Reflections On... George Santos, Or Whatever His Name Is

"A Case For Birth Control" by Nancy Ohanian

Daniel Boguslaw had a good reason why the Young Republicans invited George Santos, or whatever his name is, to speak: “If corruption is the currency of Washington, why not celebrate the precision with which its most extravagant excesses cut through the noise, instead of shoving fingers in ears and turning a blind eye? Why not push the madness to its limits? The accelerationist explanation was coherent, but there was another reason why Santos, whose list of lies and confabulations is too long to list here, was invited to speak… For the crowd of assembled outcasts, Santos— with his fabricated background and the bizarre videos shot from inside his Hill office— embodied their own tormented psyches: noncommittal; confusing; sardonic; cut adrift from the guiding charter of a coherent national party and its grounding in historic continuity. They shifted now among various extreme ideologies, chasing the rush that Trump’s authoritarian nihilism had first unleashed. What united Gaetz— who had attended a similar gathering just weeks before— and Santos was not a shared extremist political position, but an extremist prioritization of spectacle over all else, cutting straight to the bone of our entertainment-addled polis.”

“People are concerned about him. They don’t think he’s a very good guy. There are calls for him to resign,” Smith says, from a small raised stair. “Well, without getting into the details of it, experience has taught me one thing, and that is anytime there is somebody in Washington that receives bipartisan condemnation, [they’re] at least worth meeting. And at least worth hearing from. And so, it is my honor and my pleasure to introduce to you the queen of New York City, congressman George Santos.”

The crowd goes wild, and then he’s there, microphone in hand, pink tie exploding. George Santos has entered the building.

He didn’t really have anything much to say, and he was in and out of there in no time flat. Although, he did say that “I’m not going anywhere. They’ll have to drag my cold dead body out of this institution.”

Boguslaw wrote that the felt like he had “just watched the second act of some national tragicomedy, where nobody can escape white-knuckling their playbill as the band goes down with the ship. ‘The dumbing down of the country reflects itself on Broadway,’ Stephen Sondheim once said. ‘The shows get dumber, and the public gets used to them.’”

What he said about what unites Gaetz and Santos… let me add something. Believe it or not, when Gaetz— a spoiled and unaccomplished ne’re-do-well son of great privilege— got to Congress, he was an overweight moderate. Trump told him to lose 100 pounds. When the world crashed around him in the form of an under-age sex scandal, no one wanted anything to do with him. But he was successful changing the topic by hooking up with other fringe extremists— especially Marjorie Traitor Greene, who hadn’t been resurrected yet. Desperate, he reinvented himself. Something like what Santos is trying to do now, but isn’t likely to be able to before he’s indicted.

Nick Fandos covered the same event for the NY Times. Today he wrote that “Four months after his whole concocted biography unraveled— one Wall Street job and collegiate volleyball championship at a time— Santos remains a pariah. Colleagues refuse to work with him, dooming his legislative priorities. His local party has vowed to defeat him. And a slew of law enforcement and ethics investigators are combing through his life and campaign finances. But rather than shrinking from the attention, the 34-year-old congressman is stepping ever more definitely toward the spotlight. Santos seems eager to test whether he can make the journey from laughingstock to legitimacy by aligning himself with Trump— or at least signaling that he’s in on the joke… Santos has few other options. He serves on no House committees. His local Republican Party has banned him from its events, and pushed other civic organizations to blackball him, too. The invitation by the Washington, D.C., Young Republicans was his first time on the capital speaking circuit.

Representative Jerrold Nadler, the dean of New York’s congressional delegation, has barred him from regular, bipartisan meetings to discuss the state’s priorities. Representatives for New York’s senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, said he has yet to seek to work with them. And while House leaders navigating a razor-thin majority have stopped short of calling for his expulsion, colleagues say they have made clear they will only tolerate so much.

“I have no doubt that he will be a one-term congressman,” said Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a fellow New York Republican who, like Santos, flipped a Democratic-leaning suburban district on Long Island last November.

D’Esposito said he had gone out of his way to make sure his name did not appear on letters or bills with Santos, and bemoaned the constant churn that seemed to follow his colleague, and overshadow his own work.

He’s looking for life after this short stint on Capitol Hill,” D’Esposito said.