Mitch McConnell Has to Be Told How to Vote in Latest Appearance

Senator Mitch McConnell’s handlers would like the American public to believe that he’s still physically and mentally fit to be in office, but that no longer seems to be the case.

The longtime Kentucky Republican suddenly reappeared in Congress this week after an unexplained three-month absence, apparently ready to vote on Senate proceedings. But when tasked to do so during Wednesday’s Senate Agriculture Committee meeting on the Farm Bill, McConnell hazily sided with the Democrats.

The “no” vote was clearly a mistake, and visibly concerned North Dakota Senator John Hoeven, who was seated on McConnell’s left. Hoeven leaned over to the Kentuckian and said something quietly, as did committee chairman and Arkansas Senator John Boozman, seated on McConnell’s right. Senator Amy Klobuchar, the committee’s top Democrat, smiled and nodded along encouragingly as the trio struggled to address the lapse.

Nonetheless, the momentary error spurred murmurs from the table and the surrounding crowd of congressional aides.

“Aye,” McConnell quickly corrected.

McConnell’s office issued a statement on the senator’s X account shortly after the vote. The statement was written in the first-person, suggesting that despite McConnell’s vacant expression hours earlier, he was suddenly well enough to articulate via the written word that he was “proud to vote yes on the Farm Bill on behalf of the hardworking farm families across Kentucky.”

“America’s farmers are the cornerstone of our nation and the backbone of Kentucky’s economy and I wish our Democrat colleagues would have joined Republicans supporting the many important provisions in this Farm Bill,” the post continued. “My hope is the bill receives robust bipartisan support on the Senate floor and demonstrates our commitment to our Nation’s farmers and rural communities.”

McConnell was found unconscious in his Washington, D.C. home and rushed to the hospital on June 14. For weeks, his office refused to explain his extended hospitalization or elaborate on his eventual return to Capitol Hill. But the 84-year-old is clearly not the same: Since returning to Congress this week, McConnell has been repeatedly photographed with a blank gaze and his mouth hanging open, including just after his Farm Bill vote. He does not seem lucid or aware—save for the occasional wave towards the camera—and has refused to speak with reporters trying to assess his current health condition.

Former Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, employees are working on an artificial intelligence takeover of federal government services for the Trump administration. 

The Washington Sun reports that the staffers are setting up an AI-driven website, America.gov, to help Americans with everything from obtaining and renewing passports to potentially preparing and filing taxes for free. (The latter is still under discussion and would be a reversal from the White House’s earlier decision to kill the free tax filing website launched by the Biden administration, Direct File.) 

While the site is still in planning stages, several workers from Elon Musk’s DOGE are involved. These include Edward Coristine, known by his online moniker “Big Balls,” as well as Joe Gebbia, a former DOGE worker who co-founded Airbnb and now runs the White House’s National Design Studio. That office is leading the project. 

The effort is intended to be housed in the General Services Administration, sources told the Sun. Sam Corcos, a former DOGE official and head of technology at the Treasury Department, moved on to roles at GSA last month. Login.gov, a government identity proofing system at the GSA that Corcos is helping to lead, could be used as an entry point for America.gov. The White House has already mandated its use for multiple public-facing agency websites.

Some unnamed Trump administration officials told the Sun they hope the effort will give Republicans something positive to sell for November’s midterm elections. If the website goes up by the end of September, GOP candidates could run on the initiative and say that President Trump is trying to solve problems for the American people. 

But that could easily backfire. The staffers are seeking to have a chatbot be the main way people interact with America.gov, a feature already used for customer service by many businesses. But most consumers hate such bots and prefer human beings, and forcing Americans to go through a bot to get a passport or file their taxes could provoke a major backlash. 

On top of that, the National Design Studio’s other projects, such as TrumpRx and the Trump Gold Card visa website, have had multiple issues, including accessibility problems. That poor track record, along with DOGE’s less than sterling reputation, does not bode well for a government website that purports to make accessing public services easier.  

