Proof of Spine

James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate in Texas, last campaigned on September 26 and then went home to Austin with the flu. On the night of October 7 the President of the United States posted that he was "MISSING IN ACTION." The next day the President upgraded him to "TalaFREAKo," who "has been missing for 12 days! … 12 days is a long time to rid yourself of the so-called flu bug. What's going on?" The same day Ken Paxton's campaign issued a statement through its spokeswoman, Madison Cercy: "Low-T Jimmy appears to be having a full-blown mental Tala-freak-out on the national stage. If James Talarico is too fragile to face Texans, he has no business asking for their vote. We have a simple request: proof of life." The campaign asked for a video of him holding that day's newspaper and a doctor's note. On October 9 Paxton opened a "Tala-Freak-Out Tip Line" with a toll-free number. His campaign also put out, according to the Dallas Morning News, a WANTED poster: "Use caution when approaching! Talarico is mentally fragile, easily overwhelmed, and prone to illness." Note the vocabulary. Not sick, not hiding, not lazy. Mental, fragile, freak-out. The campaign of the Attorney General of Texas chose those words on purpose, and it chose them before anyone had said the word "hospital."

Then the internet said it for him. On October 9 the reality-television personality Spencer Pratt posted, "My sources are telling me Talarico is in a mental health facility." On October 10 a Republican fundraiser and former Trump fundraiser, Caroline Wren, posted flight-tracker data for a private jet that had flown from Austin to a small airport in southwest Ohio and back; nobody has tied the plane to Talarico. That Saturday a right-wing activist named Rhein Amacher telephoned the Lindner Center of Hope, a psychiatric hospital in Mason, Ohio, posed as a cousin named "Tim," and, by his own account as reported by PolitiFact and the AP, simply made up the security code the hospital asks callers for. On Sunday the influencer Nick Sortor posted "BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Ohio mental hospital CONFIRMS James Talarico was discharged from the facility earlier this week," with a 47-second recording of a woman saying it looked like he "was just discharged this evening," and "this man is CLEARLY not suited to become a US Senator." It passed 6.8 million views in a day. Elon Musk, whose super PAC Forbes reports is backing Paxton, replied: "The Talarico campaign is hiding something big that voters ought to know about." The man supposedly being discharged in Ohio that week had been photographed at the Austin City Limits festival on Friday and in the front row of a Kacey Musgraves concert in Dallas on Saturday night. Late Sunday the hospital posted one sentence: "Representative James Talarico has never received treatment from Lindner Center of Hope." Talarico replied, "I've never even been to Ohio." PolitiFact rated the claim Pants on Fire. The AP and the Dallas Morning News called it false.

Now the reader's question, which is whether the hospital broke the law by saying so. It did not, and the reason is worth a sentence. The federal privacy rule protects health information a hospital holds about a person. A hospital that never treated a man holds none, so a true statement that it never treated him discloses nothing. What the statement was, was unusual. The center's own spokeswoman told the Daily Wire the same weekend that "we do not confirm or deny whether any individual is or has been a patient," and that is the industry's standard policy for a reason: a hospital that denies for strangers and says "no comment" for patients has told the world who its patients are. Lindner broke its own rule because a lie with its name on it had reached millions of people, and the paper thinks it was right to. If anyone in this story went near a federal privacy statute, it was the caller. Federal law makes it a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, to obtain a person's health information from a hospital under false pretenses. A man who invents a security code and a cousin named Tim to pry loose a stranger's psychiatric record is describing the offense, and the only thing that saved him from completing it is that the record never existed. Nobody has been charged and the paper is not suggesting anyone will be. It notes only which side of this story was doing the lying to a hospital.

