By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
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Should the blessed day ever arrive when Donald Trump is sent to federal prison, only one of his acolytes has earned the right to share his cell: George Santos, who on Friday became the sixth person in history to be expelled from the House of Representatives, more than seven months after he was first charged with crimes including fraud and money laundering. (He’s pleaded not guilty.) A clout-chasing con man obsessed with celebrity, driven into politics not by ideology but by vanity and the promise of proximity to rich marks, Santos is a pure product of Trump’s Republican Party. “At nearly every opportunity, he placed his desire for private gain above his duty to uphold the Constitution, federal law and ethical principles,” said a House Ethics Committee report about Santos released last month. He’s a true child of the MAGA movement.
That movement is multifaceted, and different politicians represent different strains: There’s the dour, conspiracy-poisoned suburban grievance of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the gun-loving rural evangelicalism of Lauren Boebert, the overt white nationalism of Paul Gosar and the frat boy sleaze of Matt Gaetz. But no one embodies Trump’s fame-obsessed sociopathic emptiness like Santos. He’s heir to Trump’s sybaritic nihilism, high-kitsch absurdity and impregnable brazenness.
Other politicians embody the sinister, cruel and disgusting aspects of Trumpism. Santos incarnates its venal and ridiculous side, the part rooted in reality TV and get-rich-quick schemes. As Mark Chiusano reports in his excellently timed new book about Santos, “The Fabulist,” if the now ex-congressman showed much interest in politics before 2016, we don’t have a record of it; his heroes were pop divas like Paris Hilton, Lady Gaga and the “Real Housewives” star Bethenny Frankel. “But by 2016,” writes Chiusano, “he had found a new role model who brought celebrity glitz and gossip to civics: Donald Trump.”
Perhaps the reason a critical mass of Republicans finally jettisoned Santos is that he was too embarrassing a reflection of the values of the party’s de facto leader. That’s certainly why I, for one, am going to miss him. A gay man and, reportedly, a former drag queen in a party consumed by homophobia and a pseudopopulist accused of bilking his campaign donors to pay for Botox, Hermès shopping trips and the adult entertainment website OnlyFans, Santos distilled the Trump movement’s lurid hypocrisy to great comic effect. In a world overflowing with tragedy, he’s a farce.
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It’s not just his grift and vanity that made Santos such a perfect avatar of the MAGA ethos. Even more significant was the defiance he showed as his flagrant wrongdoing was revealed and the way that defiance endeared him to some of Trump’s most avid supporters. In December 2022, after Santos was elected but before he took office, The New York Times reported that he’d lied about his education, purported career in finance, family wealth and charitable endeavors and that he’d been charged in Brazil with using stolen checks. Santos’s response was, as Chiusano writes, to “post through it,” making a great show of shamelessness both online and in real life.
Much of the MAGAverse loved it. Greene became a loyal friend. As New York magazine’s Shawn McCreesh reported in March, at a Manhattan birthday party for the Breitbart editor Emma-Jo Morris, Santos was “the ‘It’ girl. His wrists are bedizened with bling from Hermès and Cartier, and fawning fans line up for selfies.” A month later, The Intercept’s Daniel Boguslaw described Santos being feted at a bar in Washington: “A milieu of young conservatives, operatives and House staffers were assembling to howl in the next-gen model of Donald Trump’s societal wrecking ball, and the name on everybody’s lips was George Santos.” A hard-core MAGA group called Washington, D.C. Young Republicans posted about Santos’s “inspirational remarks” at that event, including his insistence that his enemies will have to “drag my cold, dead body” out of Congress. Gosar chimed in with an admiring response: “Based.”
Adam Serwer famously wrote that, when it comes to Trump, “the cruelty is the point,” but maybe the criminality is as well. Rule breaking is key to Trump’s transgressive appeal; it situates him as above the strictures that govern lesser men while creating a permission structure for his followers to release their own inhibitions. That’s a big part of the reason his multiple indictments appeared to only solidify his Republican support. Sure, some of his backers probably identified with his epic persecution complex, but that alone doesn’t explain the worshipful enthusiasm among some of his fans for his mug shot. (“He looks hard,” gushed the Fox News host Jesse Watters.) Rather, many people on the right thrill to displays of impunity from people who share their politics. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the left-wing counterculture lionized outlaws like the Hells Angels for their rebellion against a hated establishment. Today, as Santos’s rise to iconic status demonstrates, a similar antinomianism has taken hold among alienated conservatives.
Of course, the devotion of part of the right-wing demimonde was not, in the end, enough to save Santos. More than half of the House Republican caucus, and most of its leaders, stood by the disgraced swindler, and Greene called his expulsion “shameful,” but unlike Trump, Santos never amassed nearly enough power to force Republican institutionalists to swallow their disgust with him. Besides, as the Tennessee Republican Tim Burchett — who voted against expulsion — said of voters in his district, “People don’t like the fact he’s gay.”
While he may not be a congressman anymore, Santos has said he’s not done with public life. At a news conference on Thursday morning, he said he plans to be involved in the 2024 presidential race: “I won’t rest until I see Donald Trump back in the White House.” Hopefully, he’ll pop up on the campaign trail before his trial begins next September. No one deserves to be a Trump surrogate more.
