The more I hear about George Santos, the more I think Republicans deliberately set him up to take the spotlight away from the rest of the Republican Party.
It’s not like Republican leadership was unaware of his nature. Yet even his fellow Republicans in New York state, quick to point out his fraudulent claims after he was elected to Congress, were surprisingly silent before he won his seat.
Santos, whose lies rival those of Donald Trump (and might exceed them by the time he’s Trump’s age — if he lives that long), shows all the signs of being a sociopath. For one thing, his lies have a calculated nature. In addition, Santos has been recorded making various false claims, all of which appear designed to ingratiate him with a particular group.
Like Trump, Santos likes to improvise. When interviewed, he doesn’t wait for questions; he performs monologues designed to create the impression of openness and transparency while he spews one seemingly inconsequential lie after another.
Here are just a few of the false statements Santos has made:
His mother died during the terrorist attack on 9/11. (She was not even in the United States on 9/11.)
He is descended from Holocaust Survivors (He is not Jewish. When questioned repeatedly about this claim, he said he didn’t claim to be Jewish — he claimed he was “Jew-ish.”)
He survived an assassination attempt. (No record of this has surfaced.)
He was mugged on 5th Avenue, and his shoes were stolen (Also not substantiated.)
Santos also lied about his education, his work history (both charitable work and for-profit), and his name.
Santos did not embellish his resume; he fabricated it.
Why didn’t Santos get eliminated before he ran for office?
According to an article in Vanity Fair, Santos’ Democratic opponent Robert Zimmerman did his best to warn New Yorkers about George Santos. However, in a district nobody thought was competitive, few paid attention.
“The media knew that he was a [Donald] Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene candidate. But what they didn’t really grasp, or really understand, is he was also the Anna Delvey candidate of this congressional midterm election cycle,” he added, a reference to the infamous grifter of the New York social scene.”
Like Trump, Santos focuses on lies that give him an edge. He uses his lies to align himself with groups whose support he craves. Whether it’s fellow New Yorkers who lost loved ones on 9/11 (Remember when Trump lied about losing “hundreds of friends” on 9/11?) or the Jewish community in New York, which Santos tried to align himself with by claiming to be a descendant of the Holocaust, Santos is both willing and able to fabricate endless stories to bolster the false impression that he is “one of us” and can be trusted.
But his stories are not the only thing that helped Santos fool the less informed among us. He has also been weaponizing his wardrobe to great effect.
George Santos’ dress-for-success strategy
When Santos lied about being mugged on 5th Avenue, he specifically mentioned having his shoes stolen. While it may be nothing more than Santos’ creative way of letting us know he wears expensive shoes, according to the New York Times, Santos’ fashion statements are an integral part of his con.
“He went deep into the costume department of the popular culture hive mind and built his cover story layer by layer, garment by garment… Yes, it’s a cliché. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. Clothes are the camouflage that gets you in the door. Especially in a world in which the line between visual truth and fiction is increasingly filtered.”
Unfortunately, neither Santos’s lies nor his manipulative fashion choices raised enough of a red flag to prevent him from becoming a member of Congress. Despite the constant media flurry around Santos’ numerous questionable claims, Speaker McCarthy seems unwilling to take any action to remove Santos from Congress.
Do Republicans want Santos to draw attention away from what they are doing?
In the old days, Santos’ lies would have probably caused the Speaker of the House to call for his resignation. But Speaker McCarthy has shown no inclination to hold Santos accountable.
When pushed to respond to whether he supports Santos simply to keep another Republican in Congress, McCarthy was adamant: “No. You know why I’m standing by him? Because his constituents voted for him,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy conveniently fails to acknowledge that when New Yorkers voted for Santos, they did so based on a series of lies that created the impression that Santos was educated, experienced, and qualified to be a member of Congress.
Even the DCCC report on Santos failed to uncover Santos’ lies related to his education and his employment history prior to the election. Instead, their report focused almost exclusively on Santos’s political engagements and his public stance on issues.
While this seems like a glaring oversight, it is the responsibility of the Republican Party, not the Democrats, to vet their candidates before backing them. When the DCCC focused on Santos’s political positions rather than his fabricated resume, it was likely because they thought the Republican Party had already done its due diligence. It may not have occurred to the researchers at the DCCC that their Republican counterparts had learned nothing from their tragic mistake in sending a pathological liar to the White House in 2016.
Or perhaps they learned the wrong thing.
Maybe what Republicans took from their four years of Trump was not the dangers of unqualified and impulsive political leaders — perhaps they learned that if they want to continue dismantling democracy, distractions like George Santos can provide some cover.