In particular, the elected official in New York State had invented origins, a religion or even diplomas. Accused of serious fraud and despite the protection of the elites of the Republican Party, Congress expelled him this Friday, December 1st.
George Santos’ crazy career in the US Congress lasted less than eleven months: less than half a term. And yet history will never forget, and neither will we, this meteoric trajectory of an elected official in the House of Representatives, devouring absolutely everything that comes his way, from any semblance of standards of decency, probity, and truth. On Friday, December 1, at the age of 35, he became the sixth member of Congress in just two and a half centuries of his country’s history to be expelled by the vote of his colleagues, including a hundred of his comrades from the Republican majority. joined most of the Democratic opposition. And the one who just a few days ago brushed aside calls for his resignation by declaring himself the “Mary Magdalene of the Congress” turns out to be the first ever to be dismissed in this way without (yet) being found guilty “ a crime of justice or of the Confederacy during the Civil War.” “I have accepted my fate. If God’s will is for me to stay here, I will stay, if God’s will is for me to go, I will go,” he told Fox News this morning.
His accusation of fraud in May and then in October was insufficient in the first two no-confidence votes from which he emerged safely, as he could not muster the required two-thirds majority against him. Many Republicans and even some Democrats have long expressed reluctance to set a precedent for an overthrow without prior judicial conviction. But the sum total of the grievances (lies, embezzlement, various frauds) finally identified against him by a House Ethics Committee report will largely convince even conservative ranks that Santos will no longer represent his New York State constituency could (on the borders of Queens and Long Island). At the risk that the Republicans will lose a seat and their majority in the House of Representatives will become even narrower and more unmanageable than it was.
A “Talented Mr. Ripley” from the Trump era
George Santos has pleaded not guilty to the 23 crimes with which he was charged, refused to cooperate in the investigation against him and claims to be innocent. But a large part of the sales pitches and embezzlements that have marked his entire political career have already been widely proven and have even been recognized by the subject himself after his election, on the basis of a campaign in which he himself was not so much portrayed the voters as a chimera, as a pure fiction of his own creation, as a Trump-era hybrid between a talented Mr. Ripley and the protagonist of Catch Me If You Can. By the time journalistic investigations began to lift the veil on the extent of the mystification, Santos had already been elected for a month and was preparing to join the ranks of the most radical homophobic right-wing extremists – he himself is gay – on the benches of the United States Congress.
Portrayed by many who knew him as a successful charmer, George Santos had lied in particular about his origins and his religion: he was not the grandson of descendants of the Holocaust and not Jewish, as he was during his election campaign – before he tried to do so to make up for a confusing lexical-rhetorical coup by claiming that he had never portrayed himself as a “Jew,” but rather as “a kind of “Jew,” Catholic at heart. He claimed that his mother died in the September 11, 2001 attacks (she lived fifteen years longer). He largely falsified his resume and invented diplomas and jobs in prestigious financial institutions, all completely imaginary. He claimed to have an equally chimerical legacy and entrepreneurial success when he actually lived with his sister. He claimed to have lost four of his employees in the Pulse shootings in Orlando, was captain of the volleyball team at a college he never attended, and rescued 2,500 animals through an organization that, most notably, turned out to be a massive embezzlement enterprise.
Trips to the casino, Botox and Onlyfans subscriptions are at the expense of his campaign
In this regard, Santos maintains an unimaginable trail of armed deeds: since 2008 he has been prosecuted in Brazil (where his family comes from) for checkbook fraud, and today the Ethics Commission report accuses him of “fraudulently exploiting every aspect of his identity”. election to Congress for his personal gain,” “stole his own campaign from him,” “deceived his donors,” and thus financed luxury purchases, vacations in Las Vegas or the Hamptons, decadent dinners, trips at the expense of contributions to his candidacy to the casino, Botox injections and subscriptions to accounts on the famous erotic site OnlyFans. He will have declared fictitious loans to his own campaign to obtain a “refund” of more than $80,000 and diverted at least $200,000 in political donations to spend at Hermès or Sephora when it was more than just a matter of filling loopholes. catastrophic debt. Shortly before the vote, which was obviously fatal to his political career, one of the Republican representatives who advocated for his ouster, Max Miller, even presented himself (along with his mother, other elected officials and almost 400 identified people) as the victim of fraudulent accusations Republican Party Santos campaign on their credit cards.
What is the post-political future of the person who, after the publication of the damning parliamentary report, announced on his account that he would not stand for re-election next year? As the prosecution against him threatens to send him to prison for a long time, he has promised to write a book that promises to be a dirty version of the American dream and a veritable nightmare for fact-checkers. When asked about his desire to use this notoriety, which he clearly loves, to appear on a reality TV show like “Dancing with the Stars,” he held back on his answer. Whatever it was, we certainly wouldn’t have believed it.