X: “We need the truth about Mitch McConnell NOW. It is unacceptable that the party who spent four years criticizing Joe Biden’s health is now silent on McConnell’s. What’s the difference between that and what Iran’s leaders are doing with the new Ayatollah? Is McConnell braindead? Or is he chatting about Graham Platner and Iran? It is OUR RIGHT to know. That seat isn’t McConnell’s. It belongs to the people of Kentucky.”

The situation became even stranger when it was revealed that McConnell’s wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, remained in China for several days after her husband’s hospitalization. Chao, who was on a previously scheduled philanthropic trip, met with Chinese Vice President Han Zheng before eventually issuing a statement explaining that McConnell’s condition “did not warrant an immediate return” to the United States. Former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has spent the last several months rebranding herself as a MAGA dissident, told TMZ that McConnell is a “vegetable” and accused Chao of being a “communist Chinese spy.”

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The drama over the state of McConnell’s health is playing out against a looming political deadline in Kentucky. In April 2024, the commonwealth’s majority-Republican legislature rewrote state law to strip the power of Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, to appoint a temporary replacement senator, guaranteeing instead a special election, a maneuver widely understood at the time as pure power preservation with an eye toward McConnell’s advancing age and health. If the senator were to step down or be legally removed before August 3, Beshear would have the authority to call a special election, potentially opening the door for a populist independent like Rep. Thomas Massie, who recently lost his primary to a Trump-endorsed opponent, to win the seat or act as a spoiler for a Democratic candidate.

But if the establishment can artificially drag McConnell past that August deadline, the thinking among conspiracists goes, any special election would be pushed to the general election in November, allowing the Republican machine to maintain total control over the succession process. This is the backdrop against which Steve Bannon is accusing McConnell’s aides of running out the clock to box out Massie, which is to say: Even the Republican Party’s own rules, designed to protect GOP power, are being weaponized by Republicans against each other.

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The party’s fears are heightened because they are already operating with a razor-thin Senate majority, and McConnell’s prolonged absence has already stalled vital spending bills moving through the Appropriations Committee and, as POLITICO reported Wednesday, is threatening to derail the defense budget, which includes President Donald Trump’s massive $1.5 trillion spending increase. This is the ultimate expression of McConnell’s conservative judicial and legislative philosophy: the preservation of power at the expense of human dignity and democratic transparency. Ultimately, it’s theFrankenstein’s monster that the senator himself helped to build.

For decades, McConnell fed the right-wing grievance machine, indulging the party’s darkest impulses as long as it delivered tax cuts for the wealthy and conservative judges for the federal bench. He looked the other way during the rise of the Tea Party and he enabled the birtherism that targeted Barack Obama. He even capitulated to Donald Trump even after the insurrection that threatened McConnell’s own life in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

McConnell believed he could ride the tiger of right-wing extremism, controlling it through sheer legislative mastery and procedural cunning. Now, as he lies in an unknown condition in a Washington hospital bed, that same tiger is scratching at his door, accusing his wife of treason and demanding his medical records like birth certificate truthers.

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