Lying for the Win
George Santos proved he'd say anything to dupe voters to elect him. His party's leader doesn't care—in fact, Kevin McCarthy is all in on the jaw-dropping liar.
In a world of lies—a world in which the previous White House occupant can tally over 30,000 lies and still be considered a viable candidate for the office again—what is one more lie? Or 10? Or 100? What makes New York’s new Rep. George Santos and his particular brand of lying so different, so egregious?
Forget exaggeration. Forget embellishments or some version of stretching the truth. This person—known in Congress as George Santos, while having variously called himself George Devolder, Anthony Devolder and George Anthony Devolder Santos—serves up whoppers so untethered from provable facts that it’s hard to believe anything he says and difficult to treat his utterances as anything more than reasons for ridicule.
Given the possibility of legal charges for financial fraud and/or campaign fraud, you would expect that he would be politically radioactive for the House majority party—were we living in a sane world. But we have learned again and again how far the Republicans and their new House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, are willing to go to get and keep power.
Santos provides another data point that shows their determination to operate beyond the bounds of legitimacy, truth be damned, no matter how shameless, no matter how sociopathic, no matter how loud the laughter. We’ll return to McCarthy later, but let’s let Santos cook his own Michelin-starred goose first.
He said he attended the prestigious Horace Mann Prep in the Bronx (he didn’t)—and even criticized the school for refusing to help him financially to finish. He said he studied economics and finance at Baruch College (nope), graduating summa cum laude in the top one percent of his class (nope), was a star on the school’s volleyball team which won its league championship (nope) and suffered injuries to both knees in the process (nope).
He also said he received an MBA in international business from New York University (nope), worked for both Citigroup and Goldman Sachs (he didn’t), helped develop carbon capture technology and played a major role in oil and gas development (nope) and rose “up the chains of Wall Street” and “developed many companies” (oh, sure). In fact, he did receive payments from one Florida-based financial services company, Harbor City Capital, accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission as operating a “classic Ponzi scheme” and stealing $17 million from investors.
He also said that one of the companies he worked for lost four employees at the Pulse nightclub shooting massacre in Orlando, later amending that to four employees who were in the process of being hired. Confronted with video from Brazil of him dressed in drag and calling himself Kitara, he vociferously denied that was him.
But it may be the family lies and his role in the death of a sick dog that are the ugliest. First, he claimed to be the Jewish “grandson of Holocaust refugees,” and later when questioned said he was only “Jew-ish” (he’s Catholic). First, he said his mother had been killed inside one the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 (she wasn’t even in the U.S. then), later claimed that she died several years after 9/11 from related cancer (she didn’t), then finally in 2016 he exploited her actual death to seek donations for her funeral. When a disabled veteran whose service dog had suffered a stomach tumor reported that Santos stole $3,000 raised to save the dying dog’s life, Santos called the report “insane.” But who would you believe?
We have yet to learn where he got more than $700,000 to loan to his 2022 campaign from his own company, Devolder Organization, particularly since according to financial disclosures he received only $55,000 in earned income during a previous attempt to get to Congress in 2020. That, along with a long list of likely fraudulent expenses charged to his campaign, could be his undoing. Demonstrating he’s learned one common trick of the GOP trade, when questioned by Matt Gaetz on Steve Bannon’s show, he pushed back with this about the $700,000: “Well, I’ll tell you where it didn’t come from. It didn’t come from China, Ukraine or Burisma.”
Santos (or whoever he is) is currently under investigation by federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, the New York State Attorney General and the Nassau County District Attorney. The federal probe is reportedly examining his questionable financial disclosures and the loans he made to himself in his Congressional run.
New York Reps. Anthony D’Esposito, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy and Brandon Williams urged him two weeks ago to resign. D’Esposito, a Republican, said it first and most clearly in a statement: “I have maintained that trust is the hallmark of good public service. When public servants deceive and mislead those they are tasked with serving, they are no longer fit to work for the people.”
But Kevin McCarthy, who not only is loading up House committees with extremist election deniers as I previously noted, has chosen to ignore any potential harm Santos could cause the GOP by giving him two committee assignments. (Those are House Small Business and Science, Space and Technology Committee.) “Look, the voters decide,” McCarthy told reporters, refusing to urge him to resign. As if this is no issue.
As lies pile one atop another, it’s not hard to see how the most broken among us have figured out that the constant repetition normalizes the deception—and that far too many who previously knew better will adapt themselves to this reality. The idea of lying politicians may be an age-old truism, but we are witnessing lying on a completely different scale.
The understandable laughter that surrounds the brazen mania of George Santos and his whoppers—here’s comic Jon Lovitz as Santos with Jimmy Fallon—is just the latest expression of a nation learning to live with corruption on steroids. The refusal of McCarthy to push back against Santos is just one more sign that the Grand Old Party has no morals, stands for nothing, and will only reach its justifiable demise when voters decide they’ve really had enough. In the meantime, newly installed Congressman Santos is the GOP’s lying face.
A tragic final question: As we await more details from the latest mass shooting on Saturday that killed 10 people at a Lunar New Year celebration in Monterey Park, CA (already the 25th mass shooting in the first three weeks of 2023), I leave you with this: How much more heartbreak and death must we endure because of guns? Until this broken reality gets fixed, America will never be whole.
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The acceptance of George Santos by Kevin McCarthy and the majority of the House GOP, should surprise no one. Matt Gaetz caught with underage girls is still a sitting member of the house and is on the judiciary committee. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been given Homeland Security after tweeting if she and Bannon planned the January 6th insurrection, they would have won on that day. The best we can do is HOPE we can survive until January 2025.
“The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.” - Mark Twain