A new Marist poll shows that 75% of New Yorkers— and 83% of respondents from Long Island— think George Santos should resign from Congress or be expelled. Even 68% of Republicans agree with the resign or be expelled choice. Next week, both may happen. Santos has called a dramatic press Conference for Thursday— on the steps of the Capitol— presumably to resign… unless he’s expelled on Wednesday. Yesterday we went further on Twitter, asking followers how much time Santos will be sentenced to. I was surprised that less than 10% thought he will be sentenced to 10 years or more. I feel certain that’s exactly what is awaiting him. The feds offered him a plea deal with reduced prison time in return for a resignation and he turned them down. I think that option is off the table now.
It’s hard to take the clownish Santos seriously. He’s a character for a made-for-Netfix series. But Kalpana Jain, the religion and ethics editor of The Conversation, who describes herself as “a political philosopher whose work focuses on the moral foundations of democratic politic,” wrote that she’s “interested in the moral reasons behind voters’ right to feel resentment when they discover that their elected representatives have lied to them.” She aasked that what makes Santos’ lies so unusual— and so damning? The idea that politicians are dishonest is, at this point, something of a cliché— although few have taken their dishonesty as far as Santos, who seems to have lied about his education, work history, charitable activity, athletic prowess and even his place of residence. Santos may be exceptional in how many lies he has told, but politicians seeking election have incentives to tell voters what they want to hear— and there is some empirical evidence that a willingness to lie may be helpful in the process of getting elected. Voters may not appreciate candidates who are unwilling or unable to mislead others from time to time.” [A Tennessee Republican elected on the same day as Santos, Andy Ogles, appears to have been lying on nearly a Santosian level and have a character not unlike Santos’ but is less of an overtly clownish buffoon and is not quite as likely to make his very serious colleagues look ridiculous be association.]
Jain put politicians’ lies— and why they are offensive— into 4 categories:
1. Lying is manipulative
The first reason to resent being lied to is that it is a form of disrespect. When you lie to me, you treat me as a thing to be manipulated and used for your purposes. In the terms used by philosopher Immanuel Kant, when you lie to me, you treat me as a means or a tool, rather than a person with a moral status equal to your own.
Kant himself took this principle as a reason to condemn all lies, however useful— but other philosophers have thought that some lies were so important that they might be compatible with, or even express, respect for citizens.
Plato, notably, argues in The Republic that when the public good requires a leader to lie, the citizens should be grateful for the deceptions of their leaders.
Michael Walzer, a modern political philosopher, echoes this idea. Politics requires the building of coalitions and the making of deals— which, in a world full of moral compromise, may entail being deceptive about what one is planning and why. As Walzer puts it, no one succeeds in politics without being willing to dirty their hands— and voters should prefer politicians to get their hands dirty if that is the cost of effective political agency.
2. Abuse of trust
A second reason to resent lies begins with the idea of predictability. If our candidates lie to us, we cannot know what they really plan to do— and, hence, cannot trust that we are voting for the candidate who will best represent our interests.
Modern political philosopher Eric Beerbohm argues that when politicians speak to us, they invite us to trust them— and a politician who lies to us abuses that trust in a way that we may rightly resent.
These ideas are powerful, but they also seem to have some limits. Voters may not need to believe candidates’ words in order to understand their intentions and thereby come to accurate beliefs about what they plan to do.
To take one recent example: The majority of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, when he was trumpeting the idea of making Mexico pay for a border wall, did not believe that it was actually possible to build a wall that would be paid for by Mexico. They did not take Trump to be describing a literal truth, but expressing an untruth that was indicative of Trump’s overall attitude toward migration and toward Mexico— and voted for him on the basis of that attitude.
3. Electoral mandate
The third reason we might resent lies told on the campaign trail stems from the idea of an electoral mandate. Philosopher John Locke, whose writings influenced the Declaration of Independence, regarded political authority as stemming from the consent of the governed; this consent might be illegitimate were it to be obtained by means of deception.
