From time to time a narrative emerges of a public determine who fully fabricated their biography, or made-up intimate particulars of specific components of their life, or constructed careers by stringing collectively one lying after the following.
Take the story of rising New York Times journalism star Jayson Blair, who 20 years in the past was caught making up interviews, creating sources who didn’t exist and describing scenes that have been spun from his creativeness. A Instances investigation finally discovered that he had largely fabricated at the very least 36 of the 73 tales he had labored on on the paper’s nationwide desk, and that a whole lot of his earlier articles have been additionally in some methods problematic.
Or the story of Rachel Dolezal, a white lady who fabricated a complete story of her African American heritage, and rose to change into president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP earlier than finally flaming out amidst a welter of tales difficult her private narrative.
And now there’s 34-year-old George Santos, an ardent Trumpist and January 6 insurrectionist, and, it seems, a grasp bullshit artist and exaggerator. If he hadn’t been caught in his lies early on in his profession — not by the Democratic Social gathering’s opposition analysis investigators, and never in time to change the result of the November elections, however by New York Instances investigative journalists — Santos might need gone on to someday be as nice a manipulator of the reality, as nice a fluffer of his personal self-image as his hero, Donald J. Trump.
Santos hasn’t simply embellished one or different side of his life story, or reduce a number of corners to make his biography appear extra compelling; reasonably, in working for workplace as a U.S. congressman from Lengthy Island, New York, he appears to have introduced the voting public with an avatar that bears hardly any relation to the true particular person.
Santos, who The New York Times discovered was accused of fraudulently cashing one other particular person’s checks whereas dwelling in Brazil, created his avatar in a manner calculated to enchantment to key voting blocs within the Lengthy Island district that he hoped to wrestle away from the Democrats — and it labored. This previous November, Santos got 54 percent of the vote in defeating Democratic nominee Robert Zimmerman. His victory, one in all a number of Democratic seats in New York State that flipped purple, was instrumental in serving to the Republicans get to the magical 218 Home seats that provides them a barebones majority as Congress returns from the brand new 12 months’s break.
Santos’s avatar is a rich actual property participant with a previous profession working for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs; has a university diploma from Baruch School, and a highschool training, sadly truncated by the 2008 monetary disaster, from the elite Horace Mann preparatory faculty; runs an animal rescue charity, and does different philanthropic work; and can also be Jewish, the descendant of Holocaust survivors.
In actuality, Santos has executed, or is, none of these issues. The origins of the place he obtained a whole lot of 1000’s of {dollars} that he then loaned to his personal marketing campaign are murky, at greatest; and his claims to being a high-flying monetary dealmaker for the wealthy and well-known seem like largely aspirational.
As his story has unraveled, the incoming congressman’s raisons d’être have change into extra ludicrous by the hour. The avatar proclaimed himself on the marketing campaign path to be “a proud American Jew.” The real Santos, when challenged on this, acknowledged that he wasn’t actually Jewish, but then said he had meant he was “Jew-ish” — as in virtually a Jew, by advantage of his friendship with many Jews. (Frankly, as somebody who is Jewish myself, I’d say that reply, that advert hoc addition of a splash the place clearly none existed, reveals such a unprecedented degree of chutzpah — a time period that the “Jew-ish” Santos is unquestionably accustomed to — that, if it weren’t so vile, I may virtually applaud for its sheer audacity. Santos has, the truth is, provide you with a line virtually worthy of a Nineteen Fifties Catskills comic.)
The truth is, I’d say that Santos’s complete absurdist story is a textbook instance of chutzpah. Many years from now, dictionaries may outline the phrase by his shameless conduct: “An act of maximum, even outrageous, manipulation of the reality for private achieve, the willingness to take disproportionate dangers with one’s honor and sense of dignity so as to reach a short-term aim: see George Santos’s weird run for Congress in 2022, for an instance of this in motion.”
If I had purchased Santos’s schtick — one more Yiddish time period that the “Jew-ish” avatar ought to be all too accustomed to — I’d be asking for a refund.
Even supposing local and federal prosecutors are now investigating George Santos, and even supposing Democrats in Congress (in addition to a number of low-ranking GOP political figures) are calling for congressional ethics probes into Santos’s fabrications, Kevin McCarthy and the other GOP leaders have remained shockingly silent. Two weeks into this cleaning soap opera, the general public has gotten bubkes — I’m positive Santos may inform you that in Yiddish this implies “beans,” or “nothing” — from McCarthy.
McCarthy’s silence is a tacit vote of confidence in Santos, shorn of his avatar attributes; a inform that in his pursuit of energy at any value, there’s no alliance that McCarthy received’t kind — Santos has pledged to vote for McCarthy as Home speaker — and no Rubicons that he received’t enable his members to cross. It’s a real signal of the Trumpian occasions.
Santos’s story is so patently absurd that it’s straightforward to only deal with it as a comedy routine. However, alas, it’s regular conduct for at present’s GOP in Congress: Santos created his personal Deep Pretend political imagery and rode the lies all the best way to D.C. And the Trumpified GOP, beneath McCarthy’s mendacious and mediocre management, appears keen to circle the wagons so as to defend him — and to shore up their slim congressional majority. The occasion’s management, in doing this, is giving its stamp of approval to Deep Pretend, avatar politics, to the concept that it’s okay to say just about something so as to safe votes. Additionally it is exhibiting, in no unsure phrases, the contempt through which the GOP holds its voters.
