Why the lies of GOP congressman-elect George Santos matter
The congressman-elect should step down, co-operate, come clean about his past. If he doesn’t, Republicans should end their silence and formally oppose his entry in the House.
What do we learn from the George Santos story? Samuel Johnson observed that men more frequently need to be reminded than informed. The Santos story reminds us that the integrity with which we conduct our lives matters.
At first the lies of the newly elected congressman from Long Island, revealed in the New York Times, seemed comic. He sounded like Jon Lovitz’s Saturday Night Live character Tommy Flanagan, a member of Pathological Liars Anonymous.
“Then my cousin died – Joe Louis. And I took it hard, maybe too hard. I tried to kill myself. Yeah, I did kill myself. I was medically dead for a week-and-a-half. And then it was a woman that brought me out of it – Indira Gandhi.”
But as the story played out I realised Mr Santos is Sam Bankman-Fried. He is Elizabeth Holmes. He is a 21st-century state-of-the-art fraudster – a stone-cold liar who effectively committed election fraud, a calculating political actor who took advantage of voters’ trust.
He wasn’t driven by inadequacy but entitlement. He’s less Tommy Flanagan than Patricia Highsmith’s Talented Mr Ripley.
You can Google “Santos lies”, though you’re likely already familiar with them. He didn’t attend the schools he claimed or work at the prestigious firms he said employed him, didn’t own what he said he owned, do what he said he’d done. He said he was Jewish when he wasn’t. He tweeted in July 2021 that “9/11 claimed my mother’s life” and five months later that she died in December 2016.
The only good thing about what appears to be his reliably compulsive lying, the one good thing that would come of his being seated in the House, is this: When a vote is close and the conference ends and the congressmen spill out into the hall, the press gaggle will surround him and say, “Congressman Santos, who will you vote for?” And he’ll say, “I’m a yes – I’ll stand with Kevin,” and reporters will know immediately that they can run through the halls screaming, “Santos is a no, McCarthy’s margin is shrinking!” I admit this will contribute to the joy of nations.
It is interesting that most of his lies were tied up with money and status. He didn’t go to just any high school, he went to the tony Horace Mann. The real estate he owned wasn’t in Lodi, New Jersey, but Nantucket. He didn’t work in some dreary insurance brokerage in Hempstead, New York, but at Goldman Sachs. This is all Tom Ripley territory, and it tells you what he values.
Mr Santos’s main answer to the accusations is what he told the New York Post: “My sins here are embellishing my resumé.”
They appear to go beyond that. Where did he get the $US700,000 he loaned his campaign?
When he ran unsuccessfully in 2020, he disclosed no assets and claimed a salary of $US55,000 from a development firm.
In the years leading up to 2020 he hadn’t been rising at Goldman; he’d reportedly been working at a call centre in Queens. His 2022 filings, however, showed sudden wealth. He claimed he made between $US3.5 million and $US11.5 million at a company he founded in 2021.
He told reporter Kadia Goba of Semafor that he did “deal building”, with “high-net-worth individuals.” If a client wanted to sell a plane or boat, Mr Santos would go to his extensive Rolodex “and be like, ‘Hey, are you looking for a plane?’ ”
He claimed a network of about 15,000 people and “institutions”. He quickly “landed a couple of million-dollar contracts”.
He didn’t respond to Semafor’s request for names of clients.
It is to the credit of Tulsi Gabbard, sitting in for Tucker Carlson on his show Tuesday night, that she didn’t cover the Santos story as another act in the freak show of American politics. Grilling him in his first television interview since the accusations surfaced, she drilled straight down into meaning.
She asked what the word “integrity” means to him. Mr Santos replied it was “very important” but suggested his lies were mere “embellishments.”
Ms Gabbard pressed: The meaning of the word integrity “actually matters in practice”. Mr Santos said integrity “means to carry yourself in an honourable way,” then said, “I made a mistake … We all make mistakes.”
Then his self-pity kicked in: “I’m having to admit this on national television for the whole country to see.”
Then pride: “I have the courage to do so because I believe that in order to … be an effective member of Congress, I have to face my mistakes.”
Then the self-pity returned: “I worked damn hard to work where I got my entire life. Life wasn’t easy … I come from abject poverty.”
Ms Gabbard wasn’t having any of it. Integrity, she said, includes “telling the truth”. Mr Santos’s falsehoods weren’t “one little lie or one little embellishment, these are blatant lies. My question is, do you have no shame?”
Mr Santos pivoted: He’s no bigger liar than the Democrats. “Look at Joe Biden. Biden’s been lying to the American people for 49 years … Democrats resoundingly support him. Do they have no shame?”
Ms Gabbard cut him off. “This is not about the Democratic Party, though. This is about your relationships” with voters who put their faith in him. She cited specific lies. He said, “Everybody wants to nitpick at me.”
Ms Gabbard said his sincerity about policy is “called into question when you tell blatant lies.” One of the biggest concerns is that “you don’t really seem to be taking this seriously.”
Blatant lies aren’t “an embellishment on a resumé. . . . It calls into question how your constituents and the American people can believe anything that you may say when you were standing on the floor of the House of Representatives supposedly fighting for them.”
Mr Santos said his accusers can “debate my resumé.”
Ms Gabbard: “Is it debatable or is it just false?”
Then Mr Santos did make a mistake. His resumé, he said, is “very debatable . . . I can sit down and explain to you what you can do in private equity . . . and we can have this discussion that’s going to go way above the American people’s head.”
“Wow,” Ms Gabbard said. “You’re saying that this discussion will go way above the heads of the American people, basically insulting their intelligence.”
Mr Santos ended by saying, “Everybody just wants to push me and call me a liar.”
Ms Gabbard wound it up: She’d given him all this time because she felt it was owed to the people of his district: “It’s hard to imagine how they could possibly trust your explanations when you’re not really even willing to admit the depth of your deception to them.”
George Santos should step down, co-operate with all investigations and come clean about his past. Assuming that won’t happen, his local party should disavow him and call for a special election. Republicans in the House should end their silence, formally oppose his entry and close their conference to him.
They have a close margin in the House and believe they can’t afford to lose even one. But Mr Santos will be the focus of investigations from day one and will be used to pummel the GOP each day for looking past his fraud.
They can’t afford to keep him. He is a bridge too far. He is an embarrassment.
The Wall Street Journal
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