What A Day - Mitch McConnell and Our Very Old Congress

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

Since 84-year-old Senator Mitch McConnell was hospitalized on June 14th after being found unconscious at his home, not one person — not even President Donald Trump — seems to know what is going on. McConnell is one of the most powerful Republican figures in political history. But over the last few years, he’s had a number of health issues, including freezing episodes during press conferences. And while he’s not running for reelection, his murky health status is not that uncommon for our very old Congress. To find out what that does for our politics and country, we spoke with Idrees Kahloon. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic who wrote about the incredible power of elder Americans.And in headlines: Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner announced he will withdraw from his race — but he's reportedly waiting until the last possible second to make it official, the U.S. launched new airstrikes against Iran, and FBI Director Kash Patel is facing new criticism for his taxpayer-funded lifestyle.Show Notes: Idrees Kahloon’s “An Oligarchy of Old People” – https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/gerontocracy-wealth-power/686585/ Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail]

The phrase that Congress is the world's best nursing home, I think sadly has more and more evidence with every passing year. I'm Jane Koston, and this is what today. The show wondering how much thought U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer put into this comparison he made on Fox Business today. Think about Abraham Lincoln. He was against slavery. He was for tariffs. President Trump similarly. He's for tariffs and he is against forced labor. Next question, Representative Greer. Can you name like three other presidents? residents. On today's show, we talk about the mystery of Senator Mitch McConnell and how Congress is too damn old with Atlantic staff writer Idris Kalloon. Before we get into all that,

here's what we're following today, Thursday, July 9th. We are suspending campaign operations. This is incredibly difficult because I know that some will think it's an admission of guilt, and it most certainly is not. We're not doing it because of the allegations. We're doing it because of the structures that are being taken away from us by those in power. I feel like that's not why. Main Democratic Senate candidate, Graham Plattner, announced Wednesday that he will withdraw from the race days after a bombshell allegation of sexual assault. Platner has denied the allegation.

In an 11-minute, 15-second selfie video posted to Twitter, Plattner lashed out at Democratic leaders claiming he had no time to address the allegations, quote, before a corporate media system and the political establishment got to act as judge, jury, and ex-executive. executioner. He also said the process to replace him needs to be, quote, open, transparent, and democratic. The main Democratic Party has voted to hold a convention to pick Platner's replacement, and many Mainers are already throwing their hats in the ring. According to state election law, Platner has until 5 p.m. Eastern, July 13th, to formally file a withdrawal in writing, and the party has until July 27th to choose a replacement. According to Axios,

Plattner plans to wait until right before that deadline. How generous of him. The United States launched new airstrikes against Iran early Thursday, and Tehran responded by targeting U.S. allies in the Middle East, which makes me feel like we're somehow not on our way to signing that peace deal we were promised. The two countries have been trading attacks since early Wednesday, after the Pentagon said Tehran struck three ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

But Thursday's strikes appeared bigger all around, with siren sounding at least three times in Bahrain, and missiles targeting Kuwait and Qatar. An Iranian official accused the U.S. of launching an airstrike targeting the area around Iran's sole nuclear power plant, and other explosions were reported elsewhere in the country during the afternoon. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump continues to confuse with his mixed messaging, saying both of these ceasefires over, but also he's not sure if we're back at war.

Hmm. FBI director and M.MA enthusiast Kash Patel is facing new criticism for his taxpayer-funded lifestyle, from Democrats and a powerful Republican. Maryland Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin and Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin announced a new investigation into Patel's alleged misuse of taxpayer funds today. That investigation follows reports of a letter to Patel from Republican Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley from back in May, in which Grassley asked about the purchase of a fleet of specially armored BMWs and his use of FBI jets for private vacations.

In a statement, Raskin and Durbin also alleged that Patel demanded special outings on official and taxpayer-funded trips, like helicopter tours in East Asia. And they said that Patel reportedly demoted FBI personnel in Belgium, quote, after they failed to ensure he was adequately entertained during official travel. Which was all so surprising from the man who allegedly gave his girlfriend a FBI SWAT detail and is currently suing a magazine for reporting on his drinking habits. Today, Davy Hearn pled not guilty. Because he is not guilty.

