Mitch McConnell is dead. You might not have heard about this and that’s not an accident.
Mitch McConnell was found ‘unconscious’ in DC home last month, may have suffered heart attack https://t.co/mxntnb48ux pic.twitter.com/nL3YJEFpjR
— New York Post (@nypost) July 1, 2026
🚨 REPORTED 911 Dispatch regarding Sen. Mitch McConnell:
Dispatched 8:36 to his home in DC on June 14th… Requesting EMS stating “unconscious and needing ALS (advanced life support).”
Is Mitch McConnell even alive? We the people deserve to know. pic.twitter.com/g0PEL7nkSa
— Erikaaa (@ErikaCA47) June 30, 2026
They may have him hooked up to machines so they can claim he isn’t dead, but the guy is dead. He might be even deader than Moqtaba Khameini, whom the Iranians still won’t show us.
It has been over two weeks since 84-year-old Senator Mitch McConnell was hospitalized on June 14, and the lack of concrete updates from his team is fueling intense public speculation.
While his office has issued brief statements claiming he is recovering and remains engaged… pic.twitter.com/7KQ6t8ucqE
— Erica 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@EricaRN4USA) June 30, 2026
Actually, more than being dead, he’s a metaphor for the Bush Republican establishment which pretends that the Democrats are the same people they were when Bill Clinton was president and that it’s Trump who’s a threat to the status quo.
In 2026, amid the massive challenges facing the country, Kentucky now has a corpse for a senator.
And the Mitch McConnell Dead Republicans hang on and hang on, past the point where they could be replaced by the people the voters would choose.
Let’s remember the situation McConnell has created in Kentucky with respect to his succession.
Kentucky has a post-turtle — that isn’t meant as a reference to McConnell’s succession, it’s a reference to the old joke about a post turtle being a turtle which rests atop a fence post, has no idea what he’s doing there, doesn’t know what to do while there and doesn’t know how to get down — Democrat governor named Andy Beshear, who, a bit like the current lifeless iteration of Mitch McConnell, is a legacy of that state’s former politics. Beshear has been in office for eight years, not altogether as a result of the damage to Kentucky Republican politics Mitch McConnell did over the last couple of decades, and McConnell has hung on as a senator under the narrative that were he to retire, Beshear would appoint a Democrat to fill out his term.
Kentucky’s GOP supermajority legislature addressed this in 2021 by passing a succession plan requiring the governor to pick from a list of three nominees by the state executive committee of the party of the outgoing senator — meaning that Beshear would have to pick from three Republicans the Kentucky GOP would send him. Beshear vetoed that bill; it was overridden. Then he refused such a hypothetical choice and promised a massive legal fight.
The legislature then passed a bill which took the governor out of the equation altogether and forced a vacancy until a special election could be called, making Kentucky one of five states taking interim Senate appointments out of the governor’s hands. Beshear vetoed that bill as well, and again his veto was overridden.
That was in 2024. Mitch McConnell, who was glitching severely in public appearance after public appearance that year, relinquished his position as the GOP Senate caucus leader. He could have retired and allowed his seat to be counted in the 2024 election cycle. That would have given Kentucky a very orderly succession to replace him.
But nope. He didn’t do that. Probably more to the point, McConnell’s staffers, who have an outsized amount of influence over the horrific performance of the GOP Senate caucus — which has been a problem for a long time — wouldn’t allow him to do that.
I’d say “not that he wanted to,” but for the fact that nobody knows what Mitch McConnell wants anymore.
It’s an utterly stupid situation, and the people responsible for it know that. Rather than be accountable and transparent about what they’ve done, they’ve spent almost three weeks hiding McConnell’s condition from the public.
Even that is too generous. They’ve spent SIX YEARS doing this. When it was obvious back in 2020 that McConnell was physically and mentally unfit for another Senate term.
They didn’t care.
Why? Shouldn’t it have been obvious that McConnell was ready for the glue factory then? Can you think of any situation in American history where a politician — and here I’ll use the Corporate Mitch McConnell rather than McConnell himself, much like I had to discuss the Corporate Joe Biden for four years when it was clear that the corporeal Joe Biden was, more or less, a nugatory entity — has forced a state legislature to dance on a string for a succession of years attempting to manage his decline into a comatose state?
The answer is simple. McConnell and the people who control him knew that his elected replacement would likely be a different kind of Republican, and they didn’t want that. So they’re trying to ride this out to the finish line with a dead man.
When at any point since the legislature passed the current succession plan (or even before then), he could have bowed out somewhat gracefully and allowed someone possessed of full faculties to replace him — and presumably work to support the agenda of the elected Republican president — after a special election.
But we can’t have nice things.
Instead it’s the better part of three weeks of limbo. No proof of life. No press release. In fact, McConnell’s office hasn’t sent out a press release since June 9, and before that they hadn’t sent anything out since May 21. But all of McConnell’s staffers still have jobs and they get to take turns pretending to be a U.S. Senator while their boss apparently lies in a vegetative state at some undisclosed location.
Perhaps there’s a compromise to be had. Move McConnell and all his assorted equipment to the Rotunda — so we can get the lie-in-state segment of this out of the way. Maybe his staff can move their desks there as well, so we can see the inner workings of that office. Who’s the actual senior U.S. Senator from Kentucky, and how long has he or she been serving?
In 2026, amid the massive challenges facing the country, Kentucky now has a corpse for a senator — warm or otherwise — and the people who have kept it there aren’t willing to say so even now.
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