If Trump was able to worm his way into the White House, there’s no one, in theory at least, who can’t. He has set a standard that is so low on every conceivable level that anyone is welcome to give it a shot, especially entitled billionaires. And that low standard is being adhered to by candidates for Congress as well. Compared to Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), we can say Roman Hruska (R-NE) was a veritable Pericles or Cicero. And in the House… have we ever had members like Marjorie Traitor Greene or Lauren Boebert before? And how about Matt Gaetz who’s managed to sink his whole party. You have to go all the back in antiquity to Publius Clodius Pulcher to find anyone to compare him to. (And it really is as though Gaetz is modeling his career on Clodius who was best known for his disruptive, scandalous behavior, his dishonesty, and controversial actions, often aimed at undermining his political opponents and causing chaos. He was viewed as reckless and detrimental to the stability of the Republic and was not taken seriously by his senatorial peers, who viewed him as an opportunistic demagogue rather than a competent statesman.)
Sorry for dragging you down the rabbit hold with me. I was just trying to say that I blame Trump for the flood of incredibly unfit candidates, some of whom have been elected to office. Madison Cawthorn was another great example. And so is George Santos— still as crazy as a loon and claiming he’s making a comeback by moving from Queens out to Suffolk County to run against his nemesis, Nick LaLota, another Republican congressman and one who agitated in Congress to expel Santos… successfully agitated. So Santos claims to be remaking himself as a chicken farmer, a lie, and claiming that he’s putting together a campaign to defeat LaLota, another lie. What he’s doing is claiming to run— an an “Ultra MAGA independent”— so he can raise money and use it for his court case, which is very likely to land him in prison (for wire fraud, money laundering, theft, making false statements to Congress, illegal campaign contributions and stealing supporters’ financial information).
Oh, and he’s driven by his hatred of LaLota. “I don’t like Nick LaLota... He’s not well-liked. He’s an arrogant person. He’s not a nice guy. He’s cocky. He’s a traditional meathead, somebody who’s not nice to you for no reason.”
[H]e said that moving to LaLota’s turf would allow him to fulfill a longtime dream of owning a backyard chicken flock while remaining within the New York City metro area.
“My husband and I both enjoy that kind of life. We’re dying to have a chicken coop and stuff like that, and in Suffolk County it’s much easier to get that,” Santos said, contrasting the county where LaLota’s district sits with the Queens-bordering suburbs of his former seat. “In Nassau County, it’s full of restrictions on where and how much, and can you get chickens and can you get roosters because of neighbors and noise and that stuff.”
Regulations on chicken ownership are generally looser in Suffolk County, though statutes across all of Long Island vary by municipality, and bans on roosters are common in both counties. Santos also claimed he had spoken with Suffolk County Republican Chairman Jesse Garcia before launching his second bid for his old district about trying for what’s now LaLota’s seat, but that the party boss had discouraged him.
Garcia, a LaLota ally, told the Daily Beast he had no memory of this conversation.
Still, in discussing his history with LaLota, Santos’ remarks quickly turned personal. He asserted that, during his first run for Congress in 2020, a Suffolk County Republican operative approached him about homophobic comments LaLota allegedly made about him and his candidacy.
“‘Why are we running homosexuals as Republicans? What the fuck are we doing?' That was essentially what was communicated to me,” Santos said.
The operative did not respond to multiple calls from the Daily Beast, and LaLota denied ever making such remarks and cast the accusation as part of Santos’ well-documented pattern of making false statements.
…As Santos tells it, the true roots of his distaste for LaLota stretch back to the period immediately after Election Night in 2020, when Santos had an advantage in the in-person vote count but faced a tsunami of absentee ballots for his opponent, then and current Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY). The district at that time contained a slice of Suffolk County, and LaLota was then the county’s Republican Board of Elections commissioner, meaning he headed the body in charge of tallying those mail-in ballots.
In his conversation with the Daily Beast, Santos accused LaLota of accepting rules from his Democratic counterpart at the board that made challenging absentee votes “a nightmare.”
“That is why I did not like Nick LaLota: because he was weak and he literally didn’t do his job the way it was supposed to be done,” Santos said, also complaining about COVID-19 protocols at the counting process.
But in this instance too, Santos hedged by claiming this was based on information funneled back to him by campaign staff and volunteers involved in the tally since he was attending freshman orientation in Washington, D.C. at the time.
The Board itself told the Daily Beast that the rules it followed for counting and disputing absentee votes are all laid out in state law. An independent source with knowledge of the situation, who requested anonymity on the grounds that he did not believe it was in his career interest to be named in an article about George Santos, went so far as to call the fallen congressman’s allegations “bullshit.”
But Suffolk County GOP sources told the Daily Beast that it was around this point that animosity began to flow the other way. As the numbers shifted toward Suozzi, Santos began publicly attacking the counting process— and the county boards of election overseeing it— as corrupt. But under New York law, these boards are jointly controlled by the local Democratic and Republican organizations, and stocked with their hand-picked appointees. An attack on the boards thus amounted to an attack on the local GOP leadership itself.
Yet despite the ill will Santos’ comments engendered when his first campaign entered rigor mortis, those same county GOP organizations decided to support him again as he prepared a second bid. After all, at that time they believed Santos to be not just an openly gay Latino man but also a Wall Street tycoon with a massive trust fund, sprawling family real estate portfolio, and a thick Rolodex of donors. Moreover, after the 2020 census, an initial Democrat-led redistricting process redrew the seat to include huge swaths of blue turf in the Bronx and the northern New York City suburbs.