If Mr. Hearn can be charged with a felony for touching the reflecting pool, every American is at risk. And every American should be alarmed about this prosecution. Because, yes, someone is being charged with a felony. for touching the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Former Olympic canoe racer David Hearn pleaded not guilty today to the charge that he deliberately damaged Trump's beloved reflecting pool. As you know, Trump spent millions renovating the pool ahead of the country's 250th birthday. These renovations involved painting the pool blue.

The coating started to peel within days of the project's completion. Oh, and the pool no longer reflects. Hearn was arrested in June after he reached inside the pool to examine the peeled sealant. He said he let go of a chunk when he was told to by a park worker. He is accused of causing more than a thousand dollars in damage, which seems like more of an issue of how much exactly did this cost than anything else. And he's not the only one. DC U.S. Attorney Janine Piro said authorities have made six other misdemeanor arrests related to the reflecting pool.

Good luck with those convictions. And that's the news. Let's talk about Kentucky Republican Senator Mitch McConnell. Mostly. Is he alive? Normally, this would be a wild question to ask about a sitting member of the U.S. Senate. But since McConnell was hospitalized on June 14th after being found unconscious at his Washington home, not one person, not even President Trump, seems to know what exactly is going on.

Here's Indiana Representative Marlon Stutzman, who was asked about McConnell on News Nation. Do you know that he's alive? I don't. You know, just the things that I've heard and seen from some friends is that he's a lot of obviously not doing well, but don't know if he's alive where he's passed away. Now, numerous conservative figures claim to have spoken to McConnell. But again, is Mitch McConnell alive, should not be an open question. McConnell, one of the most powerful Republican figures in political history, is 84 years old. Over the last few years, he's had a number of health

issues, including freezing episodes during press conferences. And while he's not running for re-election, his murky health status is not that uncommon for our very old Congress. So what does that do to our politics and our country? To find out, I spoke to Idris Kalun. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic who wrote about the incredible power of older Americans. Idris, welcome to Wadda' Day. Thanks for having me. So nobody knows what's happening with Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell.

Other than that, he's in the hospital. People have been trying to get information about his condition to pretty much no avail. what do you make of the weird shroud of secrecy around the senator's health? Yeah, I mean, clearly if they had evidence that he was doing well when actually participating in lengthy conversations about matters of state, I think that they would have released that information. So my assumption based on the fact that there's no information that's coming out is that things are not going so well.

And it's generally not a good sign when you hear nothing about a politician, particularly after we have a report that they've been in cardiac arrest, which is what's happened with McConnell. So we're going to get into this. But Congress is old. They just are. But how common is it for a senator or representative to be literally unable to carry out their duties for health reasons? And everybody's like, this is fine.

It's incredibly common, incredibly bipartisan. Maybe the one bipartisan thing that we have left. You know, Diane Feinstein was allowed to remain in Congress for a while when it became clear for months that she was unable to really perform her duties. Eleanor Holmes, Norton has, you know, also receded as well. there was a congressman, a congresswoman, I believe, who was checked into a memory care facility while also simultaneously serving in Congress. So this is incredibly common. You know, the phrase that Congress is the world's best nursing home, I think sadly has more and more evidence with every passing year. Is this new? Like, I'm aware that people are living longer and what it means to be 75 is different than when LBJ died at 64. But I don't remember this kind of. of thing happening, you know, 20 years ago when I first was thinking and following politics. There were people like Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd who got close to 100 in the Senate.

But my sense is like yours that it was not quite as common. You know, I think if you plot just the average age of the U.S. Senate over time, you see that it's gotten older and older as well. And, you know, the fact that we've made strides in cancer treatment, health care, et cetera, it means that, you know, the thing that we haven't made as many strides on are dementia, Alzheimer's, these kinds of things. And so, you know, we have this kind of perverse system where politically there are great incentives to remaining in Congress. You get more seniority. You get better, you know, committee placements. And it's great. You get a staff, all of these kinds of things. And incumbency is such a great advantage in terms of your ability to get reelected.

So there's really no incentive to move unless you are voluntarily going to do that. And a lot of people clearly on both parties find it very, very hard to move on. We'll get back to my conversation with Idris in a moment to talk about what the gerontocracy is doing to our politics. But if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. What a day is brought to you by Zbiotics. Let's face it, after a night with drinks, I don't bounce back the next day like I used to. I have to make a choice.