Here is the part that should embarrass Republicans even if every word had been true. Millions of Texans have seen someone for depression, anxiety, grief, or addiction, and plenty of them vote Republican. A party that wants their votes has just told them that getting help is the kind of thing you hide, and that if it comes out you are "fragile" and have "no business asking" for anything. The attack only works if treatment is shameful. That is the cruelty of it, and it is aimed past Talarico at every family that has ever driven someone to an appointment. After the hospital's denial, Paxton's office declined to comment to the Dallas Morning News. Nobody has taken anything down. Nobody has apologized. Talarico, asked about it on NBC 5 in Dallas, said, "I've heard rumors that he has a rare medical condition that causes clinical levels of cowardice. So I know Ken Paxton has asked for proof of life from me. I'm asking for proof of spine from him." The cowardice line was not only a joke. Talarico has accepted four debate invitations, from CNN, Hearst, Nexstar and WFAA, and challenged Paxton to a fifth on Fox News, which said it would host if both men agreed. A Paxton spokesperson said in July, "of course we're going to debate." Paxton has accepted none of them, and he did not debate his opponents in any of his three campaigns for attorney general either. On October 8, in the middle of the TalaFREAKo posts, the President wrote that Talarico "should immediately report to a Debate Stage against Ken Paxton, who is ready, willing and able." Talarico answered, "I agree. Ball's in your court." It is still there.

Paxton has his own record to defend, and the best defense he has produced of it is a number. In 2023 his office took over the prosecution of Adam Hoffman, a Waco lawyer charged with continuous sexual abuse of a young child, a boy a prosecutor said was eight, nine and ten at the time; the charge carried up to life without parole. The first trial, in the summer of 2025, ended in a hung jury, seven to five. Paxton's office then offered Hoffman guilty pleas to two misdemeanors, indecent assault and displaying harmful material to a minor, for time served, which was one day. The visiting judge, Roy Sparkman, a former Republican, said in open court: "One day. Seriously? Somebody has to sell me on the wisdom of it." The office came back with thirty days. At sentencing in April the boy's mother told the court that "30 days isn't enough," and the judge made it sixty. Hoffman walked out of the McLennan County Jail after twenty-nine of them. Because the plea did not specify the victim's age, he is not on the sex offender registry. Fairness requires the rest. The prosecutors wrote that the boy wanted to move on and protect his mental and emotional health rather than testify again, and the family has said, through a spokeswoman, that it is "tired of being used in this election" and "tired of lies being told by both Paxton & Talarico." The paper takes that seriously, and it is why the paper is not going to describe the boy or the case beyond the court record.

It will describe what Paxton said about it, because he said it in public. At a candidate forum on September 28: "I've had to deal with this crazy ad that's been running against me, saying that I let this predator out of jail." And: "The criticism has been that I let a child predator out after one day. Well, guess what? They served 60 days." Predator is his word. One day was his office's offer. Sixty was the judge's number, imposed over his office's offer after the judge mocked it from the bench, and it is not what was served, because Hoffman served twenty-nine. So the Attorney General of Texas took credit for a sentence he did not seek, got the length of it wrong, and did it as a rebuttal. Sarah Longwell's verdict was the right one: "It's like he does oppo on himself."

The rest of the file is long and settled. Indicted for securities fraud in 2015, he made the case go away nine years later, three weeks before trial, with a pretrial-intervention deal that cost him about $271,000 in restitution and required no admission of guilt. In May 2023 the Texas House, with a Republican majority, impeached him 121 to 23, sixty Republicans voting yes; the state Senate acquitted him. Four senior aides who reported him to the FBI were fired and later won a $6.6 million judgment, and his office called them "rogue employees." His wife, a Republican state senator, filed for divorce in July 2025 on "biblical grounds," alleging adultery. And last week ProPublica and the Texas Tribune counted nearly a thousand trips with his state-paid security detail at a cost of $3.3 million, of which they could tie 138 trips and $553,000 to state business. This is the man whose campaign wanted a doctor's note.

