George Santos’ crazy career in the United States Congress lasted less than eleven months: not even half a term. And yet, history will never forget, and neither will we, this meteoric trajectory of an elected official in the House of Representatives consuming absolutely everything in his path, starting with the semblance of standards of decency, probity and truth. Friday, December 1, at the age of 35, he became the sixth member of Congress in just two and a half centuries of his country’s history to be expelled by the vote of his peers, including a hundred of his comrades from the Republican majority, joining to most of the Democratic opposition. And the one who just a few days ago brushed aside calls for resignation by proclaiming himself “the Mary Magdalene of Congress” turns out to be the very first to ever be dismissed in this way without having been (yet) convicted of a crime by the courts, or a Confederate during the Civil War. “I have accepted my destiny. If it is God’s will to keep me here I will stay, if His will is for me to leave, I will leave. he declared in the morning to Fox News.
His indictment for fraud, in May and then in October, was not enough during the first two votes of no confidence from which he emerged safely, failing to unite against him the required two-thirds majority. Many Republicans and even some Democrats have long defended a reluctance to establish the precedent of an ouster backed by no prior judicial conviction. But the sum of the grievances (lies, embezzlement, various scams) finally established against him by a report from the House Ethics Committee will have largely convinced, even in the conservative ranks, that Santos could not represent longer his constituency in New York State (on the borders of Queens and Long Island). At the risk for the Republicans of losing a seat in the process, and thus making their majority in the House even narrower and more unmanageable than it was.
A “Talented Mr. Ripley” from the Trump era
George Santos has pleaded not guilty to the 23 criminal counts with which he was charged, refused to cooperate in the investigations against him, and presents himself as innocent. But a large part of the sales pitches and embezzlements which mark his entire political career have already been widely demonstrated, even recognized by the person concerned himself after his election on the basis of a campaign in which it is not so much him who was presented to voters as a chimera, a pure fiction of its own making, as a hybrid in the Trump era of a Talented Mr Ripley and the protagonist ofCatch Me If You Can. When journalistic investigations began to lift the veil on the extent of the mystification, Santos had already been elected for a month and was preparing to join the ranks of the most radically homophobic far-right – he himself is gay – on the benches of the United States Congress.
Presented by many of those who knew him as a successful charmer, George Santos had notably lied about his origins and his religion: he is not the grandson of descendants of the Holocaust, nor even Jewish as he is. had said to attract certain support during his campaign – before trying to make up for it with a bewildering lexico-rhetorical coup, by claiming to have never presented himself as “Jewish” (“jewish”) but “a kind of Jew” (“jew-ish”), Catholic at heart. He claimed that his mother died in the attacks of September 11, 2001 (she lived fifteen years longer). He largely falsified his CV, inventing diplomas and jobs in prestigious financial establishments, all of which were perfectly imaginary. He claimed an equally chimerical heritage and entrepreneurial success, when he actually lived with his sister. He claimed to have lost four of his employees in the Pulse shootings in Orlando, was captain of the volleyball team at a college he was never a student at, saved 2,500 animals through an organization that turned out to be above all a vast embezzlement enterprise.
Trips to the casino, botox and Onlyfans subscriptions at the expense of his campaign
In this regard, Santos maintains an unimaginable trail of feats of arms: pursued since 2008 in Brazil (where his family is from) for checkbook fraud, he is today accused by the report of the ethics commission of ‘to have “fraudulently exploited every aspect of his election to Congress for his personal gain,” “stole from his own campaign,” “deceived his donors” and thus financed – at the expense of contributions to his candidacy – luxury shopping, vacations in Las Vegas or the Hamptons, decadent dinners, trips to the casino, Botox injections and subscriptions to accounts on the famous adult site OnlyFans. He will have declared fictitious loans to his own campaign to obtain “reimbursement” of more than 80,000 dollars and diverted at least 200,000 dollars in political donations to spend them at Hermès or Sephora, when it was not simply a question of filling gaps. abysmal debts. Just before the vote apparently fatal to his political career, one of the Republican representatives pleading for his ouster, Max Miller even presented himself as the victim (along with his mother, other elected officials and nearly 400 people identified) of fraudulent charges made by the Santos campaign on their credit cards.
What post-politician future for the one who announced, after the publication of the damning parliamentary report on his account, that he was giving up running for re-election next year? While the prosecutions against him threaten to send him to prison for a long time, he has promised to write a book, which promises to be a sordid variation on the American dream and an authentic nightmare for fact-checkers. Asked about his desire to capitalize on this notoriety which he obviously loves to take part in a reality TV show such as Dance with the stars, he reserved his response. Whatever it was, we certainly wouldn’t have believed it.