Not Even Newsmax Is Buying Mitch McConnell’s Cover Story

Senator Mitch McConnell was inexplicably admitted to the hospital nearly a month ago, a stretch of time that has even the far-right media machine growing suspicious of the Kentucky Republican’s true medical condition.

McConnell was hospitalized after he was found unconscious in his Washington residence on June 14. But as the weeks have dragged on without a clear explanation from his team as to his mysterious absence, speculation about McConnell’s health has become increasingly grave. Earlier this week, far-right influencer Laura Loomer claimed on X that an unnamed “high level source close to the White House” told her that McConnell was suffering from severe organ failure and “is officially brain dead.”

By Thursday, hosts of the far-right news network Newsmax had joined the expanding choir.

“Republicans are doing the same bullshit with McConnell that Dems did with [Joe] Biden. No one has actually spoke to him, they are just trying to carry this on to keep @RepThomasMassie from running for his seat,” Carl Higbie posted to X on Thursday morning, referring to the highly dependent dynamic the previous president was rumored to rely on in the waning days of his term.

Newsmax anchor Rob Finnerty took his concerns to his show, questioning on air: “Where is Mitch McConnell? What is going on?

“When you factor this in under Kentucky state law, if McConnell resigned or died, a special election would have to happen within 90 days, meaning before the November elections, meaning someone like Congressman Thomas Massie could run in that race and potentially win, which is not something Republicans want,” Finnerty said.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear got involved in the matter Wednesday, penning a letter to McConnell’s office demanding a formal update on the senator’s health.

The 84-year-old Republican has represented Kentucky in the U.S. Senate since 1985, and remained on Capitol Hill through several recent health scares, particularly 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 publicly 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 with “flu-like symptoms.”

New Mexico officials are accusing President Trump’s Department of Justice of obstructing the state’s investigation into billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch. 

The state’s Attorney General, Raúl Torrez, sent a letter to the DOJ last week accusing the department of withholding redacted records related to Epstein’s Zorro Ranch property, south of Santa Fe, The New York Times reports.  

“The U.S. D.O.J.’s continued withholding of unredacted records is causing real and escalating harm,” Torrez wrote to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in the letter, made public Thursday. “Every day that the U.S. D.O.J. withholds these records, the foundation upon which a New Mexico prosecution could be built erodes.”

In February, Torrez requested documents from the DOJ related to the ranch, but despite receiving assurances from department officials that they would send over the documents, nothing ever came. Torrez wrote that he even followed up five times over the next few months through different channels to no avail, impeding important leads in the probe. 

“Every avenue of investigation that begins with a redacted name, a blacked-out face or an obscured date is an avenue that ends before it begins,” Torrez wrote. He told the Times that he hasn’t received a response to his latest letter. 

Epstein’s ranch was never fully investigated by the federal government, and New Mexico authorities have said that federal prosecutors in New York asked them in 2019 to hold off, claiming that the DOJ was conducting its own probe. Nothing came of it, and the federal government never fully searched the property, which has new ownership.

Now that the state of New Mexico has decided to begin a new investigation, it’s not surprising that the Trump administration appears to be stonewalling once again. The ranch holds many secrets, including why a mansion on the property was built by military contractor Bradbury Stamm Construction, better known for building classified government facilities such as Los Alamos National Laboratory and Kirtland Air Force Base. For now, those questions will remain unanswered as the Trump administration continues to try and wish Epstein away. 

Just one single person has enrolled in the GOP’s $3 million anti-woke program at West Virginia University’s Washington Center.

The taxpayer-funded Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship program has seen an abysmal level of interest ahead of the upcoming fall semester.

“I do think that it’s important for the legislature and for the governor to reflect on this.... There is a question about whether or not this is the best use of public funds,” WVU political science professor Erik Herron told West Virginia Watch. “I think the Washington Center, ironically, seems to be exactly what it complains that higher education has become. It was created in Charleston, and it was imposed on the university, so it’s a big government mandate.”

“I’m not happy about it,” said Democratic State Delegate John Williams, who voted against the center’s creation last year. “Now we’re in a position where we’ve allocated so much money towards this program, and only one person is taking advantage of it.”

Republicans have defended low enrollment by noting that the program does not count toward university credits for students yet—a fact that does not instill confidence.

The program, mandated in 2025 via a Republican bill, is intended to center the “great debates of western civilization,” “western history and culture,” and “the development of ideas across the political and ideological spectrum.” West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey put it more plainly, stating that the program existed to “push back on the woke ideology that has infected our schools and help return higher education to its true purpose.”

