George Santos is in the news again.
Yes, the serially dissembling (and yet electorally successful, in a cycle where the winds did not otherwise generally blow in favor of GOP challengers) freshman representative — a man who provably invented his job résumé, educational history, and ethnic status on the way to capturing New York’s third congressional district last November — has somehow managed, quelle surprise, to land himself in campaign-finance trouble as well. This comes as a major blow to those of us who had confidently bet that, having lied about being an employee at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup as well as concealing a narratively inconvenient marriage to a woman, Santos had finally righted the ship and reformed his ways. It’s a shame; this guy really seemed like he was on the verge of turning it all around.
Instead, Santos faces House ethics charges filed against him by two of his fellow New York representatives, Democrats Ritchie Torres and Dan Goldman. There is obviously no love lost between them and Santos, whose victory in a House district formerly held by retiring Democrat Tom Suozzi embarrassed the state and national party on a night when the Democrats otherwise surprisingly held their own. And in all fairness to Santos, as a political neophyte running against the corrupt Washington establishment, campaign-finance laws can often be rather arcane and impossible for all but dedicated experts to properly navigate. For example, how was Santos’s campaign moneyman supposed to know it was improper to impersonate Kevin McCarthy’s chief of staff as a fundraising ploy? There are such murky shades of ethical gray when it comes to these things; it would be preferable if the law instead had clear boundaries delineating right or wrong, such as “don’t commit wire fraud.”
Some of you, the more cynical and hard-bitten among our readership, may dismiss George Santos as a hilarious charlatan. Oh no, not so. George Santos is truly a man for the present age, a man in full. That he is unfit for office is self-evident, and yet theoretically only a personal sense of shame can drive him from it until 2024. (This is a man, I must remind you, whose capacity for shame has already been called into question.)
It matters not, in a meaningless House helmed by a kept speaker with an opposition Senate and president, and still riven with the passions and obsessions of the Trump era. If such is the entertainment we are to be granted, then we should enjoy Santos as the ne plus ultra of a certain kind of naked, sociopathically self-actualizing personality that inevitably (1) finds its way into politics, (2) somehow temporarily manages to squeeze through the cracks, and (3) got that far in large part by cynically exploiting (indeed, lying about) any piece of social leverage reasonably at hand. That Santos is a Republican is of course inconvenient, but let that go: He beautifully embodies the complexes of an entire generation of strivers playing any and every angle they can to rise to the top, and discovering that the levers of social (and thus ultimately political) power are now far different from what they were even a decade ago. So here’s to hilarious, and ultimately self-revealingly pathetic, frauds.