MAGA Demands Proof Mitch McConnell Is Alive as His Office Stonewalls

MAGA world is not satisfied with the excuses from Senator Mitch McConnell’s office over his sudden disappearance, and are now demanding proof that the former Senate majority leader is still alive.

McConnell was admitted to the hospital last month, sparking grave concerns about the Kentucky Republican’s health. The worries were only stoked by vague and repetitive statements from McConnell’s aides that failed to elaborate on the senator’s condition or why he was receiving care.

But rumors about McConnell’s health spiked late Monday, when far-right influencer Laura Loomer claimed on X that an unnamed “high level source close to the White House” told her that “Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead.” In a separate post, Loomer elaborated that “McConnell is in organ failure,” and that the White House had been told “McConnell isn’t ever coming back.”

Shortly afterward, the reporter that first broke the story about McConnell’s cardiac arrest—Desirée Townsend—said that her sources had shared the same information.

By Tuesday morning, a slew of MAGA-aligned figures were demanding answers from McConnell’s office.

“McConnell’s staff should produce proof of the senator’s condition one way or another right now,” posted Matthew Boyle, the Washington bureau chief for the far-right commentary website Breitbart.

MAGA influencer Catturd posed the obvious question to his 4 million followers on X: “It’s really easy for Mitch McConnell’s team to prove he’s still alive and well. Just do a video from the hospital. Why won’t they do it?”

Steve Bannon has also speculated about McConnell’s condition, promoting claims online that the senator’s office is trying to “avoid triggering a special election that could allow Thomas Massie to run as an independent.”

The 84-year-old Republican has represented Kentucky in the U.S. Senate since 1985. He also served as the majority leader of the upper chamber from 2015 to 2021.

These are supposed to be McConnell’s final months in office—he is currently set to retire in January, at the end of his seventh term.

But his determination to remain in play on Capitol Hill has also forced him into the limelight due to several critical health scares since 2023. In March of that year, McConnell fell at a dinner event at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, fracturing his rib and suffering a concussion in the process. He fell again that July. He also froze mid-sentence twice that year, dissociating for 20 to 30 seconds each time, sparking concerns that the aging lawmaker had suffered a stroke.

In December 2024, McConnell fell for a third time in a public setting, and again in October 2025 while on his way to vote in the Capitol. He has since been transported via wheelchair by his aides as a health precaution.

In February, McConnell’s staffers shared that the lawmaker had spent roughly eight days in the hospital for “flu-like symptoms.”

A federal judge in Ohio ruled against the Trump administration Monday, citing bigoted comments President Trump and Vice President JD Vance made about immigrants. 

U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley ordered the White House to unfreeze immigrants’ benefit applications, citing Trump and Vance’s “outright hostility towards immigrants, both before and after the 2024 presidential election.” These applications include filings for work authorization and green cards from people in the U.S. from countries including Burma, Canada, Iran, Nigeria, Syria, Tanzania, and Venezuela.

“Their ire appears focused on immigrants from countries in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Asia,” Marbley, nominated to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton in 1997, wrote.  

The judge quoted many of Trump’s comments against immigrants of color, including the time he railed against people coming to the U.S. from “shithole countries” or when he claimed Haitians are “poisoning the blood” of our country. In his second term as president, Trump attacked Somali Americans and accused them of adding “nothing” to the country, and oversaw violent immigration crackdowns across the country, particularly in Minnesota.

Marbley also highlighted Trump and Vance’s made-up accusation that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pet cats and dogs. 

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance said in 2024, which Marbley quoted directly.

“This general hostility to immigration contrasts with an apparent interest in and preference for the migration of white people,” Marbley added.

Now, the Trump administration’s racism has come back to bite Trump and Vance, and at least some immigrants can have a chance to establish some stability in the U.S. The administration’s attempt to shut them out and penalize them for where they come from, for reasons born of prejudice, was temporarily blocked Monday. 

Maine Democratic Senate hopeful Graham Platner has responded to more allegations of sexual misconduct against women.

Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Maine resident who dated Platner on and off for two years, says that he sexually assaulted her in 2021—drunkenly entering her home uninvited and forcing himself on her even as she told him to stop multiple times.

“I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me,” Racicot told Politico in an article published on Monday. “I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, ‘This is no longer my choice.’”

Racicot was one of the women who detailed Platner’s past “unsettling” behavior to The New York Times last month, but did not make her full allegation until recently due to the reaction to the story being dominated by one of the women’s political connections to the GOP. She also mentioned the internal ideological conflict in her decision.

“One of the reasons I didn’t come forward sooner was, the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person,” she said. “I just want the truth out there. I just want people to have a whole scope of who he is as a person.”

Platner has denied the allegations.

“Any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false,” Platner said in a video posted on X. “Over the last 10 months, I have been deeply humbled by the faith Mainers have put in me. You have welcomed me into your homes, into your places of work, into your restaurants.… Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful of the political reality it will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward.”

While the announcement is unclear, Platner’s political future is in more jeopardy than it already was, as calls for him to drop out begin to foment. 

This story has been updated.

The president can bellyache all he wants about advancing the SAVE America Act, but it once again appears to be completely and utterly dead in the water.

House Republican leadership has claimed that the controversial voter ID bill—which has so far held up confirmation hearings and bipartisan bill signings at Donald Trump’s behest—could still be passed through reconciliation. But at least one GOP lawmaker whose vote is very much needed to advance the effort to the president’s desk is not so confident.

