The false story about James Talarico leaving the campaign trail to seek mental health treatment insulted millions of Americans, according to former U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger.
Kinzinger, who represented Illinois in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican from 2011 to 2023, is a vocal critic of the influence of Donald Trump on the GOP. He’s now a CNN commentator and writes regularly on Facebook and his own website.
Of the weekend’s shenanigans, he wrote Tuesday: “The GOP tried to smear James Talarico over his absence from the campaign trail with a nasty whisper campaign about his mental health. Instead, they ended up insulting millions of Americans.”
After recounting the details of the lie, as reported by BNG Sunday evening, Kinzinger declared: “The lie was bad enough. But the longer I thought about the whole episode, the angrier I got about what (Ken) Paxton and his allies were really saying.”
“The whole smear depended on one assumption: That if James Talarico had gotten help for his mental health, it would be a scandal. Something to hide. Something shameful. Proof that he wasn’t fit to serve.”
“The whole smear depended on one assumption: That if James Talarico had gotten help for his mental health, it would be a scandal.”
But that’s not true, the former Congressman said. “That wouldn’t disqualify him from anything. It would tell you something good about him.”
Thus any other American seeking help for mental health got smeared by the Republican lie, he said. “Millions of other people who will never be mentioned in a story about James Talarico got the message loud and clear. Including the veteran who’s been sitting with a phone number for weeks, trying to decide whether to call. Or the farmer coming off a brutal year who was raised to believe that real men handle it themselves. Or the young guy who’s been told his whole life to tough it out. Or the teenager scrolling through her feed, watching grown adults treat psychiatric care like a punchline.”
He quoted statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control that more than 58 million Americans live with mental health issues, yet only about half seek treatment.
“Every one of them got the same lesson this week: If you’re struggling, you’d better keep it to yourself, because look what they’ll do to you if anyone finds out.”
On the same day Kinzinger wrote about this, Vice President JD Vance spoke at a political rally in Tyler, Texas, an East Texas bastion of Republican support. Vance stood at a podium in front of a U.S. aircraft carrier, and his comments were broadcast by C-SPAN.
According to one press account: “With cheers from the audience, Vance seems to hear a fan say, ‘I love you,’ to which he replies, ‘I love you too, sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the vice president, not James Talarico.’”
Back in May, White House adviser Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s immigrant deportation effort, accused Talarico of being transgender. He said Democrats “made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender Senate candidate.”
In a tightly contested Senate race that could send a Democrat to the Senate from Texas for the first time in decades, Republican accusations against Talarico have been nonstop. He has been accused of being gay, being transgender, being vegetarian, and not being a true Christian. Now he’s been falsely accused of hiding a mental health diagnosis.
Related:
Stephen Miller must be confused about gender identity | Opinion by Mark Wingfield
Republicans falsely claim Talarico was in mental hospital
Jeffress calls Talarico ‘not a Christian’ and ‘evil’