Texas State Rep. James Talarico (D-50th District) finally spoke out about his two-week disappearance from the campaign trail, and his softball interview with NBC's Phil Prazan raised more questions than it answered.

As we reported on Sunday, audio released by independent journalist Nick Sortor appears to show that the Lindner Center of Hope, a mental health facility in Mason, Ohio, discharged the Democrat nominee for U.S. Senate earlier this week. Sortor and Rhein Amacher gave Talarico until 1 p.m. ET Sunday to explain his absence, or they would expose the truth. The Talarico campaign didn’t respond, and the recording was posted after the deadline passed.

On the call, Amacher asks whether the facility has anything for James Talarico.

"It looks like he was just discharged this evening," an unidentified female employee says.

Talarico's campaign angrily denied it.

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"This is a lie designed to promote a pathetic conspiracy theory," spokesman JT Ennis wrote on X. "Last week James Talarico was home in Austin, Texas recovering from the flu."

Inevitably, Talarico had to address the situation personally, and what a softball interview it was. For starters, Talarico went two weeks without an in-person campaign event in Texas, yet Prazan shrank that to “roughly nine days” in his first question.

“Yeah, I got the flu, and I’m feeling much better, and I’m glad I had a chance to recover,” Talarico told him. “I’m glad we made the decision to just take the week, get better, and now I’m glad to be back on the trail.”

Prazan then handed him the diabetic explanation, which many predicted would happen, noting that the flu can hit diabetics hard before asking whether Talarico ever needed a doctor or a hospital.

“I just went to my primary care physician, but it wasn’t anything worse than, you know, a nasty case of the flu,” Talarico said.

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So he doubled down on the flu story. And honestly, he seemed much more nervous than he usually is, repeating variants of the same explanation over and over. I also couldn’t help noticing that for a guy who spent nearly two weeks recovering from the flu, Talarico looks like he’s gained weight. A few years back, I got COVID and was out of it for a few days, and I lost six pounds.

But I digress. Here’s the problem with the flu cover story. Talarico’s campaign never acted like it had a candidate sick with the flu. With the general election less than a month away, his team went radio silent. Worse, it posted video from old rallies and tried to pass it off as current.

Who does that over a flu bug?

Then there are the inconsistencies. Talarico claimed he was sick enough to need a week of recovery, and in nearly the same breath he complained that he never got one.

“Unfortunately, the campaign made me work from home, so I didn’t even get full days off,” he said.

So which is it? Was he flat on his back drinking liquids, or was he on the clock? If you’re telling the truth, you tend not to contradict yourself. On top of that, Talarico changed his story. When he spoke to the Hispanic Business Council via Zoom, he said he went to urgent care in Dallas. Now it’s his primary care physician, presumably in the Austin area, which is roughly three hours from Dallas.

When Prazan got around to asking about claims from conservatives and “Ken Paxton’s allies” that Talarico had a stress-induced episode and received treatment for it, the candidate had his line ready.

“That’s not true, I just had the flu, and I feel much better, but it’s a good reminder that you can’t believe everything you read on the internet,” Talarico said.

This interview makes it clear that Talarico’s team has tweaked and fine-tuned its cover story. The trouble is that everyone watched the tuning happen in real time.

A true story doesn’t need revisions. It comes out the same way every time, because the person telling it only has to remember what happened. When a campaign hides its candidate, stonewalls the questions, and then rolls out a polished explanation with a friendly reporter, it just keeps looking like the campaign is hiding something.