Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel and CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta both weighed in on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) latest freezing incident on Wednesday and suggested what the underlying health issue could be.
On Fox News’ The Special Report with Bret Baier following the incident, Siegel noted that while he hadn’t examined McConnell, his best guess “would be Parkinson’s disease because that, in its later stages, can give you a freeze.”
Gupta also raised the possibility of Parkinson’s disease during an appearance on CNN’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday.
“There’s a long list of possibilities here. I think what we saw was pretty concerning. I think most people could see that,” Gupta said. “It was similar to what we saw in July where there was this freezing. It’s the freezing of the speech, it’s the freezing of the body, it’s the tight sort of grasping of the side of the lectern.”
He continued, “His face even has this mask-like feature to it. So there’s a lot of things that are going on there.”
Gupta argued that while McConnell could have suffered from a seizure or something similar, “It could be something like when somebody comes off of their medications for things like Parkinson’s. When the medication start to wear off, they may start to have freezing episodes as well.”
The fact that his team clearly had a protocol for this and no one freaked out about it tells me this happens a lot more frequently off camera than on. This is what we can expect from the Senate minority leader moving forward. At least until '26, if he lasts that long.
Behold, our most capable leaders. This one was old as fuck too fat to walk and very dumb, don’t ask him questions. The next one is even older so, better. There is also this guy that sometimes doesn’t work anymore, because he’s as old as the dirt you walk on.