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After your purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Let's get back to my conversation with Idris Kalloon. What gets me is that every cycle we hear voters say that they want young and fresh candidates. But in reality, they keep electing the same people. long after they start qualifying for AARP membership. Chuck Grassley won re-election back in 2022 at 89 years old. Why does this keep happening?

It's a really good question. People like incumbents as much as they say that they don't. It's a bit like, you know, in polling when you ask people, what do you think about education? Oh, that's terrible. What do you think about your kid school? It's not that bad. What do you think about health care in America?

It's pretty terrible. What do you think about your health insurance? It's not that bad. bad. I think that there's something similar that happens to politicians. The abstract, people think, okay, well, we want to vote the bums out. We don't like them. But you think about your your local politician, whether it's Susan Collins, Chuck Grassley, politicians in small states that have established kind of long ties to the community. And there it goes, well, you know, he's not so bad. I'll vote for him. I think something like that is going on here as well.

I think we also have, and you wrote about this, older voters are. wealthier, and they vote more often. So is there kind of this feedback loop where you have politicians who are just kind of serving older generations because they're the ones with money and influence, and the older generations are then re-electing those politicians? They definitely play an outsized role in primary elections, and they play a big role in the campaign donation system. So the median campaign donor is 68, I believe. The median primary voter is is quite old as well in their 60s. And, you know, in a lot of ways, politics is geared around service to older voters.

That's why Social Security and Medicare are treated as untouchable entitlements. And I think one of the genius moves that Donald Trump has made, and he made it back in 2016, 2015, was to say that Republicans are no longer going to be the party about reforming those programs. And that was a play for older voters. It was successful at the time. And I think that particularly in the early stages of campaigning before the general election, the early money game, the primary game, really taking a stance against the ARP, taking a stance that's seen as disfavorable to older voters, definitely pays political penalty.

Is this part of the reason, in your view, that young people are struggling right now, that our government is built to serve older people? No, it's a complicated question because, you know, America is simultaneously a place that has problems, economic problems, a lot of economic discontent. But if you look at the living standards, they're very high. They're higher than they've ever been. If you look at actually individual earnings for people by generation, you see that Gen Z is earning more than millennials who earn more than Gen X,

who earn more than Baby Boomer. So why doesn't it feel that way if the economists and my spreadsheets and these kinds of things show the opposite? And I think that that is, you know, there's an argument that we're much more generous to elderly Americans than younger people. That's indisputably true. Social Security is a very generous entitlement at a very, very maximum. It could be $100,000 per couple. You know, compare that to what we spend for children to alleviate child poverty, obviously much less.

I think the disconnect that a lot of people feel is due to basically the cost of housing, the cost of, you know, things that are regulation constraints. So I think that people look at the system and they say, you know, yeah, I might be making more in real dollar terms than my predecessors, but also a house is four times as expensive. And that's where I think the blame game of like what went wrong with previous generations, where it all gets a bit more complicated. Your piece looks at the U.S. as some of a gerontocracy. What does that mean for the long term for the U.S.?

Do we have historical examples of other, you know, developed nations that became gerontocracies? because we're not alone. Like, a lot of developed democracies are getting older and older and older. So there are a lot of contemporary similarities. I mean, Europe has very, very similar dynamics as we do, where we had a, you know, a baby boom, and now the baby boom is getting older. And we have pension systems that were also, so, you know, a lot of things happened in the last 100 years, right?

People started living longer. They started having fewer kids. We set up these welfare states great. And now we are at a point where fertility is. low. People are living longer. They health costs are high. And there are demands made by voters to keep these systems generous and arguably more generous than they have been before.

