George Santos, America’s plastic politician, is a man for our times

In fabricating his personal and family history so wholly, American congressman George Santos reflects a wider identity crisis.

George Santos has lied about his education, his mother’s death and being the target of crime, but the Republican majority is too slim to call for his resignation. Picture: Michael Reynolds/EPA/The Times

The word “embellishment” is usually defined something like this: “a decorative detail or feature added to something to make it more attractive”. So you might embellish a patio with a pot plant, for example, or – were you a duchess, say – yourself with a gold Cartier pendant necklace.

The word’s secondary meaning has been given new life by the New York congressman George Santos – or Anthony Devolder as he has also called himself.

When it was discovered that Santos had lied about who he had worked for (not Goldman Sachs), where he had gone to school (not Horace Mann), where he had been to college (not Baruch for whom, it follows, he cannot have played volleyball and “slayed” Harvard and Yale, sacrificing both knees in the process), what his mother died from (not the indirect results of being at the Twin Towers on 9/11, since she wasn’t in the United States at the time) and what his grandparents escaped from (not the Holocaust, seeing as they were in Brazil), he explained that he had merely “embellished” his CV, as had so many others.

Just this week another video came to light of Santos claiming in an interview in Portuguese to have been the target of an assassination attempt and also the victim of a daylight mugging on Fifth Ave in which his shoes were stolen. The police of course have no record of such an incident. Another embellishment.

Failing to see the funny side and angry at being lied to on a scale that transcends the epic, the people of Long Island and his fellow New York Republicans want to see Santos go. But the Republican majority in the House is very small, so the Republican leadership there has found a series of barely plausible reasons for not calling on him to resign and for seating him on important committees.

Lying can be serious as it always involves a theft by the liar from the lied to, and in Santos’s case it amounts to grand larceny of the truth. And his election has come at a time of great liars.

In politics, the one declared 2024 presidential candidate, Donald Trump, is a persistent and shame-free liar. Podcasts and Netflix series have brought Anna Sorokin, the fake heiress, to tens of millions of enthralled listeners and viewers. In November, Elizabeth Holmes, head of Theranos, went down for 11 years.

Former US president Donald Trump, ‘a persistent and shame-free liar’. Picture: AFP

Nicholas Rossi, who claims to really be a man called Arthur Knight, is fighting extradition to the US to face rape charges. Picture: Robert Perry/The Times

Anna Sorokin was released from prison after more than a year in custody in New York while fighting her deportation. Picture: Steven Hirsch.The Mega Agency/The Times

And in Britain many will have followed the story of Nicholas Rossi, aka Arthur Knight (seriously, what next? Lancelot Lake? Gary Wain?), the American fugitive rape suspect who fabricated an announcement of his own death and funeral at sea, went to Scotland where he lived purporting to be an Irish academic and now awaits extradition.

Yet it seems to me that Santos is in a different category from the conmen, frauds and fantasists who have always existed among us. One man who agrees is veteran US talk show host Bill Maher, who told his audience a few days ago that “someone has to explain George Santos”, and then took on the job.

Maher’s semi-serious theory was that Santos, when he stood for Congress, had taken advantage of America’s silo politics.

To Republican voters he had turned his Trumpian, anti-abortion, small-tax, “I’m a winner” persona, and to Democrats his gay, Holocaust-surviving, “Jewish” victim one.

Since neither side looks at each other’s media, neither side noticed the discrepancy until it was too late.

But the more I’ve watched Santos, the more I’ve seen something else. Despite what Maher says, given how easily Santos’s deceptions could have been discovered before the election it’s hard to see them as purely directed at fooling people into electing him.

In other words it doesn’t satisfy me to analyse Santos as merely a conman trying to gain advantage from lying (though his past financial schemes may well indicate that as part of his motivation).

Rather, I think I see an almost perfect self-inventor – an entirely plastic person. When you listen to him talk (as he does) about how people can be anything they want in America, you realise he applies this retrospectively. In Santos’s America, you can also have been anything you want.

George Santos denies he is the drag queen in this photograph taken in Brazil. Picture: Twitter/The Times

So he has made himself up – and I’m not referring to his past as a drag queen in Brazil. His is a heroic extension of what so many people do on dating apps to make themselves seem attractive enough to get that first agreement to meet. Except the person George Santos is dating is himself. He is the harbinger of a post-identity politics – you can call it self-identity politics.

Most of us have some experience of this or know people who have. Let me give an example culled from Salon, a popular, liberal online magazine in the US. They have a special section where experts and teachers give advice to parents who write in with their problems. So Ms X, a concerned mother, tells how her 15-year-old daughter “who is gender fluid” has decided to change her name to something “less feminine” and gets angry when Mom uses her “dead name”. Ms X adds that (pronoun alert) “every one of their friends has decided to change their names also”.

The advice comes back: “For your child, the new name is a declaration of selfhood … It has nothing to do with you. And it is neither here nor there that ‘all’ your child’s friends are also choosing new names.”

Santos won the Long Island district in November. Picture: The Times

Salon, meet George Santos. He is your guy. He declares his selfhood all over the place. The Santos with Jewish grandparents? That is his true self. Get over it. It’s not about you.

For the identitarian left this is awkward. When it comes to race and “intersectionality” there is an assumption of inherent and ineluctable characteristics. And this essentialism goes right down to charging the borrowing of recipes from other ethnicities with the crime of “cultural appropriation”.

However, when it comes to sex and gender, you can be whatever you want at the moment you want to be it.

The traditionalist right also has a problem. Brought up in the belief that (as we sang at my primary school in the mid 1960s) “the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, and ordered their estate”, it then renounces God’s arrangements by demanding that gays not thrust their sexuality down people’s throats, that women recognise their lack of aptitude for sciences, and that black people – naturally better dancers – stop going on about race.

And as both sides flounder in their contradictions, through the middle comes the protean George Santos, fresh from inventing atomic fusion and ready to take on the world.

The Times