This idea, too, has power— but it also runs up against the sophistication of both modern elections and modern voters. After all, campaigns do not pretend to give a dispassionate description of political ideals. They are closer to rhetorical forms of combat and involve considerable amounts of deliberate ambiguity, rhetorical presentation and self-interested spin.
More to the point, though, voters understand this context and rarely regard any candidate’s presentation as stemming solely from a concern for the unalloyed truth.
4. Unnecessary and disprovable
Santos’ lies, however, do seem to have provoked something like resentment and outrage, which suggests that they are somehow unlike the usual forms of deceptive practice undertaken during political campaigns.
Certainly the congressional response to these lies is extraordinary. If Santos is expelled from Congress, he would be only the third member of that body to have been expelled since the Civil War.
The rarity of this sanction may reflect a final reason to resent deception, which is that voters especially dislike being lied to unnecessarily— nor about matters subject to easy empirical proof or disproof. It seems clear that voters may sometimes be willing to accept deceptive and dissembling political candidates, given the fact that effective statecraft may involve the use of deceptive means. Santos, however, lied about matters as tangential to politics as his nonexistent history as a star player for Baruch College’s volleyball team.
This lie was unnecessary, given its tenuous relationship to his candidacy for the House of Representatives, and easily disproved, given the fact that he did not actually attend Baruch. Similarly, the ethics report on Santos emphasized the fact that his expenditures often involved purchases for which there was no plausible relationship to a campaign, including US$6,000 at luxury goods store Ferragamo. The proposition that such a purchase was useful for his election campaign is difficult to defend— or to believe.
I believe voters may have made their peace with some deceptive campaign practices. If Walzer is right, they should expect that an effective candidate will be imperfectly honest, at best. But candidates who are both liars and bad at lying can find no such justification, since they are unlikely to be believed and thus incapable of achieving those goods that justify their deception.
If voters have made their peace with some degree of lying, in short, they are nonetheless still capable of resenting candidates who are unskilled at the craft of political deception.
There will be books and films coming out about Santos for years to come. In fact, part of the reason there was no plea deal was a dispute over whether or not Santos would be able to profit from books and films about him. (There is no federal law prohibiting it, but there is a New York State law, a 1977 “Son of Sam” statute that does… although the U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t made up its mind whether or not this violates the First Amendment.) One person who already has a book out— or will next week— about the Santos story is Mark Chiusano, author of The Fabulist— The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos. Simon & Schuster: “America has grown used to larger-than-life politicians: Teflon Don, AOC, MTG, Dark Brandon, and all the rest have injected DC politics with an unmistakable edge of celebrity flair and tabloid intrigue. Yet in 2022, a new player on the national scene outshone them all. George Anthony Devolder Santos, and his revolving door of pseudonyms, shed glaring new light on how far we’d all let our politics slide as his claimed resume was shred to bits in the wake of a longshot run to office from New York’s 3rd Congressional District. From Wall Street gigs to an amateur volleyball career, from embellished claims of Jewish heritage to a fabricated 9/11 story involving his mother’s death, Santos’s legend continued to grow as his web of lies evaporated in real time. And the only thing wilder than this charlatan embedding himself in the warm, consequence-evading arms of our nation’s capital was the Queens con artist’s refusal to bow his head in shame. The Santos show continues, as he joins the ranks of high-wattage fakers like Anna Delvey and Elizabeth Holmes.”
At one point, my friend David and I decided to write a sitcom about DC politics. I had been involved with the most successful American TV series of all time, Friends, working with producer-director-writer Kevin Bright on the biggest TV series soundtrack ever produced. So David and I went to lunch with Kevin to find out how to write a successful TV series. It was valuable lunch but I’ll sum up his wisdom in two words: character development. David and I never wrote the sitcom but I hope you can recognize Kevin’s advice here at DWT. Character development is one of our linchpins. And, of course Santos has been part of that since he was elected in 2022. Yesterday, Roland said, “I gotta hand it to you, you were hammering on Santos before anyone else even know who he was.” Of course. I can recognize a Lisa Kurdrow character when I see one. I knew George Santos was going to be more than a one-episode guest… just the way Mark Foley, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, Kyrsten Sinema have been.
