There are lies, there are damned lies, and then there is George Santos’s CV. In the short time that he has been in the public eye, the 34-year-old Republican congressman from New York has been accused of fabricating almost every facet of his life. During his election campaign, Santos claimed to be a “proud American Jew” whose grandparents “survived the Holocaust”. After being challenged on this, however, Santos clarified that he was raised Catholic and argued that he had always said he was “Jew-ish”. Emphasis on the ish.
What else has he lied about? Well, how long have you got? His education and work history appear to be fabrications. He has said his mother was working in the World Trade Center on 9/11, yet records show she was in Brazil. He has said that he “lost four employees” in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida, but the New York Times has not been able to verify these claims. He has also claimed to have been a college volleyball star (unlikely) and a producer on Spider-Man (untrue). No one is even sure what Santos’s real name is.
I could go on and on with the lies, but I need to get to the scandals. There is the scandal about his former life as a drag queen in Brazil, which he originally denied, then appeared to admit. (To be clear: the only outrageous thing about his alleged drag-queen past is that he is now active in a party that demonises and wants to criminalise drag queens as part of a broader anti-LGBTQ+ agenda.) There is the $365,000 in campaign funds he can’t account for. And then there are the multiple dog-related scandals.
Last week, Politico reported allegations that Santos spent 2017 cruising around Pennsylvania’s Amish Country buying puppies from dog breeders with cheques that bounced. (I know that cheques haven’t been widely used in the UK since about 1492, so this story sounds suspicious to British ears, but Americans still use them.)
A few days after allegedly writing $15,125 in bad cheques to breeders, Santos held an adoption event at a pet store in New York. It’s not clear if he made money from this, but adoption fees can range from $300 to $400. Santos was charged with theft by deception, but those charges were dropped when he claimed his chequebook had been stolen.
The other dog-related scandal? The congressman is accused of promising to raise funds for a homeless man’s dying dog in 2016, then taking off with the money.
I am not sure how Santos still has a job as a lawmaker, but, as he becomes more and more of an embarrassment, his party colleagues are gradually turning against him. Fellow New York congressman Nick LaLota last week called Santos a “sociopath”. The Utah senator Mitt Romney, meanwhile, described Santos as a “sick puppy” and said he “shouldn’t be in Congress … if he had any shame at all, he wouldn’t be there”.
It turns out Santos doesn’t have any shame. On Wednesday, he told reporters that he is the real victim. “It’s not the first time in history that I’ve been told to shut up and go to the back of the room, especially by people who come from a privileged background,” Santos said of Romney’s remarks. “I think it’s reprehensible the senator would say such a thing to me … it wasn’t very Mormon of him.”
If Santos were a one-off, his antics might be amusing. But there is nothing remotely funny about a political system that has allowed someone such as Santos to get as far as he has. Indeed, Santos may not be the only fabulist in the Republican party: the Washington Post reported last week that Representative Anna Paulina Luna, who was recently elected as a Republican congresswoman in Florida, also appears to have fabricated a lot of her biography.
She, too, has claimed Jewish roots, but, according to her own family, her grandfather reportedly “served in the armed forces of Nazi Germany”. If true, these allegations would suggest that the only qualifications for a successful career in the Republican party are an active imagination and no moral compass whatsoever.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