“You had a guy who could apparently raise a lot of money, apparently had a lot of professional connections, could add diversity to the Republican ticket, and on the surface, it seemed like that was an alright person to run in this district where it was understood a Republican could not win,” LaLota told the Daily Beast.
The state and county organizations stuck by Santos even after a judge tossed the initial lines, and a court-appointed master re-envisioned the district into a Democrat-leaning but winnable seat. The new lines also sheared away the district’s Suffolk County portions, making it a purely Nassau County and Queens affair.
But even though Suffolk County was done with Santos, Santos decided he wasn’t done with Suffolk County. And this is when everybody agrees things got ugly.
Well after Garcia’s county GOP organization backed LaLota for the 1st District— being vacated by Lee Zeldin, who ran a stronger-than-expected campaign for governor— Michelle Bond, the girlfriend of sam Bankman Fried’s business partner and now-confessed co-conspirator Ryan Salame, moved to get into the Republican primary. And when that happened, Santos confessed he saw dollar signs.
“Michelle Bond to me was, what I would say, an opportunity to tap into a whole new donor base. And she needed to tap into a local donor base, so it was very convenient for me,” Santos said in his interview with the Daily Beast. “So I said, ‘You know what? Fuck Nick LaLota.’”
…LaLota ultimately obliterated Bond by nearly 20 points, but only after spending more than half a million dollars on a primary where he hadn’t expected a serious rival. An uneasy peace with Santos followed— one that ruptured when news of the incoming congressman’s fabrications broke.
…[T]he now-independent candidate stressed that he was serious about winning a seat in Congress again, even if it requires multiple tries, and even though the charges he faces make it probable he would have to run one of those prospective races from inside a federal penitentiary.
“This is a long-term project. I might lose this time, I’ll win next time,” Santos said. “The reality is I want back in the game, and I don’t care who’s in the way.”
Others, including Jesse Garcia, the Suffolk County GOP chairman, dismissed Santos’ bid as just a stunt to wring a bit more attention from the public— and doubted he could even obtain sufficient petition signatures from district residents to make the ballot.
“If he does file petitions, we will look at those petitions, and I bet they will have the same validity as his degree from Baruch College,” said Garcia, alluding to the Manhattan-based institution of higher learning where Santos was in fact neither a student nor a volleyball star.
And that brings us to a Dan Pfeiffer question of the day: Why is the Press Making Trump Seem More Normal? He noted that as hard as it may be to believe, “much of the political press has an inadvertent pro-Trump bias.”
I do not envy the responsible journalists covering Trump. The man in a non-stop fount of disinformation. He spreads lies and conspiracy theories at a rate no fact checker can monitor. Airing his speeches live or simply quoting what he says risks spreading disinformation. And as we saw during the height of COVID and on January 6th, that disinformation can have tragic consequences. After January 6th, many outlets simply stopped covering Trump all together. Some cable networks refused to air his 2020 victory speeches because they knew he would lie about the legitimacy of the election and much more. For too long the press transmitted Trump’s lies and then people actually died. However, they have gone too far. The press didn’t cover Trump accusing Biden of using cocaine because it was obviously false and they doubt their own ability to persuade their readers. They know that most people don’t click the link and read the article, so it’s easier to ignore. I understand the instinct, but if Trump is dumb and dishonest enough to say Joe Biden delivered the speech while high on cocaine, the public should know. I often have to watch a whole Trump rally to prepare for the podcast, and no one has ever needed an editor more than Trump. The press shouldn’t do that job for Trump because it ends up hiding relevant information from the public.
When it comes to Trump— and only Trump, the press has abandoned Roger Ailes’ “Orchestra Pit Theory of Politics,” As the former GOP consultant turned Fox News honcho/overall terrible human explained: “If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls into the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”
Trump delivers his speeches from the orchestra pit, but the press covers the rare moments he climbs out and gets back on stage.
…He does a rally or interview filled with insane, incoherent ramblings and then the news clips the most coherent 30-45 seconds to air as part of the package.
Understanding some of the things Trump says requires an advanced degree in Right Wing marginalia. It would be nearly impossible for the local news or the Washington Post to explain what the hell Trump is talking about most of the time, so they just ignore it. Trump accusing Biden of using drugs didn’t come out of thin air. Ever since the State of the Union, Right Wing media figures have been trying to square Biden’s fiery performance with their caricature of him as a doddering, senile old man. The only explanation these yahoos could come up with was that Biden used some performance-enhancing drugs. Sean Hannity called Biden “Jacked Up Joe” after the speech.
Instead of explaining this Right Wing conspiracy or highlighting Trump’s direct accusation that Biden was on drugs, the press focused on Trump’s comments on Gaza. On one level, Israel and Gaza is a major issue in the campaign and Trump has tried very hard to obscure his position. But by focusing on the one quasi-serious moment in an entirely unserious interview, the press gave the public the sense that Trump was a more normal candidate.
Because Joe Biden is a serious person who tells the truth, the press holds him to an exponentially higher standard than Trump. Imagine that Joe Biden was interviewed on Pod Save America and spoke about the War in Gaza, climate change, his economic plans, his efforts to cancel student debt, and other serious issues, but at one point toward the end of the interview, he casually mentioned that Trump was doing cocaine. Would the press ignore the accusation and write a bunch of stories about his climate change accomplishments?
Absolutely not.
Such an accusation would be a major story for days. Other Democrats running for office would be asked if they would disavow Biden’s comments. The White House Press Secretary would be under constant pressure to provide evidence to back up that claim. The next time Biden addressed the press, they would hammer him with follow-up questions.
And therein lies Trump’s huge advantage. He can make outrageous accusations that demonstrate his unfitness for office and the press would rather ignore them than confront the challenge of covering them responsibly.
