10 U.S. Politicians Who Spent a Weekend at Bernie's

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We’re focusing a lot right now on Mitch McConnell as of the filming of this video, but there was have been so many cases over the years of politicians hiding health issues from the public, and we’re going to go over the most famous and egregious of them now. And don’t you go anywhere until the very end because we’ll be inching ever closer to tortoise time as we tick down through some of these incredible cases of politicians decaying before our very eyes and outright lying about it.

10 Chester Arthur

The very first time we have a really good sense of this happening and a full picture about it is back in 1881 with President Chester Arthur. He served from 81 to 85. And Arthur is played by Nick Offerman in the Netflix series Death by Lightning that also stars Michael Shannon as President James Garfield.

President Arthur was diagnosed with kidney disease almost directly after he was sworn in following the assassination of President Garfield in 1881. Specifically he had what was then called Bright’s Disease, and is now called nephritis, and it’s a kidney disease that results in inflammation in different parts of the organ, and leads to a lot of complications in someone’s overall health.

Suddenly, despite this Arthur was the president, and he was very visibly losing a ton of weight and looking very strikingly unhealthy by 1883. He took a trip to Florida in order to try and feel a little better, but that actually made things worse, as going to Florida generally does for the rest of us, too. Later in the year he traveled to Yellowstone for the same reason, which he doubled up as a promotional tour for the burgeoning national parks system. Both goals for that visit were successful and he recovered a bit, but not nearly enough. The very next year he didn’t even secure the Republican nomination for president and so didn’t even get to run again, and that was maybe a good thing because the year after that in 1885, he died.

President Arthur had actually ordered that most of his documents to be burned, which continued to cloud the nature of his illness even to history. It wasn’t until the New York Times did an investigation in the 1970s that we really found out the true extent of his illness.

9 Grover Cleveland

In 1893 we have a fun one involving President Grover Cleveland. One day that year, Cleveland told everybody he was going on a little fishing trip with a friend. But in reality, he was secreted away to have surgery while floating around on that friend’s yacht. When the Philadelphia Press ran a story with the real details of the surgery, the administration insisted that it was all lies, but they backpedaled a little and said, “sure, yeah, he actually did really have a procedure done on the yacht, but it was just that his dentist came along and took out a bad tooth for him.” The real truth, that President Cleveland had a tumor removed the roof of his mouth, wasn’t officially confirmed until 1917, nine year’s after the man’s death.

8 Woodrow Wilson

President Woodrow Wilson had a massive stroke while in office in 1919. It left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak, and his wife Edith is said to have pretty much been running the government from then until he lost his bid for a third term. Not only that, but it seems very likely that he’d been having strokes since 1896, when he’d lost the use of his right hand and had to learn how to write all over again with his left hand. Another stroke had left him partially blind in one eye, and another one lost him the use of his left arm, this one he described in a letter to a friend as “as nasty a beast as ever attacked poor human flesh.” Wilson died in 1924.

7 Franklin Delano Roosevelt

It’s no secret that Franklin Delano Roosevelt spent his presidency mostly in a wheelchair due to complications from polio. What was a secret at the time though was just how much this affected him, and what other conditions he developed that spent years lurking beneath the surface.

He came down with polio back in 1924 at the age of 39, and it almost completely ruined any chance he had at serving in public office. But he wanted it, and he stayed focused and made a major effort to remain in the game and he won election for governor of New York in 1928 and 1930, and then he won four consecutive presidential elections. World War II took a giant bite out of what remained of his health toward the end of his life. In 1944 he had one physical that showed he’d been living with high blood pressure, heart disease, and bronchitis.

Throughout his career though, people just didn’t know how sick he really was. And that’s because FDR successfully convinced the press not to cover him in an unflattering way. He wasn’t seen in public as a sick old man, he never let anyone take pictures or film him walking, because he couldn’t really do it, and spent most of his time in a custom-made wheelchair instead. And there are also very few pictures of him even in that wheelchair, because his agreement with the media included having them only photograph him from above the waist.

However, after accepting the nomination once again for the 1944 presidential election, a candid picture of Roosevelt did end up making the rounds where he looked every bit the frail old man that he was at that point. Fears of his possible inability to complete a fourth term caused a vice presidential shakeup where his VP nominee was replaced by Harry Truman, who would go on to become president just a year later when FDR died of a massive stroke in April of 1945.

Even after he died, his press secretary Stephen Early kept up the charade by releasing a statement that “the president was given a thorough examination by seven or eight physicians” and that “he was pronounced organically sound in every way.”

Organic, non-GMO, thrice-washed Roosevelt. Never canned, always fresh. And very dead.

