UPDATE (Aug. 31, 2023, 3:00 p.m. ET): Brian Monahan, attending physician for the U.S. Capitol, said in a brief statement on Thursday that he had "consulted with Leader McConnell and conferred with his neurology team" and deemed that McConnell "is medically clear to continue with his schedule as planned."
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., froze again. This time it was during a news conference Wednesday in Covington, Kentucky. For 30 seconds, he stood silently at the lectern after he was asked whether he intended to run for re-election in 2026. It was the second time in a month that McConnell has been rendered mute and motionless in the middle of answering questions from the media.
When it happened last month, neither McConnell nor anyone around him offered any explanation beyond a report from aides that he’d felt “lightheaded.” They gave no indication that the 81-year-old Senate Republican leader had seen a doctor after the Senate GOP leadership’s weekly news conference, where he’d had to be led away from the cameras. We’re told that he went right back to work that evening.
His not taking time off was meant to be a sign of strength, a signal that the octogenarian would, as he later said through a spokesperson, continue to serve as the Senate Republican leader throughout the current term of Congress. Instead, his refusal to address the issue has brought attention to how difficult it is for Americans to talk openly about aging and the effects it can have.
American society on the whole fears aging. It is a culture that works overtime to stave off death, even while having one of the lowest life expectancies in the world compared to the amount spent on health care every year. It is considered taboo to bring up age in a variety of contexts, including whether or not someone is still hardy enough for the rigors of public service after more than eight decades on the planet.
The lack of information from McConnell and his staff has contributed to intense speculation.
It’s also hard to talk about such things without making blanket statements. McConnell and President Joe Biden, 80, are contemporaries, in almost every sense of the word. Biden is running for re-election, despite having weathered a string of questions and commentary — mostly from Republicans, but also from some Democrats — about whether he’s still fit to serve. He has had a few spills and stumbled over words, but we’ve seen nothing from him comparable to what we’ve seen from McConnell.
S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health of the University of Illinois at Chicago, has pushed back against the idea of any sort of age limit for holding office. A person’s chronological age “is not a good barometer of biological age,” he told NPR this month. “You can get people into their 80s and 90s that can operate at levels that are 10, 20, 30 years younger than their chronological age. And the reverse is also true.” He said some people — like Biden and former President Donald Trump — are what are called “superagers,” or “individuals that make it out past the age of 80 that are functioning at a cognitive level that is often decades younger than their chronological age.”
As it stands, though, we don’t have enough information to assess what McConnell has been going through, including whether or how it could affect his ability to govern. The lack of information from McConnell and his staff has contributed to intense speculation. Experts have rattled off potential causes ranging in seriousness from dehydration to a mini-stroke, known as a transient ischemic attack.
Dr. Joe Verghese, director of the division of cognitive and motor aging in the neurology department at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, agreed that there could still be a wide variety of possible causes for the sudden stoppages we’ve twice seen from McConnell. “Some of them are very benign. If you are not sleeping well, for instance, you know, that can affect your attention,” he told me in a phone call Wednesday afternoon. “If you’re stressed and you’re in a stressful situation, again, you could have these pauses. And, on the other hand, there could be less benign sort of explanations for it.”
That doesn’t mean there’s no reason to be concerned, especially because Wednesday wasn’t the first time McConnell has frozen. “It suggests that maybe there’s a chronic issue as opposed to just, like, a one-time issue,” Dr. Uche Blackstock, who heads the group Advancing Healthy Equity, told me in a phone call Wednesday afternoon. She also stressed that we’ve seen it happen twice to McConnell in public. We don’t know whether he’s had such episodes in private.
McConnell isn’t the only senator fielding questions about his capacity to perform the job. Unlike Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who at 90 is the oldest senator, there has been no reporting that his cognitive abilities have slipped. But in contrast to Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who has been candid about his recovery from a stroke last year, including his subsequent treatment for depression, McConnell has been cagey about his health status.
There is clearly something wrong with McConnell, even if it’s lack of sleep or a reaction to a new medication or something else that’s easily treatable.
He “has moved more slowly and struggled with hearing loss,” according to The New York Times, since he sustained a concussion from a fall in March that kept him out of sight in rehab for over a month. That might explain why an aide had to repeat a pair of questions after McConnell regained his ability to speak Wednesday. But he has fallen multiple times, as well, often not disclosing the incidents at the time, and he still hasn’t explained why he was seen in 2020 with his hands bandaged and bruised.
This time around, there at least appeared to be more initial willingness to engage with what the public saw. “Leader McConnell felt momentarily lightheaded and paused during his press conference today,” a McConnell aide said. The same aide added that the minority leader “feels fine” but would be consulting a doctor before Wednesday’s next scheduled event.
That’s a good step. Drs. Verghese and Blackstock were adamant that an examination should happen right away. Feeling “fine” isn’t the same as there being no problem. (McConnell said he felt fine after having frozen in July, too.) There is clearly something wrong with McConnell, even if it’s lack of sleep or a reaction to a new medication or something else that’s easily treatable. But if he doesn’t disclose what a doctor finds, if a doctor finds something, then we’ll still be left in the dark about one of the country’s most powerful people.
If McConnell is forced to step down earlier than he intended, his seat won’t fall to a Democrat. He has already made sure of that, thanks to a recent change he helped engineer in how Kentucky’s Senate vacancies are handled. It’s clear that he has had plenty of time to think about his legacy and what happens after he has finally left the Senate, but he also needs to publicly confront what’s happening right now.
CORRECTION (Aug. 31, 2023, 8:30 a.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated Biden’s age. He is 80, not 81.