“Hey, Julia! I’m here to wish you congratulations on getting your driving test. You’ve proved that even the legally blind can do it. I know that it's a bummer that right after you got the test, and you showed that you weren't a quitter, you got into that little accident. . . . You will rock this as soon as you're out of that body cast because you’re awesome, and Jesus and President Trump will make sure that you're back on the road soon. . . . I want you to never give up on your dreams, because you are not a quitter, Julia, and I love you. Byee!” – George Santos, creator of Cameos
America loves scammers, glamour and shamelessness. America also has a spot softer than a newborn’s fontanelle for shallow nonsense. So when we say we get the impulse to fork hundreds of dollars over to former New York Congressman George Santos so he’ll call your best friend a filthy hooker, we’re not endorsing that choice. It simply indicates we know what kind of market is out there.
So does Santos, a con artist extraordinaire facing a 23-count federal indictment for wire fraud, identity theft and other crimes, which each count linked to some crazy story. He isn’t above ripping off a disabled U.S. Navy veteran or writing bad checks to an Amish man, both over transactions related to dogs.
Criminality is merely a speed bump in our national popularity pageants, especially if the crooks can make corruption look super-duper fun. And Santos certainly has. It takes a certain type of ballsiness to not only improperly use campaign contributions but to spend those funds on shopping, Botox treatments and OnlyFans.
Observing Santos’ flaming burn through his 15 minutes made me revisit philosopher Harry Frankfurt's 1986 essay “On Bulls**t.” He expanded into a book nearly two decades hence, but the original take does a fine job of breaking down what Santos is and why he’s ultimately doomed to disappear. In short, he’s not a skilled liar, made obvious by those charges piled on him. If he were, we’d be more concerned about Santos building a semi-respectable post-government career after this burst of notoriety passes.
That the public is enabling him in at all points to his partial competence as a bulls**t artist. Frankfurt distinguishes between the two thusly:
The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth. On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bulls**t his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular.
. . . This freedom from the constraints to which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the “bulls**t artist.”
From what we’ve seen of Santos' brazen fibs, his artistry is lacking; his embellishing brushwork lacks precision and shadow. Paint-by-numbers is more his speed, proven by his willingness anything to make a fast buck or explain his way out of a situation, making him simpatico with Cameo, the platform through which celebrities sell personalized videos to anyone willing to pay for them.
On a recent episode of CBS New York’s “The Point,” Santos claimed to host Marcia Kramer that in a matter of days, he’s made more money than in $174,000 annual salary. He threw a “that is actually factual” in there so we know he means business.
According to what Cameo’s founder and CEO, Steven Galanis told Semafor, he may be telling the truth this time. At least this money grab is aboveboard and the exploitation is somewhat mutual.
On recent episodes of his ABC late-night show Jimmy Kimmel revealed that he paid for a "big stockpile" of Santos Cameos under fake names, each request more ridiculous than the last, to fuel a limited-series mid-monologue gag titled “Will Santos Say It?”
Kimmel claimed a curiosity as to whether Santos would follow his instructions verbatim to validate handing money to an alleged fraudster. That's a reason, along with the standard mission to mine for LOLs. But we all know Santos can be bought for the right price. Seeing that proven on TV is more entertaining than hearing about it secondhand.
Kimmel’s fake requests include messages of encouragement for an imaginary Arby’s employee who came out as a furry – a "beav-a-pus," to be more precise – and for a woman who finally cloned her beloved dog Adolf with the help of “Doctor Haunschnaffer.” The roaring reactions to Santos enthusiastically feigning enthusiasm through imbecilic, badly improvised dialogue are purely reflexive. After that first airing, Santos demanded Kimmel pony up $20,000 for his efforts, to which Kimmel replied in his monologue, “Can you imagine if I get sued by George Santos for fraud? Man, how good would that be? It would be like a dream come true.” Then he shared a few more videos.
TWO MORE of Jimmy’s George Santos Cameo requests fulfilled! pic.twitter.com/cgF3cFAXR7
— Jimmy Kimmel Live (@JimmyKimmelLive) December 12, 2023
Kimmel’s exercises at Santos’ expense will get old, but not before he assists in making the sixth congressman to be kicked out in the 234-year history of the House of Representatives temporarily well-off. No lawyer is going to work for him pro bono. Luckily for him, Santos is in high demand, in part because of the free or inexpensive exposure Kimmel and others have provided.
Since joining Cameo, he’s jacked up his rates from $75 a video to $500 for a few seconds of custom-ordered blather.