6 John F. Kennedy

President John F. Kennedy was notoriously in pain for a lot of his presidency. But not many of his health problems were actually fully known to the public. People knew about his bad back, but the story behind that was that he was a war hero, so that’s how that happened, and that was noble and patriotic and awesome and totally forgivable as far as debilitating health problems go. Eventually people came to know that he had Addison’s disease, which causes things like fatigue, skin discoloration, low blood sugar, stomach cramps, dizziness, and weight loss. But in his 1960 presidential campaign, his staff denied claims of Addison’s and instead told everyone he just had an adrenal deficiency at the time.

But that was only the tip of the iceberg anyway, because JFK had been a sickly person since all the way back to childhood. He was so sick all the time that his family joked that his blood could kill a mosquito. He had scarlet fever as a child, then he had an unknown illness that kept him home from boarding school, and starting in childhood and continuing on for the entire rest of his life, he suffered from the back problems that we kind of knew about and also intense stomach pain. When he got it in his head that he wanted to join the Navy, he looked to his father Joseph Kennedy Sr., who was a wealthy investor, former ambassador to the UK, and the very first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. JFK would never have passed a military physical, and famously didn’t have to undergo one in order to get picked to work in naval intelligence.

Later, he was the commander of a PT boat that sank, and he heroically helped his crew to safety, which gave him the bad back excuse, because the incident did a number on his already frail health and he spent a long while in the hospital before ending his military career and coming home to the U.S. to have the first of four surgeries on his back. Friends noted that he was extremely yellow, and not at all in a comment on his courage, but the actual color of his body was yellow. And he was having a major Addison’s episode at the time, but his people would successfully convince everyone that he’d just contracted malaria while overseas, which is not great, but less not great than anyone knowing he had much worse things going on. Addison’s disease was until just a few years prior to his diagnosis a terminal condition.

In 1961, Kennedy was in so much pain that he couldn’t climb the stairs to board his plane at Andrews Air Force Base, and so they had to raise him up to the door in a cherry picker. These details and many more were finally revealed in 2002 when historian Robert Dallek was given access to Kennedy’s medical files and private papers, which until that time were largely kept under wraps.

What Dallek found was that JFK was on upwards of eight to twelve medications simultaneously, from stimulants to barbituates to methadone to anxiety meds, for conditions like osteoporosis, colitis, and prostatitis. JFK was in so much pain at certain moments that he couldn’t put his own socks on. During the bay of pigs crisis he was on all those meds in addition to an antipsychotic for a severe mood disorder and also an antibiotic for a urinary tract infection. It’s probably easy to like, tell you what he wasn’t taking, and what he didn’t suffer from. And again, all of that was pretty successfully hidden until 2002.

5 Ronald Reagan

In 1994, Ronald Reagan’s dementia diagnosis was made fully public. His doctors are said to have officially noticed symptoms of the disease in the summer of 93. For decades though, there’s been a pretty fierce debate about whether he was experiencing symptoms of dementia while still president, and whether his wife Nancy Reagan was really running things behind the scenes.

Reagan was old when he was elected, only younger than trump when each of them took office. Reagan was 69, trump was 78 going into his second term. So now the record of old ass man presidents goes Reagan, trump, biden, then trump again.

But there was a lot of speculation about Reagan because it was the first time in modern history that we were having the conversation about just how old someone should be to serve as the most powerful person in the free world. And it’s possible that a lot of the senior moments that the press and the public observed were just that, moments where his age was getting the better of him.

It 2011, Reagan’s sons Ron and Michael each wrote books about their father for what would have been his 100th birthday. In Ron’s book, he describes feeling like something was off about his father now and then even during his first term. But Reagan would live another ten years after his diagnosis until 2004. And even today, things are still a bit inconclusive. Reagan said in an interview when he was first elected that if he thought for a second that he was experiencing symptoms of cognitive decline, he’d pack it up and walk away. Of course he was in a position where he literally had to say that in order to tamp down concerns about his age. So this one is really hard to say, and I feel like we’re going to be talking about Biden the same way we talk about Reagan, in this liminal, inconclusive kind of space. But history will tell us about these more modern cases, just as they did with the ones that came before.

4 Strom Thurmond

Strom Thurmond was in the Senate for 47 years. He was the 4th longest-serving senator of all time. And before that he spent about twenty years as a state senator in South Carolina and then had a term as the governor of South Carolina until 1954, when he got elected to the U.S. Senate.

Thurmond spent the last several years of his life in and out of Walter Reed Medical Center. But did he retire from the Senate, you ask? Was he willing to give up his accumulated wealth and power because he was literally decaying before our very eyes? I was around and aware for the end of Thurmond, and I can vouch that he did not do any of that. He stuck around like a bad fart, and he died at the age of 100, less than a year after finally leaving the Senate in January of 2003.

