Is Mitch McConnell dead?
This shouldn’t be a difficult question to answer. The response is either “yes”, “no”, or something along the lines of “he’s on life-support but appears to be brain dead.”
However, while it may be a straightforward question, nobody close to the Kentucky senator seems keen on delivering a clear answer. On 14 June, the 84-year-old senator was hospitalized for a medical event. According to a new video and eyewitness account, McConnell was loaded into an ambulance on a stretcher after a possible cardiac arrest at his home. Almost a month later, McConnell’s condition is shrouded in mystery and the source of much speculation.
The mystery deepened this week when Trump ally and far-right influencer Laura Loomer made the explosive claim on Twiter/X that McConnell is “officially brain dead”. Desiree Townsend, an independent journalist who first reported that emergency services had been called to a house linked to McConnell, said she had “heard the same thing from my sources for days”. Townsend added that she was camped out at the hospital waiting for McConnell to be taken off life support.
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A number of Republicans have rushed to dispute Loomer and Townsend’s allegations. On Tuesday, majority leader John Thune’s representative claimed he’d spoken to Mitch the previous day and “[t]hey had a lengthy and substantive conversation that covered a variety of topics, including national security.” Senate Republican whip John Barrasso and political commentator Scott Jennings have also said they had 20-minute phone calls with McConnell on important topics.
Has McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, also had a nice 20-minute chat with her husband recently? That’s unclear. Chao left for China two days before McConnell was hospitalized and didn’t exactly rush back to his bedside to feed him grapes and offer moral support. In a statement issued on Tuesday, she said: “The Senator’s health did not warrant an immediate return to the US.”
I know that US politics veers manically between tragedy and farce, but it’s worth pausing for a moment and taking in just how ridiculous this situation is. It’s been weeks since McConnell was hospitalized and there is no clear evidence that he is alive. If McConnell can have substantive conversations about national security, why can’t he get in front of a news camera and tell his constituents that he is OK? You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect that something is very wrong. Indeed, even some of McConnell’s fellow Republicans are perturbed. Republican congressmanMarlin Stutzman admitted on Thursday that he doesn’t know if McConnell is “alive or has passed away” and even Donald Trump has said he has no idea how McConnell is doing. Kentucky’s Democratic governor Andy Beshear, meanwhile, has sent a letter to McConnell asking him to be transparent about the situation and put an end to the speculation.
Why isn’t McConnell’s team being more transparent? One hypothesis is that the silence is strategic because Republicans don’t want to risk a special election. McConnell is retiring from the Senate and his successor will be decided in a November election between Republican congressman Andy Barr and Democrat Charles Booker – with Barr widely favoured to win the seat. If it turns out that McConnell is unfit for office, Kentucky law states that there would have to be a special election to fill the rest of his term. This would be risky for Republicans because of how unpredictable special elections are. So, the thinking goes, they’d prefer to wait out the election clock.
Imagine for a second if this absurd situation involved a Democrat. Forget taking the high road, Republicans would be raising hell. McConnell himself would be doing whatever he could to turn the situation to his advantage. This is the guy, don’t forget, who blocked Merrick Garland’s supreme court nomination in 2016 after justice Antonin Scalia because he claimed that a vacancy shouldn’t be filled during a presidential election year. (Translation: he didn’t want Barack Obama nominating a judge.) This is the guy who, four years later, changed his mind about that whole election year rule he was so passionate about and rushed through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett as a supreme court judge just eight days before the election. McConnell has built a reputation for being a cunning tactician; he’s a man who has spent his life gaming the system. I don’t know what condition McConnell is currently in, but I wouldn’t put it past him to still be gaming the system from the afterlife.
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