Hidden Camera Reveals Talarico’s Church Wishes Assassination Attempt “Had Been More Successful”

On a recording obtained by Townhall and dated August 20, 2026, Rev. Babs Miller, minister to the parish at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, did not speak in parable when she admitted that members of Talarico’s church-home wished Trump dead.

“We still have people in this church who wish that the young man had not just nicked his ear, but had been more successful.”

The “young man” was Thomas Matthew Crooks. On July 13, 2024, he fired on President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Corey Comperatore was killed. Two other men were wounded. Trump turned his head a fraction of an inch, at just the right moment, and lived. In Miller’s telling, that near-miss was not mercy. It was a job left unfinished.

Townhall noted she did not say whether Democratic U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico was among those members. She did not have to name him for the remark to land. Talarico has called St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church of Austin home since he was two. He has named senior pastor Jim Rigby a mentor and “my pastor in every sense of the word.” Rigby baptized him, married his parents, and remains the spiritual figure Talarico cites when he tells Texas his politics are the Sermon on the Mount taken into public life.

The question is not whether a minister misspoke. It is what kind of church formed the man asking for a Senate seat.

An older pattern, now on tape

Miller’s line was not an isolated slip. On April 26, 2026 — the morning after Cole Tomas Allen rushed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives, and fired toward the ballroom stairs where the president sat — Rigby told his congregation he knew “a lot of people have mixed feelings.” He added that violence would not solve the problem. The first half of the sentence traveled. The second half did not erase the first half.

That is the pattern: violence is formally declined, then described in the grammar of disappointment. Babs Miller went further. She called a completed assassination “successful.”

By mid-September the clip had moved from Townhall into RedState, RadarOnline, NewsBusters, and the Texas Senate race. Talarico has treated criticism of the church as a smear, saying Republicans were “attacking my church and my pastor.” The church has not publicly disowned the language. Talarico has not publicly answered whether he shares it.

The church that raised him

St. Andrew’s sits in North Austin and is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Rigby has led it for roughly four decades. It is a More Light congregation, meaning that it openly affirms LGBTQIA+ individuals and lifestyles.  St. Andrews is also a Reproductive Freedom church, active in immigrant sanctuary work and advocacy it frames as “human rights”. Membership, it says, is “not weighed down by vows, obligations or dogma.” Agnostics and people with no church background are invited in.

Its published creed is unusually clear: Presbyterian in name, but first loyal to “Christ’s gospel of universal love”; “Christ centered,” yet ready to “respect and learn from all religions of love”; willing to “affirm the ancient symbols,” yet eager to “speak a new language” and teach the Bible “without sectarian dogma.” The weekly gathering song puts it in rhyme: “Every life-giving path is welcome here… naming Holy many names.”

Miller admitted as much in a different section of the same clip, released by Townhall. “If you polled our members, and asked them if they were Christian, agnostic, or atheist, the vast majority would say agnostic or atheist because they don’t buy the religion that we got from the Puritans.”

A 2007 Texas Monthly profile already described St. Andrew’s as one of Austin’s most openly liberal churches — a place that welcomed an atheist professor who rejected the divinity of Jesus, and a pulpit where Rigby taught resurrection as “a symbol to illumine from your own experience,” not an event that happened. Heaven, he said, was “not another world someplace else.

In sermons Rigby has urged listeners to “leave the fundamentalism behind,” including a fixation on repentance, resurrection, and “belief in God.” He has said he no longer thinks Jesus died physically and rose again. “What seems more likely to me is that Jesus rises again in the church.” He has said Jesus “did not come to teach us Christianity” but “radical and universal love.” He rarely uses the word “God.” Talarico praises Rigby as a formative figure in his worldview and theology.

Miller’s path fits the house. She has described a 24-year road to ordination as an “out” lesbian chaplain, completed at St. Andrew’s in 2014. Those facts are not the scandal. They explain the moral vocabulary in which an assassination attempt can be discussed as a success rate.

The candidate and the creed

Talarico is not a casual visitor. His first remembered protest, as a fourth-grader, was a church action outside the Governor’s Mansion. He later enrolled at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and built a campaign on the claim that “justice is love out in public.”

None of that requires him to have wished Trump dead. It does require him to explain why a church that catechizes people this way is still the home he claims — and why two of its ministers can speak of assassination in the tones of unfinished business without a public reckoning from the man who calls one of them pastor “in every sense of the word.”

Historic Christianity is not a mood. It holds that God is not a metaphor for community, that Jesus is not merely a symbol of our better selves, and that murder is forbidden even when the target is a politician you consider distasteful. St. Andrew’s has spent decades translating those claims into poetry and activism. Miller’s poll of the membership suggests the translation worked.

As October approaches, the question is no longer only what James Talarico has said from the pulpit, but what other hidden camera footage regarding his church is still out there. In November, Texas voters will decide whether a candidate shaped by that congregation — and who brings its reading of Scripture into political combat — belongs in the U.S. Senate. They should make that choice with the footage in front of them. A pulpit that can call an assassin’s miss a lack of success has already defined what it means by success.