The story of Thurmond’s health has been largely forgotten by now, because we mostly talk about other things like how he filibustered the Civil Rights Act. But there were a lot of debates at the time about a guy who was 100 or when he was approaching 100 and whether or not he could actually do his job. He couldn’t really walk much in his later years, and he was passing out all the time at restaurants and at home, and people just generally weren’t sure why we were allowing this to go on. A New Yorker article about one of our next politicos that we’ll be talking about said that it was “widely known” for the last decade of his life that Thurmond was “non compos mentis,” or not of sound mind.

If that reminds you of somebody else, somebody much greener, who carries his own house on his back, then you’d be right. And it’s almost time to talk about Hurtle the Turtle, but we still have a couple more recent members of the literal skeleton crew that is the American government to cover.

3 Kay Granger

Just two short years ago, a phenomenally outrageous event completely took over the news cycle, possibly a little belatedly, and that’s the time that Republican Representative Kay Granger of Texas was found in a memory care unit in 2024 where she was discovered to be living with dementia. She missed votes in the House for weeks before even the first tip about her cognitive decline surfaced, which it did in a small Dallas news outlet. She then missed much more work because no one was able to confirm her actual whereabouts for months after the tip came in. Her last vote in Congress was in July of 2024 and she just completely fell off the map until December of 2024. Not only that, Granger was the chair of the House Appropriations Committee. Incredibly, she actually did step down from that role the year before when she also announced that she wouldn’t be seeking reelection. Or more likely, members of her staff announced that for her.

The fact that she missed all that time without the press having any inkling that something was egregiously wrong probably says an awful lot about the way that Congress operates in America today and how much they really do any work, or rather, how they can do absolutely no work at all for half a year while getting paid by the public and using their fantastic healthcare, and then just see no consequences for not doing their jobs.

To their credit, I guess, the Congresswoman Granger’s team came clean when she was finally tracked down. Granger’s son was also forthcoming when reporters finally showed up at the memory care unit where Granger was living. He told the press that she’d got lost wandering in the neighborhood, and that’s when they decided to do what was best for her health and safety, but conveniently forgot to do what was best for the stability and operational integrity of American governance.

Oops.

2 Diane Feinstein

Also very recently, Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein of California tried to get away with a similar bob and weave strategy. Before she died at the age of 90 in 2023, she’d served in the Senate for longer than any other woman ever had, but now Senator Patty Murray holds the record. Feinstein was still serving at the time of her death, saying that she was finally going to retire when her term was up in 2024.

Stories about Feinstein were everywhere in the news due to her failing health during the final years of her Senate career. She had a pacemaker put in in 2017, and her staff was transparent about that. 2017, so that would be, six, seven, eight, nine, so she would have been 81 at that point. Good lord.

In 2023 Feinstein was hospitalized for complications from shingles. At the time we didn’t know the extent of the danger, but it came out later that she had encephalitis, like her brain was swelling to dangerous levels. And that was only uncovered by the New York Times after the fact. She was out of commission and missing work in the Senate for three months during her recovery from that episode.

She released a statement when she got out of the hospital, saying, “Even though I’ve made significant progress and was able to return to Washington, I’m still experiencing some side effects from the shingles virus. My doctors have advised me to work a lighter schedule as I return to the Senate. I’m hopeful those issues will subside as I continue to recover.” Who other than a United States Senator is lucky enough to tell their bosses that they’re going to just work less because of their imploding health in their highly advanced age and subsequent inability to do their jobs?

After Feinstein came back to work, she had encounters with the press that were documented by Slate and the Los Angeles Times that seemed to suggest that she didn’t actually remember being away from the Senate at all. Then she fell at home and was rushed to the hospital, and she and her team continued to downplay her memory loss and complications she was experiencing from the encephalitis and from Ramsay Hunt Syndrome, including loss of balance and loss of eyesight. But again, this had to be dug up by the New York Times since no one on her team was forthcoming about the extent of her health issues. They just downplayed it all and waited us out, all the way up to the day she died.

1 Mitch McConnell

And here we are, we’ve made it. It’s Turtle Power Hour. Our delightful friend 84-year-old Mitch McConnell, the guy who served as a Senate party leader longer than absolutely anyone else, has not been seen in public for months now. He’s gone completely inside his shell.

Mitch is not just spending a weekend at Bernie’s, he’s been there for all the ridiculous sequels at this point too, and he might soon be getting a spinoff movie of his own, the way things are going.

McConnell was hospitalized in June of 2026 for an undisclosed reason. It later came out that he’d had a fall at his home Washington D.C. His office said that he’d also come down with pneumonia and was getting treatment for that. A month later he was released into a rehab facility, and finally this month, August, he was let out and is supposedly recovering further at home.

