Having voted Democrat in every presidential election bar one since 1992, they chose Republican George Santos, 34, who seemed, as he put it, the “full embodiment of the American dream”, a child of Brazilian immigrants who through sheer hard work had excelled at school, on Wall Street, and even founded a charity for injured pets.
After the midterms I reached out to Mr Santos for an interview in a private Twitter message – was this the new face of the post-Trump Republican party, young, gay, Hispanic, I asked?
Thankfully, he didn’t reply. His constituents got a lot more change than they had expected, creating a massive political headache for the Republican party.
Mr Santos — if that is even his name — may well be the greatest liar to have ever been elected to congress, a fantasist without peer whose list of false claims, and actual background, have grown ever more bizarre by the day.
Mr Santos didn’t attend New York University, work at Citi or Goldman Sachs; he didn’t broker yacht sales for the rich and famous nor have a near death Covid-19 experience, as multiple investigations now attest, triggered by a New York Times investigation in December.
Far from stewarding a small real estate empire straddling New York and Brazil, he was living with his sister in Queen’s, who is about to be evicted following unpaid rent.
His mother didn’t die in “the south tower” of the World Trade Centre during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but of cancer in Brazil in 2016, where she had lived since 1999.
And far from raising money for injured animals, Mr Santos allegedly stole US$3,000 from a GoFundMe page he had set up to help Sapphire, a sick pit bull owned by two struggling New Jersey veterans.
If that wasn’t enough change for his constituents it’s since emerged Mr Santos was a drag queen in Rio in the late 2000s, performing under the name Kitara Ravache, according to members of Rio’s drag community.
NEW: I just spoke by phone with Eula Rochard, a Brazilian drag queen who was friends with George Santos when he lived near Rio. She said everyone knew him as Anthony (*never* George), or by his drag name, Kitara, and confirms this photo is from a 2008 drag show at Icaraà Beach. pic.twitter.com/1MeeDR1O2O
— Marisa Kabas (@MarisaKabas) January 18, 2023
That was around the same time he stole a cheque book from a man his late mother was looking after, to buy a pair of shoes, according to Brazilian court records. At least that now makes sense!
Mr Santos has since conceded some of his claims, including having lost four colleagues in the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting, were false.
Others, though, were simply a misunderstanding: he never said, for instance, that he was Jewish, but rather “Jew-ish”, having multiple Jewish friends and a spiritual connection to the faith.
And he maintains he is gay despite forgetting to put down a previous marriage to a woman on his biography.
Mr Santos went by the name of Anthony Devolder among friends, and only wanted to get elected to congress, according to a former housemate who spoke to CBS news this week, “so he could get a pension and free healthcare for the rest of his life”.
Democrats and Republicans, including in his own district, have demanded Mr Santos resign in shame.
But the two-thirds majority vote in the House of Representatives required to expel a member of congress is unlikely to be forthcoming.
Indeed, the new House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy appointed Mr Santos to two committees this week: small business and science, rejecting Mr Santos’s more understandable preference for foreign affairs.
In the 435-seat House of Representatives, where Republicans only have 222 seats, Mr McCarthy needs every vote he can get to stay in the speaker’s chair.
For now, the GOP’s official line is ‘let the voters decide’, as it quietly knocks heads together trying to work out how any of his story managed to get through what must have been near non-existent candidate vetting procedures.
“I don’t condone what he said, what he’s done. I don’t think anybody does. But that’s not my role. He was elected,” congressman Roger Williams, chairman of the small business committee, told CNN.
Mr Santos remains defiant, vowing not to resign.
“These distractions won’t stop me!” he tweeted earlier on Thursday, after earlier in the day denying he had been a drag queen, even a “poor” one as alleged by his former showgirl colleagues – although some seemingly corroborating pictures and video have since emerged.
In a desperate situation politically, and as the representative for the New York district that includes Queen’s, perhaps that’s the one revelation Mr Santos (or Devolder) should have embraced.
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