His success is not entirely Kimmel’s doing/fault. In the year or so since he sashayed onto the national stage, Santos has styled himself as a theatrical prevaricator and a maximalist, slathering himself with illusionary power like a “Drag Race” contestant layers on cream eyeshadow.
He says all the things he believes his constituents and fellow Republicans want to hear without understanding or caring what the true definitions of terms such as “constitutionalist” mean. Grifters wager on their marks’ ignorance, and in this respect the odds were ever in his favor. The House Republican circus backed him until it was no longer advantageous, throwing him out in the cold.
But like Brer Rabbit hitting the briar patch, Santos has landed in a spotlight that is, for now, warm and inviting. Preceding Kimmel in platforming Santos is Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who funded a Santos Cameo to troll his Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., who is currently facing federal bribery and corruption charges and is refusing to vacate his seat.
The New Yorkers who elected him may not have much love for the guy, but the entertainment world sure does. Santos has filmed an interview with satirical interviewer Ziwe Fumudoh, which she has teased will run on YouTube after initially proposing featuring it on pay-per-view. HBO Films plans to adapt Mark Chiusano’s recently released book about Santos, “The Fabulist,” to be executive produced by Frank Rich (“Succession”) and Mike Makowsky (“Bad Education”), who is writing the screenplay.
Professional comics love him for the same reason they love all bulls**t artists, which is that they’re constantly generating material. In her recent “Amber Says What” segment on “Late Night with Seth Meyers," Amber Ruffin referred to Santos as “her favorite messy diva.” Bowen Yang slayed with a Broadway-style farewell to Santos on a recent “Saturday Night Live.”
“Santos clearly didn’t deliver for his constituents, but he delivered hard for the rest of us,” said “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver shortly after he was kicked out of Congress. “And I don’t want him to be in my government and I don’t want to sit next to him on an airplane, but I definitely want him in [Bravo producer] Andy Cohen‘s menagerie of damaged human beings.”
By that, Oliver was referring to Cohen’s “Real Housewives” franchise, which has already survived its share of felons and cheaters. Cohen wisely shot down those hopes on his Sirius XM show. “Let me be clear: we don’t want him.”
Cohen is playing the long game, as should the levelheaded among us, anticipating that this Santos obsession is a fever that will break if it doesn’t kill us. Is there really any danger of that? Not from Santos, maybe. But we should recognize what this success re-confirms about the state of our politics and us, an audience of voters.
These jokes can serve a purpose, understand. Santos, a formerly elected government official, is showing us he’s willing to say or do anything to keep his name in our mouths. That is what politicians do, of course. But he’s also nakedly performing the strategy that may return Donald Trump to power and, more frightfully, keep him there, which is that he follows orders like a champ.
Pay him enough, and he will do or say anything. On Cameo, that may be gut-busting. If he follows through with his threat to dish on members of Congress on a subscriber-based X channel, what he says will strain credibility. But if the goal is to continue Steve Bannon’s misinformation strategy of “flooding the zone with s**t,” Santos may get somewhere by blending his funhouse with an outhouse.
But his success has so far relied on other people’s ideas. He’d never heard of Cameo until an aide to Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., suggested he open an account.
“Is the bulls**tter by his very nature a mindless slob? Is his product necessarily messy or unrefined?” Frankfurt asked. “The word s**t does, to be sure, suggest this. Excrement is not designed or crafted at all; it is merely emitted, or dumped. It may have a more or less coherent shape, or it may not, but it is in any case certainly not wrought.”
Blithe predictions that Santos will follow in the footsteps of Sean Spicer and Rudy Giuliani and appear on “Dancing with the Stars” and “The Masked Singer” are not off base. He is a few degrees less radioactive than Spicer, who normalized Trump’s lying, or Giuliani, who strategized to subvert democracy. Both were incredibly bad at these endeavors, but still.
Santos’ rise to power is a symptom of that cancer, i.e. the vomit and diarrhea caused by the illness. The good news is that means he's flushable.
He may be smart enough to steal puppies but he probably lacks the intelligence to headline an interview program on Newsmax. He might end up co-starring in one of The Daily Wire’s throwaway movies. This explosion of Santos' media saturation is filling his coffers in the short run. It’s the holidays, and there are plenty of folks out there who may consider a short video from him to be a delightful gag gift.
Once that passes like a bad cold, it’s time for TV and the public to stop enabling him and let nature take its course, sending Santos slithering back the state he fears most — obscurity.