We found out from EMS radio chatter that McConnell was unconscious when they took him to the hospital. Now, my cousin Bryan is hilarious and adored by all, his biggest pet peeve is when people on TV get knocked unconscious. It’s a convenient plot device to get characters out of the way or unaware for a minute, but in reality, if you take a hit to the head hard enough that you physically shut off, that means that when you wake up you’re going to be dealing with lasting challenges for the rest of your life.

Maybe it’s no surprise then that in all this time, no one’s actually seen or heard from McConnell, which is why speculation is running a bit rampant. Many people have said from the very start of this that he’s just been dead the whole time. But Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming and conservative weirdo on CNN Scott Jennings lit up a firestorm of hilarity when they both told everyone they spoke with McConnell on the phone for a very weirdly specific twenty minutes. Shortly after, the world was filled with anecdotes of every single one of us having spoken to Mitch McConnell for twenty minutes yesterday, including yours truly.

In all the time that Mitch McConnell has been missing, his people released two creepy proof of life photos, one where his wife Elaine Chao is gently holding him while he’s holding a newspaper with the day’s date on it. Just not at all like a kidnap victim.

It might be easier to give turtle boy the benefit of the doubt if he didn’t have a whole history now of concerning health glitches. With some very public ones. In 2023 he fell at a dinner event in D.C. and was taken to the hospital for treatment. His office didn’t tell the public about the concussion he got from that fall until about 13 hours later. Concussions, like being rendered unconscious, are actually very bad in reality.

July of that same year is when saw the first so-called Mitch Glitch, where he just completely froze while giving a press conference, and eventually some of the aides figured out they needed to also not stand there like idiots and ushered him away while he was very obviously confused and disoriented. Then a month later he froze again while giving another press conference, and his office told us he just felt momentarily lightheaded, even though we could all see that wasn’t what happened.

In 2024 he fell at a lunch event and sprained his wrist. In 2025, he fell down the stairs in the Capitol building after a vote. His office said this fall was the result of “lingering effects of polio in his left leg.” Unlike all the other falls, I guess, and not like, the fact that he was 82 at the time apparently. Later in the year he tripped and fell in a hallway in the building, and that was caught on camera and went viral.

In February of this year he supposedly went to the hospital of his own accord with flu-like symptoms. His office said he was totally fine but went due to an abundance of caution, which must be nice to be able to do that with healthcare that will just pay for just in case kind of stuff for a whole week while you’re supposed to be working. Though it’s more likely given the context that something more serious was going on with them.

So yeah, now we have no idea whether Mitch McConnell is awake and alert or on death’s door with no measurable brain function. We have no indication other than he’s supposedly at home and still recovering from whatever it was they think we’ll believe kept him in the hospital for two months this time. And he’s just going to sit somewhere outside the public eye watching reruns of Bonanza until he either fully crosses over or he gets at least coherent enough to do a public appearance to keep people placated.

Look, obviously, we need to be pushing for greater accountability from our elected representatives. They’re supposed to work for us, and that’s really on paper only at this point. They need guidelines in place that are enforceable. They can’t just be allowed to wither away and die in office while holding immense sway over the course of all of our lives, and serving to such an age where they’re not even understanding many of the issues that we’re facing as individuals or as a country. And maybe to the point where they’re not even mentally there anymore.

My friend Kairi has very hilariously decided we should institute a ladder test. Like, haul politicians out into the public square once a year and make them climb a ladder. If they struggle, they’re out of there. Of course, we’d have to adjust it for people in wheelchairs or with certain conditions, but the premise is very simple, just a basic physical task that a healthy person would not a have a problem doing.

But we could really institute intelligent, sensible solutions here, and we could use this turtle in the shell moment to do push for that. Things like age limits on public service, dementia screening, definitely especially we need to demand attendance requirements and as a very low bar, real proof of life, and proof of sound mind and body.

We also desperately need to be able to do recall elections for every public office. It is nuts that here in America, we’re just stuck with decaying zombie people as a general rule in our politics. This is one of the reasons we are where we are right now. So let’s work to do some f*cking good about that, and let’s make sure to do some f*cking good in our own little sphere of influence in the world wherever we can.

As long as this video is, I left lots and lots and lots of material on the cutting room floor, but the good news is you can head on over to my Patreon page and see all of it right now, including my research about the health of trump and Biden while in office, in addition to a bonus appearance from Abraham Lincoln and what we know about his health concerns while he was president. If you want to grab some of the things I mention in my videos, like the Netflix show Death By Lightning was based on the book Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard, there’s a link for that below in the didgeridoo along with, as always, all the sources for this video. And if you stick around here you can see the full video that I did on trump’s various medical scares and health conditions.

Check that out, because it’s pretty enlightening. But not death by lightning, he’s definitely avoided that so far, at least.

And if you know why that’s a double entendre, I definitely want you to subscribe to the channel. See you next time.