Senator McConnell Is Alive and Recovering

After the unexpected death of his friend, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina late Saturday, a missing Senator Mitch McConnell resurfaced on Sunday to reveal that he is alive and recovering after a fall and complications caused by pneumonia. The intensely private Kentucky Republican senator, 84, now serving his seventh term, issued a statement saying that he is out of a Washington, D.C., hospital where he was admitted on June 14 and is in a rehabilitation center. He said that like others of his generation, he hesitated to share details of “the vulnerability that comes with growing older.” However, with curiosity piqued, he shared that due to mobility issues resulting from childhood polio as well as other physical vulnerabilities associated with aging, he took “a fall which landed me in the hospital.”“My doctors have confirmed that I didn’t break any bones or suffer a concussion. I didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke. I don’t have any tumors or hemorrhages. But I was briefly unconscious and was taken to the hospital. While receiving excellent care over the past several weeks, I’ve also had to deal with a mild case of pneumonia,” he detailed in the statement.Mr. McConnell has a long history of illness. He has been periodically using a wheelchair in the Senate since he fell in March 2023 while at a Washington hotel. At the time, he was hospitalized with a concussion and missed several weeks of work. The next year, he fell and sprained his wrist after attending a GOP lunch. More recently, he has frozen up in public and appeared out of sorts during a budget hearing earlier this year. The internet has been awash for weeks with speculation that the senator was braindead or otherwise incapacitated and he was just serving as a seat warmer in the Republican conference. Even after he shared a photo of himself with his wife, the former transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, as he held a copy of Sunday’s Washington Post, conspiracy theorists continued to claim he was incommunicado and unresponsive. “There’s no way Mitch McConnell wrote that essay,” insisted an independent journalist, Laura Loomer, who led the charge about his incapacitation. She alleged that the photo looked AI generated and blurry around the edges. A statement from Mr. McConnell’s attending physician, which accompanied the senator’s announcement, said that he has been cleared to participate in a physical therapy regimen. Mr. McConnell, who acknowledged that the demands of the job coupled with his increasing frailty led to his decision earlier this year to retire, announced that while he seeks to regain his strength, he will remain away from the Senate for a while longer. “At my age, I tend to do what my doctors tell me to do. I’ve submitted to every test they can think of to help figure out what caused this incident. And I’m continuing to do everything they ask to speed my recovery,” he said. “As much as it frustrates me, this process takes time. And on the advice of my doctors, I won’t be able to return to the Senate floor to vote quite yet.” In the meantime, he said, he is not taking a break from conducting Senate business from his bed and is working closely with his legislative staff and Kentucky team as well as following midterm politics, the appropriations debate, and “everything in between.”“I still have unfinished business to complete on your behalf, and I have every intention of finishing the job you elected me to do,” he said, pledging to return to the Senate before his ultimate January 2027 departure.

Senator McConnell Is Alive and Recovering

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