House Speaker Mike Johnson just shattered President Donald Trump’s lies about reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

At a rally in North Carolina Wednesday night, Trump insisted—as his administration has claimed for weeks—that the Strait of Hormuz was open. But hundreds of miles away on Capitol Hill, Johnson revealed that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Now that ongoing conflict obviously has had an effect on gas prices, for example, because the Strait of Hormuz is not completely open safely for commerce yet, and the Red Sea is affected as well,” Johnson said at a press conference.

“Of course gas prices are too high,” he continued. “When we get that thing resolved in the Strait of Hormuz, that will have a direct effect on that, and it will help to bring down grocery costs.”

The speaker claimed that Republican lawmakers were “working around the clock” to resolve the situation by speaking to people in their districts “with authenticity and frankness.” In reality, House Republicans took a five-week vacation and then returned to work for just seven days before adjourning Wednesday until after the midterms.

The Trump administration has spent weeks claiming that the flow of ships and gasoline through the Strait of Hormuz has resumed—but it’s still far less than the prewar average. Even more concerningly, a consistent gap has emerged between the government’s claims about the flow of energy and the quantities tracked by industry firms.

Meanwhile, crude oil prices pushed above $100 per barrel Wednesday, causing diesel prices to surge to more than $6 per gallon at stations around the country. Trump has continued to claim that prices won’t fall until “right after” the midterm elections—when the White House is reportedly plotting to escalate military action against Iran.

An independent group tapped by the United Nations’ top human rights body reported Thursday that it found “reasonable grounds” to believe that the U.S. committed war crimes in Iran.

The cited atrocity was a pair of Tomahawk missile strikes on the “clearly identifiable” Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab—a city in the southern Iranian province of Hormozgan—and a sports complex in Lamerd that occurred in February. The two attacks killed 178 civilians, most of them children.

The findings were documented in a report by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran and submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

At the time of the strikes, U.S. military officials denied that they were behind the attack. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted that the U.S. “never” targets civilians during foreign conflicts. Early reports indicated that outdated Pentagon intel had led them to believe that the school was actually an Iranian base.

The fact-finding mission found that the U.S. “failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify” that the school site “was a military objective.” It also declared that the U.S. had acted willfully and recklessly, and had failed to do basic due diligence, such as updating its databases or examining publicly available data that would have revealed the site was a school.

“The Mission considers that the U.S.’s failure to update information in relation to the school in its targeting databases and to verify that the building was a military objective before launching the attack went beyond mere negligence,” the report reads. “Rather, the U.S. directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.”

The group confirmed that the U.S. was behind the attacks by analyzing the damage the strikes inflicted on the surrounding area as well as to the victims’ bodies. The group said the distinctive pockmarking left behind by a wide spray of tungsten bullets suggested that the weapon of choice was Lockheed Martin’s Precision Strike missiles, also identified as “PRsM.” The U.S., the independent body concluded, was the only nation in the conflict that possessed such weapons.

President Donald Trump already has plans to demolish the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

One day after a federal judge ordered Trump to finally give up on plastering his name on the Kennedy Center, and the president’s handpicked board of trustees voted to close the center, Trump was spotted reviewing plans to destroy the nation’s prestigious national theater.

AFP photographer Brendan Smialowski captured a photograph through the window of Air Force One Wednesday night in which Trump can be seen looking at a large posterboard emblazoned with the words “KENNEDY CENTER DEMOLISH.”

Speaking to reporters on the tarmac earlier that evening, Trump made it clear that he couldn’t be bothered to renovate a former president’s memorial because he hadn’t been allowed to plaster his name on it.

“I’d like to be able to save it, but it’s going to take a lot of subsidy into the future and for us as an administration to want to do that, I think the Trump administration should be recognized,” Trump said.

In a court filing last month, prosecutors suggested that the proposed $250 million renovation project was necessary for the institution’s survival. If the building wasn’t able to be renovated, they suggested constructing a “large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River.”

Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty, a Kennedy Center trustee and the plaintiff in the court battle to block the center’s renaming, requested an emergency hearing to challenge the sudden closure, calling it “unexplained and unlawful.”

But Trump may not be waiting for the hearing. A legal observer said in court filings Wednesday night that she had seen a “forklift run into and hit the pillars on the building several times.”