IIt’s hard to remember exactly what freshly-elected Republican Rep. George Santos had to say about his life. His stories are constantly changing and contradicting; his lies seem indiscriminate and mostly ad hoc. He said he worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, but didn’t. He said he graduated from Baruch College – which he didn’t do either. Some of his fabrications are so trivial and specific that it is impossible to attribute them to nefarious motives.
For example, what good could Santos possibly do by claiming to be a college volleyball champion, as he apparently did to local Republican leaders? The others are clearly self-serving, and his attempts to cover them up are so brazen and frankly hilarious. On the campaign trail, Santos, who is running in New York’s Jewish 3rd Ward on the outskirts of Long Island, claimed to be “part of the Jewish community” and descended from Ukrainian refugees. When this proved to be untrue, he later tried to claim that he simply meant that he was “Jewish-like’. It’s like a Seinfeld line; pun, unbelievable, outrageous. At a time like this, it’s hard to take Santos’s dishonesty seriously. It seems less like an affront to the dignity of the democratic process and more like some A continuous irony, a performance art.
But if you look at his fictional biography as a whole, it’s clear that Santos is pandering to a particular American craving. With great tact, he created a character that would assuage the anxieties and appease the vanities of wealthy Republican-leaning voters in his district. On the campaign trail, Santos portrayed himself as the embodiment of upward mobility in 20th-century America. The self-described son of Brazilian immigrants, he grew up in “extreme poverty” and attended public schools before becoming a blue-chip financial trader and wealthy philanthropist. No doubt many people still want to believe in this dream. But that should be a red flag. Anyone who has assessed America with a clear eye knows that Goldman Sachs traders don’t come from basement apartments in Jackson Heights, Queens, as Santos claims. They were from Dalton, Choate and Exeter.
He claims to be the most demonized identities in the Republican imagination: he is supposed to be Jewish, a member of the group targeted by the conspiracy QAnon theory; he is supposed to be gay, a member of the group that is increasingly being smeared For a pedophile; he’s supposed to be a Latino immigrant, part of a group with dark fantasies about demographic change and crime in the white mind. But at the same time, he is a Republican and a defender of these prejudices; he is in the very group his party is against, which seems to absolve his constituents of complicity even as they indulge their prejudices . These identities are not meant to be investments in the diversity of our country, but rather moral shields, vulnerable cover behind which attacks on these groups can be launched.
And, of course, there is the remarkable historical coincidence that Santos’ proclivity for claiming his own life is intertwined with a moment of crisis of American conscience. He said his grandparents – allegedly Jewish – were Holocaust survivors. He said his mom died on 9/11. He said he lost four employees in the Pulse massacre, an incident in which a gunman opened fire on an Orlando gay club. It seems he is using this proximity to tragedy to some effect in his fundraising; of the several investigations into Santos, one is now tied to campaign spending, and money appears to be flowing from his The accounts disappeared, and the amount was just below the federal reporting threshold for receipts. In this telling, Santos has an uncanny, Forrest Gump-like biographical connection to these momentous historical moments, his own life transformed at the same moment as it challenges national identity. It’s not hard to see why the novel appealed to Santos, and why it appealed to his voters. This makes him an embodiment of America itself.
Maybe he is. For his audacity and deceit, his shamelessness and his so-called consolation of financial malfeasance, Santos, with all his lies, appears to reveal a disturbing truth about American politics, emphasizing what political writer John Gantz said ” crime rule”. After all, politicians lie all the time, and the Republican Party in particular seems to have been quick to mainstream the use of lies, fraud, and cheap scams to manipulate and blackmail the government, the public, and the ruling elite. After all, are Santos’ lies any more far-fetched than Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him in a vast, undiscovered conspiracy? Are his lies about where he works and goes to school more nefarious than claims that Covid vaccines are killing people or drag queens plan to molest children in public libraries? Perhaps Santos’ real crime was not in lying but in telling the wrong lie. He didn’t repeat the same fabrications as his fellow Republicans — those about marginalized people. Instead, he just lied to himself. Crucially, he lied about the one thing that seemed to really matter to the Republican leadership: He claimed to be part of the moneyed elite when he was not.
Santos’ fellow New York Republicans are trying to distance themselves from the congressman, calling for his resignation, hoping it will help their own re-election chances. “He needs help,” said Jennifer DeSena, a local Republican official from Long Island. “This isn’t a normal person.” In fact, it’s hard not to suspect that there might be something wrong with this person, other than moral depravity—a delusional tendency or break with reality that leads to all this fiction. But it would be a mistake to think that George Santos’ illness was his own alone. His lies are the product of a political system that encourages dishonesty, punishes sincerity, and provides opportunities for petty liars. In that sense, Santos is the politician we deserve.
