A Republican senator who appeared to freeze during a live TV interview returned to the show where it happened Wednesday to offer viewers an assurance that he was, in fact, healthy.
MAGA-friendly Senator John Kennedy—at 73, not even among the 10 oldest senators—had been speaking on Kudlow on the Fox Business Network on Tuesday when he froze and appeared to repeat himself. On Wednesday, he acknowledged that there had been concerns about his health as a result of the apparent freeze but said it was in fact a technical error which had hit him.
“Some of these rags up here, they’ve got all kinds of stories that I had a brain freeze live on TV, or a stroke, or caught an STD live on television, or something,” the 73-year-old said on Kudlow, seemingly referring to coverage of Tuesday’s incident by the Daily Beast and other outlets.
At the beginning of their interview, host Larry Kudlow asked Kennedy about the moment on Tuesday when he trailed off mid-sentence and stayed silent until the camera panned away from him. On air, Kudlow had chalked up the pause to “technical problems.”
“A lot of lefty media are saying things they shouldn’t say,” Kudlow said to Kennedy. “As I understand it, what happened was your IFB, your wire broke down, and you had a lot of noise in your year, and you had stopped talking because you couldn’t get anything through.”
Kudlow used the acronym IFB to refer to interruptible fold back, a system which allows news anchors and guests to hear instructions from crew while on air through an earpiece.
In response, Kennedy said that he was “just yapping away, and all of a sudden my earpiece blew up... it sounded like a 747.”
“I just stopped talking, and I didn’t start talking again until I could hear you,” the septuagenarian said.
A spokesperson for FBN said that the incident on Tuesday was due to an IFB issue.
Before Kennedy’s interview with Kudlow on Tuesday, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) appeared on the same show and at one point told the host that he couldn’t hear him. Paul continued to speak, and the camera never cut away from him, as it did during Kennedy’s segment.
“I’m okay. I’m here, I’m back here today. I’m full of p--s and vinegar,” Kennedy said on Wednesday.
While Kennedy insisted his freezing was due to a technical issue, the exchange was reminiscent of Senator Mitch McConnell’s two freezing episodes in 2023. The 83-year old McConnell decided to step down as Senate Minority Leader in 2024, and won’t run for re-election next year.
To cap off his assurances that he’s healthy and spry, Kennedy joked to Kudlow that he would do an “old man backflip” for him sometime.
When he froze up on Tuesday, he seemed to be in the middle of saying that Jesus loves the mayors of sanctuary cities, “but everyone else thinks they’re idiots,” an idiom that he has pulled out in the past to describe figures such as Michael Cohen. He has been a strong proponent of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
That brand of wittiness has earned Kennedy a reputation in the Senate for folksy soundbites. He’ll next face re-election in 2028, if he chooses to run.