And so what we see in America is replicated in the UK. In the UK, they have something called the triple lock, which is an amount that the annual benefits for elderly residents are increased. And basically, it is the highest of inflation or wages or. a number. And so basically, it's always mechanically going to be higher than than inflation. And France has a similar kind of debate about, you know, every time there's an attempt to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, there are a lot of protests. And, you know, one thing that's also happening that's causing these commitments to be made, these commitments that are

consuming a greater share of GDP that, you know, if you extrapolate and look at the actual tables for 10 years from now, there's no mathematical way that this is possible to continue to give. One reason that governments aren't really changing anything right now is that, you know, older voters are a bigger share of the electorate, just mechanically, right? And so the costs of going against these programs is too high for any politician to play. That's true in America with the change that Trump made to the Republican Party. It's true in the UK, right? So Nigel Farage might be willing to be iconoclassic about so many things. He's not willing to talk. touch the triple lock. Andy Burnham, the incoming prime minister who is not going to touch the triple

lock. No one wants to touch it, right, because it's just a loser. And that dynamic, that political dynamic is replicated in basically every country that's going through this right now. So to that point, if older people hold the most power and money, and they're holding on to that power and money, and they're using that power and money to keep each other in power, and no one wants to go against them, how do we change this? Because to your point, it's, it can't last. And it doesn't feel good for the future of the country? I mean, the way of all things is that there will be a transition at some point, right? So there will be a transition of power to younger people in time. You know, like the heir to Donald Trump, right, is going to be someone like J.D. Vance.

And there will be a transition in terms of wealth going on to people. So there's a kind of argument of like, just wait for it to happen. It'll happen. You know, there are others who have more radical ideas, ideas about like literally reducing the weight of the elderly vote, mechanically increasing the weight of the young vote. And I kind of, it's provocative, but I don't subscribe to that idea. But, you know, there are more neutral grounds that are, I think, more palatable. But, like, you know, one thing is that the rise of the elderly as a share of the population is also corresponding with an increase in their share of the wealth of this country, right?

to an astonishing degree, like more and more dollars are held by older people. And if you just tax income at higher rates, you will reduce that inequality in wealth terms. Political inequality, I think, is much harder to deal with, right? Because there's one person, one vote. But, you know, you can imagine taxation scheme that actually, you know, equalizes the playing field. And then I think there are also, you know, if the root of discontent is people, young people's inability to access housing and other constraints, There are things you can do to increase the accessibility of housing that I think, you know, don't require a kind of generational warfare settlement in order to get to, but would be beneficial to the young and also for the elderly. Idris, thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me. That was my conversation with Idris Kaloon, staff writer at the Atlantic. Before we go, with the Supreme Court term over, it's time to look back on the wreckage, the hypocrisy, the racism, and the sheer stupidity. and who better than Crooked's favorite trio of badass constitutional law professors to break it all down. Stay informed about the far-right agenda and the real-life implications of their Supreme Court successes for millions of Americans. Listen to strict scrutiny every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts, or on YouTube. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review. Learn more about Count BinFace, who is actually running for actual parliament in the actual UK and tell your friends to listen.

And if you're in the reading, and not just about Count Binface, the alter ego of a British comedian who has repeatedly run for office with such policy suggestions as, make ice cream cheaper. Like me, Whataday is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston. And what's his biggest advantage in his race against right-wing reform UK leader, Nigel Farage? In his words, quote, I'm not Nigel Farage. What a day is a production of Crooked Media. Our show is produced by Caitlin Plummer, Emily 4, Erica Morrison, and Adrian Hill.

Our team includes Haley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Joseph Dutra, Johanna Case, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdoch and Jordan Canter. We had helped today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Hey, so listen, whether you're in the States, across the pond, or somewhere on the other side of the world, we love that you tune into Cricket for US News. But did you know, we also have a UK news show. That's right. It's called Pod Save the UK.

Pod Save the UK is a no bullshit, unabashedly progressive conversation about politics, focused on the issues that matter most of the people of Britain. With all the changes in our government, including the fun, revolving door of Prime Ministers we have here, there's always lots to talk about. And there's lots of fabulous guests to talk to journalists, politicians, experts, comedians and activists. Yeah, we've had great comedians on as well, like Rosie Jones, Stuart Lee, Ashling Bee. We've also had Tommy Vitor on, who may be our boss.

We still don't know. We're not quite clear on who our boss is. I thought it might be Tommy Vitor. I thought it might be John Favreau. I don't know if it's John Lovett. It's hard to say. It's not clear to us who our bosses are. Some of our listeners call us irreverent but not stupid.

I object to that. I'm deeply stupid. It doesn't sound too bad. So look, come check us out. Come join us. Pod Save the UK every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.