Sen. Mitch McConnell has not returned to his duties six weeks after being admitted to a Washington, D.C.-area hospital.
Initial reports said he suffered a cardiac arrest, but weeks later, his office released a statement and photo of him and wife Elaine Chao with him fully clothed sitting in a hospital bed appearing to look coherent, saying he had merely suffered a fall and then caught a “mild case of pneumonia.”
His office released another statement from the Kentucky Republican earlier this week, but increasingly, more people are becoming skeptical that McConnell’s health is improving with rehabilitation and are demanding more ‘proof of life.’
And now, people are beginning to poke fun at the entire situation.
Overnight on Wednesday, missing-person flyers featuring McConnell’s photo appeared throughout Washington, D.C.
The flyers claimed the 84-year-old senator was last seen on June 11, three days before he was taken from his home by ambulance.
The flyers also mocked McConnell’s appearance, describing him as “turtle-like” and “tortoise-like,” while joking that he was “known for blocking something in the Senate.”
“If you have any information about his whereabouts, please keep it to yourself,” the flyer reads. “He would.”
The flyers were created by a group called the Save America Movement. Several were taped to walls and lampposts around the Capitol complex.
“We put those flyers up because this has gotten absurd,” a spokesperson for SAM, an anti-Trump political organization, wrote in a Substack post on Wednesday.
“For more than a month now, the senior senator from Kentucky has not cast a vote, has not appeared for the work of the chamber, and has not, in any provable or functional sense, represented the four and a half million people who sent him there,” the spokesperson added.
During an appearance on The Daily Beast podcast, Steve Schmidt, founder of SAM, said the secrecy surrounding McConnell’s health reflects what he described as the “rotten” state of American politics.
“The lie has so strangled the truth that whether a man who served in the United States Senate since 1985… turned into a force and a joke around the world, whether he’s alive or not,” Schmidt, a former Republican, said.
“This is like the penultimate episode of a writer’s fantasy ending for Veep,” the anti-Trump/anti-MAGA Lincoln Project co-founder added.
McConnell was hospitalized on June 14 after emergency medical personnel responded to reports of an unconscious person at his home, according to a publicly available EMS dispatch record.
In the weeks that followed, the senator’s office released few details about his condition.
His staff, led by Terry Carmack, repeatedly issued the same statement, saying only that McConnell “appreciates the outpouring of support” as he continued receiving treatment.
As public concern over his health grew, McConnell’s office released a photograph on July 12 showing him in the hospital with his wife, Elaine Chao, holding a copy of that morning’s Washington Post.
The image, however, prompted questions about its authenticity, including from some fellow Republicans.
A second photograph of McConnell, showing him smiling while seated beside his wife, Elaine Chao, was released on Monday. The image was accompanied by a statement from the senator’s office in which McConnell said he is “working hard to get back to my full schedule” in the Senate.
McConnell’s physician also said the 84-year-old senator continues to undergo a “strenuous course of physical therapy and rehabilitation” following his discharge from the hospital.
Now, Kentucky Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear is demanding McConnell either verbally address constituents to prove he can still serve or resign his seat.
In a letter sent Monday to McConnell and his staff, Beshear insisted on greater transparency after the senator’s prolonged absence following a fall.
The letter, first reported by Axios, was also copied to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D.
