The GOP remains obsessed with taking down James Talarico in the Texas Senate race. One of their attack prongs has been trying to paint Talarico as a vegan. They had abandoned it for a while but last week President Grievance started it up again:
Trump: "When I see that Talafreako in Texas. So he's been a vaygan all his life. He's a vaygan vaygan, I didn't even know what the hell a veygan was. A veygan is vegetables. A vaygan is eating a piece of lettuce all day long."
The amount of lifting in that clip makes my arms hurt.
Instead, this version of manhood seems to require an extraordinary amount of coaching. I keep thinking of “The Birdcage,” in which Robin Williams’ Armand attempts to teach Nathan Lane’s Albert how to walk like John Wayne. The more deliberately Albert performs masculinity, the more conspicuous the performance becomes.
Of course Trump imagines Talarico disappearing behind the barbecue tent to drop the act. For a political culture increasingly invested in prescribing how a man should dress, eat and behave, the idea of someone secretly abandoning the performance must be familiar. Maintaining it looks exhausting.
It’s a good insight—when everything is fake, something that is authentic is jarring. Talarico is a challenge to subservient MAGA masculinity. I wrote about the MAGA ideal of masculinity, and it’s still on display.
And the attempt to paint Talarico as gay got a second round, too:
JD Vance: "I love you too sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I'm the vice president, not James Talarico."
But neither of them moved the needle I guess, so it was time for the big GOP October Surprise:
The smear campaign began when Talarico, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in Texas, was not seen in public for nine days. His campaign was slow to explain why. While nature abhors a vacuum, Donald Trump and social media seize on one and weaponise it….
Then, on 11 October, came the supposed coup de grâce. Conservative social media influencer Nick Sortor posted a 47-second audio clip on X that he said proved that Talarico had been discharged earlier in the week from Lindner Center of Hope, a mental health treatment centre in Mason, Ohio.
The call was placed by Rhein Amacher, a self-described “right-wing provocateur”. In the clip, a woman whom Sorter claimed was an employee there says it looked like Talarico “was just discharged this evening”. The online Maga faithful were jubilant.
But not for long. The Bulwark obtained the full phone call showing the purported employee had repeatedly denied any record of Talarico being at the centre. The timeline also did not add up. Amacher said he made the call to the mental health centre on Saturday evening, but Talarico was seen at the Austin City Limits music festival on Friday. On Saturday, he made an appearance at a Kacey Musgraves concert in Dallas.
The Lindner Center of Hope wrote in an X post on Sunday that Talarico “has never received treatment” from the facility. Talarico replied to the post, saying, “I’ve never even been to Ohio.” He included a tears of joy emoji.
The first, and maybe only, thing you notice about this is how stupid these people are. Amacer was asked for the patient code when he first called and he was completely stupefied by the request. His solution was to make up a code when he called back. He had no idea that when you call a hospital to ask about a patient you need to know that person’s code so their confidentiality can be protected. I’m sparing you the excruciating details—just know that this entire op was carried about by the stupidest and most cringe people available to the GOP.
The second thing that you notice is that this is all they had to combat what is increasingly looking like a solid Democratic midterm victory. They are desperate. And you would think that the Eric Schmitt debacle from last month would have been a life lesson about concocting conspiracy theories and using stupid people to launch them.
But panic makes people do stupid things, and the very real possibility of a Texas Senate seat’s turning blue has got to be an existential crisis for the GOP so they’ll probably try it again.
I’ll leave you with this: