John Oliver returned from a weeks-long vacation Sunday night and opened his show with a brutal bit questioning whether Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is still alive.
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The “Last Week Tonight” host used the cold open to run through headlines he’d missed, sliding the Kentucky senator’s monthlong hospitalization in between a parasitic outbreak and the death of a Senate colleague.
“We are back, and we missed a lot over the last few weeks. A parasitic infection has caused explosive diarrhea across the country. Lindsey Graham died, and Mitch McConnell…maybe didn’t,” Oliver quipped, displaying a hospital-room photo of the 84-year-old senator seated next to his wife, Elaine Chao.
The dig comes after McConnell collapsed at his Washington, D.C. home on June 14, and an EMS dispatch recording that later became public showed responders had been called there for “cardiac arrest” and performed CPR before transporting him. His office withheld key details on the episode for weeks. On July 12, staffers finally released the hospital photograph alongside a written statement in which McConnell conspicuously ruled out a laundry list of diagnoses.
“I didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke. I don’t have any tumors or hemorrhages. But I was briefly unconscious and was taken to the hospital,” McConnell wrote. “While receiving excellent care over the past several weeks, I’ve also had to deal with a mild case of pneumonia.”
A McConnell spokesperson later told The Washington Post that the senator “continues to improve in rehab.”
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Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has said even he can’t get information out of the senator’s team.
“I haven’t heard a thing. Not an email, not a letter, not a call, not a video… absolutely nothing,” the Democratic governor told SiriusXM earlier this month, adding that he’d received two calls from separate agencies suggesting McConnell had died.
Beshear urged the senator’s office to “call into a news station for 5 minutes or put out a short video” to end what he called concerning speculation.
The stonewalling is being managed by McConnell’s longtime chief of staff, Terry Carmack, whose taxpayer-funded salary rose to $226,849.94 in fiscal year 2026. Graham’s funeral is scheduled for Tuesday at Washington National Cathedral. McConnell’s office has not said whether he will attend.
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