“It can’t” pass through reconciliation, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis told MS NOW. “If it could, we’d already be talking about it. Let’s just stop playing games. Let’s stop being dishonest.”

When a reporter suggested that the House might strong-arm the Senate into passing the act by blocking other legislation, Tillis responded bluntly: “That’s super cute.”

Tillis has been one of the more vocal conservative critics of Trump’s signature bill, openly questioning how the SAVE America Act could be implemented without the use of federal funds.

“Let’s assume you only allow early voting in the month of October,” Tillis told the Raleigh News & Observer last week. “Then do you honestly believe that we can have this thing up in 50 states? There’s no funding. There’s no specific implementation instructions.”

“Unless they do the work to get to the 60 votes, they know it’s dead, and so all this is theater,” Tillis continued. “And honestly, here in North Carolina, or in virtually any state, the ability, if we go back to when we implemented voter ID in North Carolina, it took a year to get everything in place with adequate funding.”

The SAVE America Act sparked nationwide controversy earlier this year, particularly over a detail in the first version of the bill that would have made it more difficult for married women to vote. The backlash on Capitol Hill was so grave that it gummed up efforts to fund the Department of Homeland Security for several months, forcing Republicans to bail on the package in order to end the congressional gridlock.

The original SAVE America Act suggested numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, including line items that would abolish mail-in voting, require voters to bring proof of citizenship and proof of residency to register to vote, require voter ID, and mandate voter roll purges every 30 days, an enormous bureaucratic task that would place undue burdens on local election officials. The measure also would have added to federal law to prevent men from competing in women’s sports, and a ban on “transgender mutilation surgery.”

But the bill has been radically pared down since then, in large part due to the improbability of passing it in whole. House Speaker Mike Johnson has claimed that the current iteration of the act proposed by the lower chamber preserves the “backbone” of what Trump is pushing to pass in the Senate. That includes requirements to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote, and a mandate to present photo identification when casting a ballot.

“That eliminates the problem, all the fraud and everything that everybody’s concerned about in our elections, particularly, frankly, in these blue states,” Johnson told Fox News Sunday, describing the SAVE Act as a shared top priority between the lower chamber and the White House.

The House is currently in a two-week recess, and only a handful of legislative weeks remain before midterm elections. Beyond that, lawmakers aren’t convinced the president will be satisfied with whatever solution could even get through Congress.

“He wants to go it alone, his way to the highway, and it don’t work,” Nebraska Representative Don Bacon told MS NOW. “He’s trying to pound the square peg through the circle, and it doesn’t work.”

Despite Trump’s aggressive efforts to turn the tide, Republican holdouts on the bill haven’t budged—and those that remain wish that the current administration would let this strenuous chapter come to a close.

“Republicans—those of us who can do math—would like the president and other members to recognize that there isn’t a path forward,” an unidentified lawmaker told the network.

Nearly a year after President Donald Trump’s mass government layoffs, the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association are still scrambling to replace scientists and collect missing data.

The NWS is hiring for hundreds of mostly entry-level positions, after the agency lost about 15 percent of its employees during Trump’s first year back in office, CBS News reported Monday.

Tom Fahy, legislative director of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, said that the agency had shed roughly 600 workers in 2025. Most of those employees were seasoned workers who accepted early retirement packages, while roughly 100 were probationary employees in their first year of work. Meanwhile, NOAA employed nearly 300 fewer meteorologists and hydrologists at the end of May than it did in January 2025, according to federal data reviewed by CBS News.

Former government scientists told CBS News that mass layoffs, which forced out experts, have undermined the research and forecasting conducted by these agencies.

Alan Gerard, a meteorologist who worked for three decades at the weather service and NOAA before retiring last year, told CBS News that the Trump administration’s sudden reductions to the workforce disrupted the flow of institutional knowledge.

“Obviously, people retiring and new people coming up is a natural part of any business or agency,” Gerard said. “But it’s meant to be done in an organized process, where the new people coming in have the benefit of working for a period with people who are experienced and can help train them and build up their expertise.”

Rick Thoman, a climate specialist in Alaska who worked for three decades as a weather service meteorologist, told CBS News that the sudden layoffs had been “a really bad thing.”

“Alaska is not like forecasting for Nebraska, and there are no schools of meteorology in Alaska. Everyone has to come here and learn it,” Thoman said. “So, even though there’s some effort to increase staffing now, because there are no old-timers left, and folks come in here without any experience in high-latitude weather forecasting, it just makes it that much harder.”

Already, the cracks have started to show. Since Trump returned to office, employees, including Gerard and Thoman, have observed a notable decline of “upper air” data collected by weather balloons as several weather stations have stopped launching probes twice daily.

“There’s concern about the quality of the models because of the lack of upper air data,” Gerard told CBS News. “There’s a lot of expression of just being less confident, and having less confidence in your data tends to undermine a lot of your operational decisions, right?”

Thoman pointed out that in October, weather models had incorrectly predicted a storm that displaced more than 1,000 people, after more than half of the area’s scheduled balloon launches failed to take flight in the days before the storm hit.

Thoman said it was “inconceivable” that the lack of data had made no impact on the weather model forecast.

This shortage of both data and weather experts is especially concerning with the hurricane season about to start. Climate change has resulted in longer, more intense storms—and now, it looks like some people won’t be as well equipped to face them.