Mitch McConnell’s Health Scare and the Future of the GOP

Inside the Hive host Brian Stelter talked to Politico senior political columnist Jonathan Martin about Mitch McConnell’s refusal to step down despite a couple on-camera freeze-ups—and how Republican senators (for now, at least) are standing by him. Martin describes McConnell as “one of these rare modern American senators who never had an appetite to run for president,” explaining how “it is extraordinarily difficult for somebody like that to walk away from the pinnacle of their career in public life.”

Stelter and Martin also discuss the state of America’s political gerontocracy, as well as the 81-year-old minority leader’s relationship with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, his response to Trumpism, and his support for Ukraine. McConnell’s “last big public fight,” Martin says, is “the effort to keep the Republican Party away from the temptation of isolationism and away from kind of what he views as the most virulent strain of Trumpism.” That’s McConnell’s “mission at this point,” he says, and perhaps “his final battle.”