Opinion Columnist
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
Should the blessed day ever arrive when Donald Trump is sent to federal prison, only one of his acolytes has earned the right to share his cell: George Santos, who on Friday became the sixth person in history to be expelled from the House of Representatives, more than seven months after he was first charged with crimes including fraud and money laundering. (He’s pleaded not guilty.) A clout-chasing con man obsessed with celebrity, driven into politics not by ideology but by vanity and the promise of proximity to rich marks, Santos is a pure product of Trump’s Republican Party. “At nearly every opportunity, he placed his desire for private gain above his duty to uphold the Constitution, federal law and ethical principles,” said a House Ethics Committee report about Santos released last month. He’s a true child of the MAGA movement.
That movement is multifaceted, and different politicians represent different strains: There’s the dour, conspiracy-poisoned suburban grievance of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the gun-loving rural evangelicalism of Lauren Boebert, the overt white nationalism of Paul Gosar and the frat boy sleaze of Matt Gaetz. But no one embodies Trump’s fame-obsessed sociopathic emptiness like Santos. He’s heir to Trump’s sybaritic nihilism, high-kitsch absurdity and impregnable brazenness.
Other politicians embody the sinister, cruel and disgusting aspects of Trumpism. Santos incarnates its venal and ridiculous side, the part rooted in reality TV and get-rich-quick schemes. As Mark Chiusano reports in his excellently timed new book about Santos, “The Fabulist,” if the now ex-congressman showed much interest in politics before 2016, we don’t have a record of it; his heroes were pop divas like Paris Hilton, Lady Gaga and the “Real Housewives” star Bethenny Frankel. “But by 2016,” writes Chiusano, “he had found a new role model who brought celebrity glitz and gossip to civics: Donald Trump.”
Perhaps the reason a critical mass of Republicans finally jettisoned Santos is that he was too embarrassing a reflection of the values of the party’s de facto leader. That’s certainly why I, for one, am going to miss him. A gay man and, reportedly, a former drag queen in a party consumed by homophobia and a pseudopopulist accused of bilking his campaign donors to pay for Botox, Hermès shopping trips and the adult entertainment website OnlyFans, Santos distilled the Trump movement’s lurid hypocrisy to great comic effect. In a world overflowing with tragedy, he’s a farce.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
It’s not just his grift and vanity that made Santos such a perfect avatar of the MAGA ethos. Even more significant was the defiance he showed as his flagrant wrongdoing was revealed and the way that defiance endeared him to some of Trump’s most avid supporters. In December 2022, after Santos was elected but before he took office, The New York Times reported that he’d lied about his education, purported career in finance, family wealth and charitable endeavors and that he’d been charged in Brazil with using stolen checks. Santos’s response was, as Chiusano writes, to “post through it,” making a great show of shamelessness both online and in real life.
Much of the MAGAverse loved it. Greene became a loyal friend. As New York magazine’s Shawn McCreesh reported in March, at a Manhattan birthday party for the Breitbart editor Emma-Jo Morris, Santos was “the ‘It’ girl. His wrists are bedizened with bling from Hermès and Cartier, and fawning fans line up for selfies.” A month later, The Intercept’s Daniel Boguslaw described Santos being feted at a bar in Washington: “A milieu of young conservatives, operatives and House staffers were assembling to howl in the next-gen model of Donald Trump’s societal wrecking ball, and the name on everybody’s lips was George Santos.” A hard-core MAGA group called Washington, D.C. Young Republicans posted about Santos’s “inspirational remarks” at that event, including his insistence that his enemies will have to “drag my cold, dead body” out of Congress. Gosar chimed in with an admiring response: “Based.”
Adam Serwer famously wrote that, when it comes to Trump, “the cruelty is the point,” but maybe the criminality is as well. Rule breaking is key to Trump’s transgressive appeal; it situates him as above the strictures that govern lesser men while creating a permission structure for his followers to release their own inhibitions. That’s a big part of the reason his multiple indictments appeared to only solidify his Republican support. Sure, some of his backers probably identified with his epic persecution complex, but that alone doesn’t explain the worshipful enthusiasm among some of his fans for his mug shot. (“He looks hard,” gushed the Fox News host Jesse Watters.) Rather, many people on the right thrill to displays of impunity from people who share their politics. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the left-wing counterculture lionized outlaws like the Hells Angels for their rebellion against a hated establishment. Today, as Santos’s rise to iconic status demonstrates, a similar antinomianism has taken hold among alienated conservatives.
Of course, the devotion of part of the right-wing demimonde was not, in the end, enough to save Santos. More than half of the House Republican caucus, and most of its leaders, stood by the disgraced swindler, and Greene called his expulsion “shameful,” but unlike Trump, Santos never amassed nearly enough power to force Republican institutionalists to swallow their disgust with him. Besides, as the Tennessee Republican Tim Burchett — who voted against expulsion — said of voters in his district, “People don’t like the fact he’s gay.”
While he may not be a congressman anymore, Santos has said he’s not done with public life. At a news conference on Thursday morning, he said he plans to be involved in the 2024 presidential race: “I won’t rest until I see Donald Trump back in the White House.” Hopefully, he’ll pop up on the campaign trail before his trial begins next September. No one deserves to be a Trump surrogate more.
