Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was hospitalized Wednesday after a fall at a Washington, D.C., hotel, in which the 81-year-old apparently tripped and needed medical treatment, a spokesperson confirmed to The Daily Beast.
The news was first reported by John Bresnahan, co-founder at D.C.-focused Punchbowl News.
“This evening, Leader McConnell tripped at a local hotel during a private dinner. He has been admitted to the hospital where he is receiving treatment,” the spokesperson said.
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McConnell was reportedly at the Waldorf Astoria, though the representative did not offer details about the event—as well as any specific details on his injuries.
This is not McConnell’s first fall in recent years. In 2019, the GOP leader fractured his shoulder after he tripped and fell at his home in Kentucky.
McConnell is a survivor of childhood polio, having contracted it in 1944. He still carries with him a mild limp from his bout with the disease.
“The disease was sweeping the nation, prompting full-blown hysteria not only in urban communities in the Northeast, but in rural towns like Five Points, Alabama, in a house like ours,” McConnell wrote in his book, The Long Game.
“Just after I turned 2, and not long after my dad left for basic training, that I first came down with what my mother thought was the flu. But when she took me to see the local doctor, hoping for something to make me feel better, she learned the diagnosis was far more grim.”
In 2021, McConnell described his childhood polio in a 60-second PSA promoting COVID-19 vaccines, recalling how he “faced a different disease” and “back then, it took decades for us to develop a vaccine.”
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