Tweet Share Share Comment George Santos will not be seeking reelection in 2024. He made the announcement on Thursday, airing all the pickled grievances so crucial to MAGA playbook: He’s tired of being “under the gun” from the media “all the time,” and he will instead continue to represent his constituents for as long as he is “allowed.” (Ominous!)
The real reason for this abrupt suspension of duty is an investigation conducted by the House Committee on Ethics, also made public on Thursday, that dug up a highly Santosian pattern of corruption during the man’s 10 months (only 10 months!) in Congress. Surely to everyone’s great surprise, the committee alleged that Santos siphoned off oodles of cash from his campaign funds for private uses. What was he spending donor wealth on? Credit card bills, personal debut, and—because we’re talking about Santos—charges at Sephora, Hermès, and OnlyFans.
Santos was already facing two federal indictments, containing 23 individual fraud charges, to say nothing of the Michael Mann-worthy international bad-check case he settled with the Brazilian government in March. (The U.S. trial date is set for Sept. 9, during the white-hot apex of the 2024 campaign, which is just kismet.) Given Santos’ impressive nationwide unpopularity, and the way he seems to singularly represent the tumorous afterbirth of the Trump presidency—one of the many Americans who have learned that it is possible to lie about everything and still get rewarded with an office on Capitol Hill—his seat is certainly in play for Democrats.
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Anyone invested in the function of democracy and the rule of law should be happy to see him go. But as a person who enjoys marveling at the incredible weirdos who get elected in this country, I have to admit that the George Santos saga was like manna from heaven. Nobody has ever crammed so many baffling scandals in a single term. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, hits like grade-A Santos derangement. I’m going to savor every drop we have left.
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Where do you even start? We first got to know Santos as a man who fabricated his entire biography, ostensibly to present himself as an electorally viable striver. (He lied about graduating college, and that he worked at big-deal Wall Street firms like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, among other things.) But the degree of the congressman’s mendaciousness grew increasingly impressive as reporters paged through the Santos Files. George Santos told donors that he produced the cursed Spider-Man musical on Broadway. He claimed to have been a volleyball star at a college he never attended. He told WNYC that he lost four of his employees at the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida, even though none of the 49 victims from the tragedy had ever worked at a company Santos owned. Most famously, he claimed, on multiple occasions, that he was Jewish, and that his grandparents—who were born in Brazil—survived the Holocaust. When it came to light that Santos was most certainly not Jewish, he told the New York Post that we were the ones who had it all wrong. “I said I was ‘Jew-ish,’” he explained. Santos didn’t let that stop him from attending events held by the Republican Jewish Coalition, which he was swiftly univinted to after the truth surfaced.
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Santos clearly has an appetite for harebrained petty scams, which is exactly what has done him in on the national level. Do you know why he was busted in Brazil? In 2008, Santos stole a checkbook from a man his mother was caring for, and signed his name as Délio while on a shopping spree for new clothes. (Investigators were not fooled.) Do you know why people started questioning the legal solvency of Santos’ (now defunct) animal rescue charity, Friends of Pets United? Because he asked for donations to be made out in his name, rather than the organization. Brother, it’s called money laundering for a reason. Few politicians have ever been so nakedly unscrupulous—corruption investigations are usually centered on reams of dry paperwork, detailing wire records between anonymous financial firms operating in the benthic depths of global capital. But here is George Santos, our all-time hapless doofus, dropping donor money on OnlyFans subscriptions, and feeding a mystery baby on the House floor. He’s a natural showman, whether he knows it or not.
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Santos has remained remarkably buoyant throughout this ordeal. He still shows up to Congress in his expansive wardrobe of tight crew-neck sweaters. He still takes the floor to sponsor a variety of odious bills, and his colleagues in the Republican Party often present an image of mutual respect toward him. All of this is counterfeit, of course. Everyone knows the jig is up. In fact, lately it seems like Santos has leaned into the spectacle of his hallucinogenic reign, enjoying the lame-duck freedom afforded to politicians of a much more reverent pedigree. After surviving an expulsion vote in early November, enacted due to his mounting list of financial crimes, Santos tweeted a Photoshopped image of him wearing a crown with the caption, “If you come for me, you best not miss.” (The post has since been deleted.) In the days leading up to the vote, Santos announced to the world, “They’re not after me, they’re after you, I’m just in the way,” as if the average American citizen is facing multiple federal indictments.
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Compare this attitude to, say, Donald Trump, who appears to be in severe psychic pain as he contends with multiple legal entanglements, violating gag orders, storming out of courtrooms, posting giant blocks of text on his fugazi Twitter, etc. Santos, on the other hand, seems enviably serene as the walls close in. As his banishment gets closer, he only grows more cocksure.
We will get another year of foolishness as the 2024 session kicks into high gear. Santos’ federal trial will follow—alongside plenty of surely still uncovered—which will be sublime for us true believers. Then, in all likelihood, we’ll endure through a lengthy Santos prison sentence, where the most ridiculous man in congress shall be divested of his platform. No more goofy lies, no more ridiculously ill-conceived scams, no more commandeered babies, no mind-blowing headlines to cut through the soul-crushing doldrums of electoral politics.
And you know what? Everyone but maybe a few Long Island Republicans will miss George Santos when he is gone. He is like a white dwarf, burning twice as bright for only half as long. He owes it to us to make the rest of his term count. I call on George Santos to engineer a crypto fleece or a phishing operation or really any scheme worthy of his singular, astonishing idiocy. Something, anything, before the memories are all we have left.
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Admit It: You’re Going to Miss the Hell Out of George Santos When He’s Gone
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17.11.2023
Tweet Share Share Comment George Santos will not be seeking reelection in 2024. He made the announcement on Thursday, airing all the pickled grievances so crucial to MAGA playbook: He’s tired of being “under the gun” from the media “all the time,” and he will instead continue to represent his constituents for as long as he is “allowed.” (Ominous!)
The real reason for this abrupt suspension of duty is an investigation conducted by the House Committee on Ethics, also made public on Thursday, that dug up a highly Santosian pattern of corruption during the man’s 10 months (only 10 months!) in Congress. Surely to everyone’s great surprise, the committee alleged that Santos siphoned off oodles of cash from his campaign funds for private uses. What was he spending donor wealth on? Credit card bills, personal debut, and—because we’re talking about Santos—charges at Sephora, Hermès, and OnlyFans.
Santos was already facing two federal indictments, containing 23 individual fraud charges, to say nothing of the Michael Mann-worthy international bad-check case he settled with the Brazilian government in March. (The U.S. trial date is set for Sept. 9, during the white-hot apex of the 2024 campaign, which is just kismet.) Given Santos’ impressive nationwide unpopularity, and the way he seems to singularly represent the tumorous afterbirth of the Trump presidency—one of the many Americans who have learned that it is possible to lie about everything and still get rewarded with an office on Capitol Hill—his seat is certainly in play for Democrats.
Advertisement Anyone invested in the function of democracy and the rule of law should be happy to see him go. But as a person who enjoys marveling at the incredible weirdos who get elected in this country, I have to admit that the George Santos saga was like manna from heaven. Nobody has ever crammed so many........
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