More than a month into Sen. Mitch McConnell’s absence, the public is taking matters into its own hands.
Overnight on Wednesday, missing-person flyers bearing McConnell’s face were scattered around Washington, D.C. The flyers state that McConnell, 84, was last seen on June 11, three days before he was loaded into the back of an ambulance. They also jab at the Kentucky senator’s appearance, describing him as “turtle-like,” " tortoise-like, " and “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 the Save America Movement, and several have been 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.”
In an appearance on The Daily Beast podcast, SAM founder Steve Schmidt said McConnell’s health being shrouded in mystery is a testament to how “rotten” the state of U.S. politics has become.
“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.”
Robert Steurer, McConnell’s spokesperson, did not respond to an inquiry from The Daily Beast regarding the flyers or to the numerous inquiries that preceded it.
McConnell was hospitalized more than a month ago, on June 14, the same day a public EMS dispatch call showed emergency medical personnel responding to reports of an unconscious person at his home.
Since then, the senator’s staff has fallen almost completely silent. His team, led by Terry Carmack, who is on track to earn more than $226,000 this year, repeatedly issued the same statement, saying only that he “appreciates the outpouring of support” while he continued treatment. As concerns mounted, the senator’s staff finally shared a photo of him in the hospital alongside his wife, Elaine Chao, on July 12, clutching a copy of that morning’s Washington Post. However, the image’s authenticity drew scrutiny even from McConnell’s fellow Republicans.
A second photo of McConnell smiling while seated beside Chao was released on Monday. It was accompanied by a statement from McConnell’s office saying he is “working hard to get back to my full schedule” in the Senate.
McConnell’s physician added that the 84-year-old is continuing a “strenuous course of physical therapy and rehabilitation” after being discharged from hospital care.
That same day, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear wrote a letter to McConnell demanding he “directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of his capacity to serve, or resign.”
“All of this speculation and even this letter could have been avoided with a minimal amount of transparency,” Beshear wrote. “Kentuckians are just asking Senator McConnell to be honest.”
Still, there is no video footage of McConnell, the Senate’s longest-serving party leader, speaking or photographs of him standing. His staff has not explained why.