Today, writing for MSNBC.com, Chiusano was still in stitches over Santos, noting that her may go to prison but he’s still getting what he wanted all along: celebrity. “Looked at from a certain angle,” he noted, “Santos isn’t just an indicted politician on the cusp of disaster. He’s a star. His antics have made him a frequent main character on social media. The Ethics Committee report earned him another round of shoutouts on NBC’s Saturday Night Live and the late-night shows. He is as viral as the stickiest contagion, his alleged usage of donor money for Botox and OnlyFans, a subscription-based site often used to host pornography, only making him seem funnier.”
In much of his alleged fraudulent behavior, Santos has left a trail of financial victims behind him, including a once-homeless Navy veteran and dog owner, as well as a family friend, who is also a former roommate, who now lives in a Brazilian favela. (Santos has pleaded not guilty to all charges.) But the largely small-time nature of his hustles makes him seem closer to hilarious than hateful, at least from the distant perspective of the X user or TikToker. And though he is feeling the pinch of consequences now, he has also achieved a level of fame he has envied for many years.
One of the most striking aspects of the reporting for my book about Santos, The Fabulist, was just how deep his love of celebrity runs. In his 20s, he often posted on social media breathlessly about the likes of Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga or Selena Gomez, often tagging them in hope of getting their attention. (See: “@mileycyrus i want clear skin!!!!!! help!!!”)
His affection for Real Housewife Bethenny Frankel was another constant: He posted on Twitter from her talk show in 2014, and CNN unearthed video of him in that episode peeking under his chair to see if he’d won a QVC gift card. In 2022, during his second run for Congress, he was chatting with his Democratic opponent during a break in a TV debate and claimed that he’d been on that particular set before because Frankel was “a friend of mine.”
“Well, that’s nice,” the nonplussed Democrat said. (When asked about Santos' claim, a representative for Frankel said in an email that the reality star "is not familiar with him.")
Santos didn’t just like watching the demigods who inhabited that world; he had dreams of that kind of fame for himself. On the 2022 campaign trail he once joked in a previously unreported tape that he’d “love to” be a celebrity, modestly allowing that he wasn’t. But the urge was there, including in his late adolescent years, when he was living on and off in his parents’ birth country of Brazil. This was the era when he dressed in drag and took on an alluring drag name: Kitara Ravache. Santos yearned to be one of the “Misses” at a dress-and-jewel-filled beauty pageant called Miss Rio de Janeiro Gay. He participated in either 2007 or 2008, depending on the recollection of people involved, but lost, Orlando Almeida, the contest’s organizer, told me.
This was often the way with him: an ambition for big things but never actually reaching the mountaintop. Even as he ran for office, he did so in a congressional race that didn’t draw much attention. But after he won his race, the New York Times uncovered his vast string of biographical fibs. Then, his fame became universal. Then, he was both an answer to a clue on “Jeopardy!” and a joke in a New York City subway ad. And there were signs that he enjoyed the attention, even if the spotlight was glaring.
And why not? Since being sworn in, for Santos it has been a lot of fun and games and a $174,000 annual salary— even if that time ends soon. Santos may resign next week or get pushed out of Congress. He also could just keep shuffling along in office until he takes a plea deal or faces his trial date in September. But for someone who was so drawn to the bright lights, this period has its benefits over poverty, which he experienced, and obscurity, which once might have been his fate. Others, from O.J. Simpson to Sean Spicer, have returned from ignominy or simply embarrassment in American life before.
If he were to go to prison, Santos has plenty of the connections and conspiratorial bona fides necessary to start a far-right podcast afterward. He himself has talked about a book and TV. And if all else fails, there is always Cameo or ABC’s Dancing with the Stars. Democracy might have lost out from all his machinations, but for Santos, infamy might be better than not being famous at all.
