On Saturday November 18, George Santos, newly elected as congressman representing a district covering northern Long Island and northwestern Queens, spoke at a summit of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He was a valued guest on the event as considered one of only three Jewish Republicans in the brand new Congress, together with David Kustoff of Tennessee and Max Miller of Ohio. As often in his campaign literature, Santos said he had a grandfather who fled the Nazis in 1940 from his native Belgium, ending up as a refugee in Brazil. Santos’s speech was a reprise of the successful pitch he’d made to voters. Running in a predominately Democratic district—where Joe Biden had trounced Donald Trump in 2020—Santos won by portraying himself as a special type of Republican: He was pro-Trump, yes, but in addition openly gay, Jewish, the kid of immigrants from Brazil, a self-made man who rose from working-class roots to the heights of finance, and the founding father of an animal rescue charity.
The libertarian pundit Glenn Greenwald was considered one of many who were charmed by the Santos saga. On November 15, Greenwald tweeted, “Meet George Santos, the first-ever Brazilian-American (and first-ever openly gay Republican) elected to Congress in US history. The son of working-class immigrant parents who left Brazil for the US, Congressman-elect Santos was born and raised in Jackson Heights, Queens.”
If Santos seemed almost too good to be true, it’s because almost his entire biography and résumé was a fiction. Because the Forward reported on Wednesday, “Congressman-elect George Santos’s emotional narrative of getting Jewish grandparents who fled Europe during World War II appears to be unfaithful, like much of the remainder of his campaign biography, in response to genealogy web sites reviewed by the Forward.” It’s an open query whether Santos is even Jewish in any respect.
The Forward report got here after a devastating Latest York Times article on Monday documenting that Santos’s résumé was “largely fiction.” There’s no evidence to support Santos’s claim that he attended Baruch College, as he claimed, or that he ever worked for Citigroup or Goldman Sachs. The animal charity he claimed to have founded just isn’t registered with the IRS. His claim to have had coworkers who were killed within the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre is unsupported. He does have criminal charges for check fraud in Brazil, and his campaign’s financial disclosures are murky and suggest mysterious secret funding. In sum, Santos gives every evidence of being an entire con man—someone who has invented an inspiring and politically useful life story out of whole cloth.
Is Santos even gay? This may need seemed an absurd query per week ago, but fresh reporting from the Every day Beast indicates that his personal history is as shifty and hard to pin down as the rest about him: Santos was married to a girl from 2012 to 2019 and there isn’t any record of his supposed current marriage to a person. The story continues to be developing.
The proven fact that Santos continues to be almost certain to be sworn in as a member of congress represents a large systematic failure that encompasses each major political parties in addition to the media. The Republicans appear to have had some inkling of the issues with this candidate, since they invested relatively little into his campaign. However the GOP completely failed in its duty of vetting public officials—not surprising given the proven fact that the party is increasingly more likely to foist unfit and sometimes unhinged candidates on the general public corresponding to Georgia’s Herschel Walker (who lost his senatorial bid) and Arizona’s Kari Lake (who lost her gubernatorial bid).
The failure of Walker and Lake indicate that when the GOP nominates radically unworthy candidates, voters will reject them. But that happens only when the Democrats put up a superb fight and the media provides the essential fact-based reporting for making a sound judgement. This happened in much of America in 2022, notably in Pennsylvania and Michigan in addition to Georgia and Arizona. It singularly did not occur in Latest York State, which was perhaps weakest link within the Democratic coalition (rivaled only by Florida).
Within the wake of Santos’s victory and latest revelations about his flagrant lying, the media and the Democrats are engaged in a contest of finger-pointing. Many are asking why the Times did an in-depth expose of Santos only after he already won. Others are stating the failure of the campaign of the Democratic Party candidate Robert Zimmerman, which provided the media with some oppo research but missed a lot of the most important problems with Santos.
One example of the genre was a tweet by Latest Republic editor Michael Tomasky, who wrote, “It’s not The Latest York Times’s job to get dirt on George Santos. It’s the Zimmerman campaign’s and the NY State Dem Party’s job.” (Tomasky later took back his defense of the Times).
Tomasky in his original tweet is barely half-right. The Zimmerman campaign and the NY State Democratic Party did fail in a spectacular fashion.
However the Times hardly covered itself with glory. For much of the last two years, its coverage of Latest York was slanted toward sensationalistic reporting on crime that only benefited the Republicans. Smaller local papers (notably The North Shore Leader and Newsday) did a greater job covering Santos. Mark Chiusano, a member of the Newsday editorial board, did several necessary pieces that highlighted how sketchy Santos was about his background. But like plenty of local papers, The North Shore Leader and Newsday don’t have the reporting staff they possessed even a decade ago, when they might have pursued the story with vigor. The Latest York Times—which does have the staff—stayed away from the story until it was moot since Santos had already won.
The failure of the Zimmerman campaign and the Latest York State Democratic Party speaks to a different deep structural problem. Latest York Democrats lost big within the midterms since the state party is a sclerotic machine that serves mainly as a job placement center for clubby insiders. As my Nation colleague Ross Barkan noted in a bit for Latest York, “The long-running open secret amongst Latest York politicos is that there isn’t any serious, functioning statewide Democratic organization. This was as much true under Andrew Cuomo because it is under the newly elected governor, Kathy Hochul. Actually, there have been few times in modern history when the state party mattered in any respect as an organizing vehicle, a spot to recruit candidates, or a tool to prove the vote.”
It’s hardly surprising that a dysfunctional political machine that’s instinctively hostile to left-wing politics would lose the flexibility to do even basic oppo research. The Zimmerman campaign did unearth a couple of nuggets to make use of against Santos—but these were minor in comparison with the entire story.
Congress will survive having a sleazy liar like Santos roaming through the halls. In spite of everything, congressional con men aren’t a novelty. The larger problem is that neither the Latest York Democratic Party nor The Latest York Times are quite as much as the duty of stopping the following Santos from winning.