Now the economy, which is why any of this is happening. On October 8 the national average for regular gas was $4.36, and AAA said it was the first year the October average had ever been above four dollars. A year earlier it was $3.16. In Texas it was $3.87, $1.15 more than a year before. Diesel, which is what ranch trucks and grocery trucks run on, was $6.30. The cause is the President's war with Iran and the closed Strait of Hormuz, and his advice to the country, per Time in May, was that it was "peanuts" and "won't be much longer." In 2024 he promised to cut energy prices in half within twelve months. On groceries the paper will be honest, because it is the paper's whole pitch: the overall food-at-home index was up 2.2 percent over the year in August, which is not a stampede. Beef is the exception, and in Texas beef is not a line item. A pound of ground beef cost $5.55 the month he took office and $6.92 in August, the highest the Labor Department has ever recorded, up 25 percent. He promised in 2024 to bring prices down "starting on Day One." Last December he called affordability "a con job by the Democrats."

Texas has 12.1 million head of cattle, nearly twice the next state. Here is what the President has done for those ranchers. Last October he proposed buying Argentine beef, and when the cattlemen objected he posted that "the Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don't understand that the only reason they are doing so well" was his "50% Tariff on Brazil." A month later he exempted Brazilian beef from it. In February he roughly quadrupled Argentina's beef quota. In August, the day after Joesley Batista, one of the Brazilian brothers who control JBS, the world's largest meatpacker, met him in the Oval Office, according to the Wall Street Journal, he suspended the tariffs on up to 300,000 tons of imported ground beef and promised it would sell at 25 percent below market. Cattle futures dropped that Monday. The screwworm closure that shut the border to Mexican cattle in May of last year has since reopened in Arizona and New Mexico. The Texas crossings are still closed, and as of July, 41 of the country's 42 screwworm cases were in Texas. To be fair to him, ranchers were getting near-record prices for cattle this summer and the herd's long decline began before he took office. That is exactly the point: the one group in Texas the market was finally paying, he went after with imports. Texas's Republican agriculture commissioner, Sid Miller, said it on his own ranch in September: "President Trump, who I fully support, decided that we needed to import some hamburger meat, which I don't agree with." The paper searched for anything Ken Paxton has said about Argentine beef, Brazilian beef, or 300,000 tons of tariff-free hamburger, and found nothing.

That is the strange part, and the relationship deserves a paragraph. Paxton sued four states to overturn the 2020 election for Trump and lost at the Supreme Court in three days. Trump repaid him by sitting out the primary until a week before the runoff and then endorsing him as "extremely loyal to me." At the Republicans' midterm convention in Dallas last month, the President told the crowd that Paxton "may not dress right," "may not be the best-looking guy I've ever seen," and "they may not like the way he talks," then said, "I don't know if he's going to ever speak to me again — but you know, I don't care as long as he wins." Paxton thanked him for having "delivered more for this country than anyone before." Then at a private fundraiser with lobbyists a few weeks later, in recordings published by the New York Times and Axios, Paxton told the room that the convention "dropped our numbers. Everybody's numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good," and about prices: "It's not tariffs. It's the war, it's gas prices." And: "I have no control over gas prices." His campaign's answer was that "President Trump is doing everything he can to bring prices down." So in private the war is the problem and the President is a drag, and in public the President is the greatest ever and the problem is a Democrat with the flu. Nobody in the Texas Republican Party has said in public what its Senate nominee said to donors. They have made up a hospital stay instead.

The polls explain the hospital. Marist in September had Talarico ahead 50 to 44. The New York Times and Siena had him ahead 51 to 45. Trafalgar, a Republican-leaning pollster, had him ahead 47 to 44 in a survey finished on October 8, the day the Paxton campaign asked for proof of life. Texas voters gave the President 28 percent approval on inflation and prices in the University of Texas poll in June, his worst number on any issue. No Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas since 1994. This one is behind, on the wrong side of gas and beef, with a record that includes an impeachment and twenty-nine days served that he calls sixty, and not one debate accepted, and his answer was to tell the state that a man who caught the flu had been committed to a psychiatric hospital in a state he has never visited. The hospital said no. Five clowns. The election is November 3.