The fall curriculum includes classes titled “Woke,” “The New Right,” and “Nation and Migration.”

This is one of the more desperate cases of the right’s ongoing culture war in academia, the workplace, and beyond. Responding to what you perceive as ideological extremism in the classroom with your own ideological course—worth zero credits—is a decision steeped in delusion. We’ll see how many people are enrolled in the fall.

The Trump administration is attacking journalists for reporting on President Trump ditching his new Qatari jet for security reasons.

MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig reported Wednesday evening that the president abruptly swapped the new jet for his old Air Force One on his trip from the NATO summit in Turkey to the U.K. due to concerns about the aircraft’s defense systems. She noted the new Air Force One didn’t have the necessary communications and defensive capabilities for “safe travel amid Iran hostilities.”

Leonnig’s post was angrily singled out by White House communications director Steven Cheung, even though multiple other outlets reported the same information.

“Carol Leonnig is a liar and this article is complete Fake News. She has no idea what she is talking about. She says the White House declined to comment. Not true. We gave comment to The New York Times and many other outlets,” he wrote Thursday on X. “Carol is not a real journalist. A complete fraud.”

Cheung never actually disputed any of Leonnig’s reporting in the post—he just called it fake news without offering up any response. And if his issue is with Leonning not attributing his comment, all he said to The New York Times on a similar story was “the new Air Force One is a state-of-the-art aircraft that has been fitted with high-level security protocols that ensure the safety of the president and his staff.”

He also mentioned that “there are many enemies of America who have their sights on [Trump], and we use every tool at our disposal—including distraction and misdirection—to address those threats.” But none of that language addressed the reason Trump switched planes.

Trump himself claimed rather unconvincingly that the Qatari jet was going to a U.S. military base in Europe “so the soldiers can see it.” In reality, the new jet simply doesn’t have the same command-and-control functions of the original Air Force One. And while experts have said that it would take years and billions of dollars to upgrade the Qatari jet’s defenses to the presidential level, the Trump administration did it in weeks—all before ditching it partway through its first official trip.

Trump officials are on the hunt for the person who leaked details about a hostile meeting between the Pentagon and the Vatican earlier this year.

In January, the Pentagon reportedly threatened an ambassador from the Holy See, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his State of the World address.

The U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Brian Burch, told The New York Times Thursday that the meeting had been “grossly mischaracterized.” The 51-year-old co-founder of CatholicVote presumed the story came from the Vatican’s side, and personally called Cardinal Pierre for an apology for what Burch described to the Times as “an attack on the United States.”

Burch told the national daily that he had also asked for the cardinal’s help in identifying “who was lying about the meeting.” The Times noted that Burch later posted a statement in which he claimed that Cardinal Pierre had “emphatically denied” reports of the confrontational exchange, and that the Vatican had confirmed the details of the meeting were exaggerated. The cardinal, however, did not respond to a request for comment from the Times. The Pentagon denied ever making such a threat.

Pope Leo XIV has continually upset the president and a number of Donald Trump’s underlings through his relentless advocacy for world peace, particularly as it relates to the president’s warmongering. The Chicago-born pontiff has thus far railed against the White House’s lethal and unproductive attacks on small watercraft in the Caribbean, the sudden infiltration of Venezuela, and the escalating conflict in Iran, the last of which he said in June was not a “just” war.

Trump, meanwhile, has not shied away from throwing his own fire at the religious leader. In May, Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he believed the pope was “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people” by advocating for global peace and prosperity. “But I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” he said.

Trump, however, has not done a very good job himself of stripping nuclear capabilities from Iran’s theocratic regime.

Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, three years after former President Barack Obama brokered the Iran nuclear deal to limit the country’s enormous uranium stockpile. But that changed later that year when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact and imposed a series of tough economic sanctions against the Middle Eastern country.

By 2025, Iran had curated an 11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium, the whereabouts of which remain largely unknown. The total stockpile could create as many as 10 bombs if fully enriched, according to a 2025 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

On Wednesday, Trump indicated that he would no longer be willing to negotiate with Tehran’s leadership, suggesting that—despite having been president from 2017 to 2021—he had only just now started to understand Iran’s theocracy.

“I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum,” Trump told reporters at a NATO summit presser in Ankara, Turkey. When asked what had changed since the memorandum of understanding was preemptively signed last month, Trump said: “I got to know ’em.”