There has been a Weekend at Bernie’s quality to the recent saga of former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The eighty-four-year-old lawmaker spent weeks in hospital, his diagnosis undisclosed, while Republican leaders emerged one by one to assure the public that they had personally spoken to him and found him fully engaged. One half-expected McConnell to issue a statement through a system of ropes and pulleys or, in the age of AI, a lifelike simulacrum.

But this weekend, McConnell finally appeared on camera, explaining he had been hospitalized after a fall and was subsequently battling pneumonia. He promised that he would be back in the Senate “as soon as possible.”

This dramatic resurrection offers an apt metaphor for the man’s recent career. For years, he has been widely written off as a relic, an irrelevant vestige of the older GOP demolished by Donald Trump. But in reality, McConnell’s version of the party has been enjoying an impressive resurgence.