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I’m utterly flabbergasted by this Mitch McConnell thing. And maybe I shouldn’t be at this point. Maybe I should just become a cold, ruthless bastard who can’t be surprised by anything anymore. But I’m not there yet. And somehow, what happened today made this whole thing even more absurd.
Today’s rant is sponsored by Ground News.
I’ve been paying more attention to how differently the same story gets covered depending on where you read it—especially lately, when everything feels optimized for speed and outrage instead of context.
Take this one—over a 1,000 outlets have reported on Donald Trump’s pledge at the recent GOP Midterm Convention, to send every American adult $5,000 if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate in the November midterm elections.
Mother Jones who is owned by an independent, non-profit media organization (The Center for Investigative Reporting), refers to Donald Trump as “your deadbeat president”, citing his latest pledge has drawn wide criticism from his own supporters and right leaning media conglomerates and spokespeople.
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World News Daily (WND) whose ownership is not stated, reports the President doubled down on plans for a $5,000 dividend to every adult American, providing in-depth quotes from Donald Trump.
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Same story—completely different narratives.
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On Monday, they dragged this poor husk of a man out for a dog and pony show. They brought in more Capitol Police than you can imagine, all to conceal his actual condition from the public. They wheeled out a man we hadn’t seen in three months, a man who wasn’t in particularly good shape even before this weird cardiac event, and who certainly wasn’t physically or mentally up for the job. And they had him speak to reporters for about two minutes.
But first, they told those reporters they couldn’t record video or audio. No footage. No sound. Nothing that would let us hear his voice or see how frail he really is.
And the media complied. That’s wild to me. And frankly, insulting to his constituents.
What right do Mitch McConnell’s staffers have to keep the public in the dark for months and then expect a blatantly censored appearance to end every legitimate question about his ability to do the job? What right do they have to decide that the people of Kentucky don’t get to know the condition of the man who is supposed to be representing them?
He disappeared again yesterday, missing several voters — and then this afternoon, McConnell reappeared. And somehow that made this story even crazier by voting to advance the Farm Bill (finally!) after multiple people had to help him cast his vote.
These people work for us. Their salaries are paid with our tax dollars. Asking whether our elected officials are actually capable of doing the work we pay them to do is not some outrageous invasion of privacy. It is the bare minimum of democratic accountability.
And I’m sorry, but I have some questions.
Because this isn’t some meaningless ceremonial vote. This is the Farm Bill. This is the legislation that helps determine what happens to the food system you rely on every single day. It affects whether farmers can protect themselves when crops fail or markets collapse, how families access food assistance, how farmland is conserved, and how billions of taxpayer dollars flow through rural America.
It affects whether a farmer can keep planting next year. Whether food makes it from a field in Iowa to the grocery store where you buy dinner. Whether families can put food on the table. These are real people, real livelihoods and real public money.
And Congress generally rewrites this thing once every five years.
The bill McConnell helped advance is more than 900 pages.
Nine. Hundred. Pages.
Maybe — just maybe — that deserves more than somebody showing up after three months away and casting the deciding vote without the public having any meaningful idea how carefully he studied what the hell he was voting on.
I’ve started paying more attention to how the same story can feel completely different depending on who’s reporting it. Ground News makes that easy to see by showing coverage from across the political spectrum and pointing out what certain outlets leave out.
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And that’s why the victory lap we’re seeing now from Republican operatives and people in the media pisses me off so much. They are spiking the football — saying: look how stupid these Democratic content creators look… they thought Mitch McConnell was dead.
Let me be very clear about something: The only reason I thought Mitch McConnell might be dead is because they wouldn’t put him on camera and show him to us. You don’t get to hide a sitting senator for three months, ban cameras when you finally trot him out, and then mock the people who asked where he was.
And you definitely don’t get to act like today’s vote settles the matter.
To me, today’s vote makes the questions more consequential. His vote mattered. Without that twelfth Republican vote, this legislation hadn’t moved. Today they had it. Today it moved.
I don’t like talking about any of this. I’d much rather be talking about the important issues of the day. But I can’t, because Congress won’t do anything about the important issues of the day. And Congress won’t do anything because we have people like Mitch McConnell in power who can’t physically or mentally do the job, surrounded by a whole apparatus of people willing to cover for a gerontocracy that is incapable of delivering on anything that matters to the American people. But the more I think about it, the more I realize this is one of the important issues of the day. Because this isn’t really about Mitch McConnell anymore. It’s about what we allow power to become in this country. It’s about politicians clinging to power to the detriment of people’s livelihoods and the wellbeing of our country.
They can’t rein in an out-of-control fascist president. They can’t end this ridiculous, illegal war in Iran. They can’t fix our broken economy. They can’t regulate AI, or deal with the data centers and Flock cameras that are driving Americans crazy every single day. They are not capable of dealing with any of it. And it’s because of exactly this.
So to the pundits online who were so happy to lecture people like me: screw that.
Mitch McConnell did show up again today, this time to cast the vote his Republican peers proclaimed they needed to move the farm bill forward. It’s bullshit. But that doesn’t erase any of my questions about what the hell is actually going on here.
If I’m being honest with you, what we’ve seen of him this week deeply concerns me. And that’s if you can even say what we have seen this week was Mitch McConnell. I don’t think it really was. It was whatever’s left of him. He is not capable of doing this job. It’s incredibly sad. It’s elder abuse.
And this keeps happening in America. We have so many members of Congress who have clung to power for far too long and done nothing to create the conditions for the next generation of American politicians to step up, not just into ordinary seats, but into leadership. I am tired of this entire class of people acting like we’re being annoying for asking basic questions about what the hell is going on in this country and why it keeps happening.
It is not okay for a sitting member of Congress, whether it’s Mitch McConnell or Tom Kean or any of the others, and that includes plenty of Democrats, to disappear for months with no update on their health. None.
Why hasn’t the Senate removed Mitch McConnell? Why haven’t they moved the farm bill forward without him? Why haven’t they stripped him of his committee assignments? That’s what would happen in a functioning government. And a functioning media would spend a hell of a lot more time on this story instead of moving on the moment they got played by a bullshit dog and pony show.
I remain bewildered. And I’ll be honest about why I keep talking about McConnell. Yes, it gets clicks. It does. But that’s not why I keep coming back to it. I keep talking about it because this story is a window into everything that is broken about American politics right now. It is maddening that we’re expected to just tolerate this kind of crap.
And that’s before we even get to the fact that the current president of the United States is very clearly in substantial physical and cognitive decline. He doesn’t know where he is half the time. He is not up for the job. And he’s being taken advantage of by some of the least qualified people you have ever seen on this planet.
We are in bad shape in America. And until we break up these concentrated power structures that are manipulating the American people and destroying our economy, and relentlessly, ruthlessly demand real transparency and accountability from the people who wield them, we are never going to take this country back. We are never going to get to a place where we have a government that worthy of the people it represents.
Because Mitch McConnell showed up today.
He cast the vote his party demanded of him was needed.
A piece of legislation advanced.
And somehow, after three months of gaslighting, we’re supposed to believe that ‘showing up’ is the same thing as delivering for the American people.
It’s not.
It’s the bare minimum. The American people deserve representatives who can actually do the work — and a government honest enough to tell us when they can’t. We deserve a hell of a lot better than this.
With urgency,
—Mike
Mike Nellis is a Democratic strategist and entrepreneur who has raised over $1 billion for Democratic campaigns and causes. He’s the founder of Authentic.org, an award-winning fundraising and advertising agency, and a former Senior Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris. This Substack is where he writes with endless urgency about the issues of the day—and how we can save the Democratic Party and our democracy.
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