The Make America Great Again movement’s full-tilt meltdown over a new story about Texas Senate candidate James Talarico may have rested on an entirely false premise, according to analysts.
On Sunday, MAGA speculated that Talarico had been at a mental health facility in Ohio to explain his recent 12-day absence from the campaign trail. Talarico has contended that he was at home recovering from the flu. Some MAGA personalities posted an alleged recording of a phone call with an unnamed employee at the Lindner Center of Hope, the mental health facility in Ohio at the center of the controversy, and analysts spotted a few damning details that undermined the entire story altogether.
Andrew Egger, a reporter at The Bulwark, noted that the timeline MAGA created for the case didn’t line up with what Talarico was posting publicly about his appearances.
“The caller in question says he made these calls last night,” Egger posted on X. “In the call, the ’employee’ seems to say Talarico was discharged ‘this evening.’ The same evening Talarico was publicly on stage [with] Kasey Musgraves.”
Nick Sortor, one of the MAGA personalities who amplified the story on X, was hit with several brutal Community Notes, with one suggesting that the timeline was “impossible.”
“On the call, the ’employee’ says was discharged ‘this evening’ (10/10). Talarico was seen in Texas 10/9. This makes the proposed timeline impossible,” one of the notes read in part.
Speculation about the authenticity of MAGA’s story boiled over after Laura Basset, editor-in-chief of Jezebel, pointed out that X owner Elon Musk had suspended an account that verified the phone call Sortor shared was generated with AI.
“Elon immediately suspended this account that showed Nick Sortor’s recorded call to the mental health facility was AI-generated and is preventing community notes on the Sortor post,” she posted on X. “It’s all hands on deck trying to make the fake Talarico story stick.”
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