Derek French/SOPA Images via ZUMA Press Wire
Former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) reported to federal prison on Friday, after pleading guilty in 2024 to identity theft and wire fraud, stemming, in part, from a spectacular straw-donor scandal that was dwarfed by his still-more-spectacular “entire life story” scandal. As political prisoners go, Santos is not quite on par with his friend and mentor Nelson Mandela, but he has hinted in recent days that he may be killed in prison for what he knows. I don’t wish that on him, of course, but also don’t take it very seriously. Before becoming the first member of the House to get expelled from the chamber in more than two decades, he’d spent barely enough time in Washington to know where the Speaker’s Lobby is—let alone where the bodies are buried.
But Santos’ banishment and subsequent imprisonment does make him an exceptional case in one key way: Santos showed that it was possible for party leaders and rank-and-file members to act swiftly to deal with a fabulist whose very presence insulted the office he held—provided it was just a powerless back-bencher whose transgressions they could all laugh away.
Because Santos was a relative nobody, his colleagues could be honest about who he was in a way that for nearly a decade they have never been about their party’s leader or, frankly, themselves.
When the New York Times first exposed Santos’ biography as largely fictitious after the 2024 election, a lot of people spent a lot of time asking how someone like this could win. There was, of course, a major failure from Democrats in New York to pick up on basic red flags over the course of two successive campaigns. And there was a failure by Republicans’ vaunted Nassau County machine to do the same before twice giving their official imprimatur to a man who lied about being both Jewish and the producer of the Broadway musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. These were fair questions, but they also tended to obscure a larger one.
Some of the loudest voices in favor of expulsion were Santos’ fellow New York Republicans, eager to cast out their colleague as a MAGA imposter and condemning his lies and transgressions with unusual directness. It’s that age-old, never-quite-true maxim: This is not who we are. Because Santos was a relative nobody, his colleagues could be honest about who he was in a way that for nearly a decade they have never been about their party’s leader or, frankly, themselves.
Santos’ fleeting ascent is no great mystery if you view it in the larger context of a party leadership that’s desensitized to scammers and a party base that’s uncommonly susceptible to them. His claims to have played varsity volleyball at a college he never attended are not so different from the president’s recent claim to have an uncle who taught the Unabomber at a college the Unabomber never attended. The president, of course, was convicted on 34 felony counts in 2024 of falsifying business records to circumvent campaign finance laws. His administration seems to lie about everything, as a matter of course. It requires more than a little bit of credulity to blame the rise of a transparent a grifter like Santos on bandwidth issues at the vetting department; “How could a con artist from Queens make it so far in Donald Trump’s Republican party?” is a question that seems to answer itself.
None of this is to excuse Santos’ illegal behavior. It’s bad when people in politics abuse the public trust. But also: It’s bad when people in politics abuse the public trust! And in an age of court-sanctioned impunity for presidential crimes, of mass pardons for insurrectionists and political allies and seemingly anyone who has been convicted of public corruption in recent memory, it sort of feels like a joke that the one Republicans actually facing consequences for his actions is this guy.
There’s a famous quote from the late UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian about the false morality at the heart of college athletics: “The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky,” he said, “it’s going to give Cleveland State two more years of probation.” I don’t think you need to know much about college sports to get the basic point. The Republican Party in the Trump era is awash in grifters, weirdos, and frauds. The animating purpose is a mass public deception for the sake of wide-scale fleecing by a billionaire hustler. So it got rid of George Santos as fast as it could.