George Santos: A grifter in the American tradition

What’s so bad about George Santos anyway? Sure, he won a seat in New York’s 3rd Congressional District by lying to the electorate about his qualifications for office. And sure, it was more than just embellishment to claim he’d gone to schools and colleges he never attended, worked at places he had never been employed and falsely asserting he had a “Jew-ish background.” (That gets you votes in New York, even today.) Still, he won his seat decisively by some 21,000 votes, a greater margin than Joe Biden had over Trump in Georgia.

Of course, now with the truth on the table, 78 percent of the electorate, including 71 percent of Republicans, are screaming for his resignation. (I wonder what the other 22 percent of the electorate are doing for brains.)

True, Santos lied blatantly about his marital status, philanthropic pursuits and financial dealings. But, Santos’s defeated opponent, Robert Zimmerman, attributed the Santos victory to the ”Republican landslide” and  New Yorkers’ concern over rising crime. And, former Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), who once represented Santos’s district, attributed the puzzling victory to “Democratic complacency, Republican extremism and media decline.”

Is it possible that had the false statements been uncovered before Election Day, Santos would have won anyway? The truth is that no one, before the election, was willing to out Santos even though the fraud was easily uncovered — not Republicans, not Democrats and certainly not the media.

Historically, Americans have always indulged an excessive appetite for fantasy over fact. It is an American tradition.

Long before there was George Santos, Americans from Cotton Mather to Buffalo Bill have lied and lied again to paint a picture other than the one represented by reality. Deeply embedded in our culture is the notion that we can think anything we damn please, and can even make up the facts as we go along. Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” about the size of Trump’s 2017 inauguration crowd are a case in point.

Mather preached from the pulpit that the world was coming to an end. After the prediction failed, he revised the date two more times. Buffalo Bill doubled as promoter and writer of fictionalized accounts of Indian fighting. I hate to tell you this, but he was a professional prevaricator. His Wild West Shows featured the story that he had killed and scalped the Cheyenne Chief Yellow Hair at the Battle of Walbonnet Creek, swinging the trophy over his head and proclaiming in triumph, “The first scalp for Custer.” The problem is that no one present recalled the event.  Historians believe the story was embellished or invented.

Frank Abagnale claimed to be a lawyer, an airline pilot, an informant for the FBI and a state prosecutor to swindle the gullible. He served time in prisons in three countries, and then found it was more profitable to go straight by becoming a fabulist.  

He got to tell his “life story” of fraud and deception on “The Tonight Show” and “To Tell the Truth.” A book about his life, “Catch Me if You Can,” was turned into a movie by Steven Spielberg and later a Broadway musical. Turns out that many of Abagnale’s details about his “life story” were false. So, he lied even about his lies.

Which bring us back to Santos. Santos put together for the electorate a string of lies that boggle the imagination. He lied about where he went to high school and college, falsely claiming he had a degree in economics and finance from Baruch College.

He lied about his employment history, falsely claiming that he had worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. In fact, he worked for an outfit called Harbor City Capital, now under SEC investigation for an alleged Ponzi scheme, mulcting investors of $27 million.

Using the alias Anthony Devolder, he cashed checks on an animal charity he ran. He collected $3,500 to fund life-saving surgery for a dog owned by a disabled veteran, and then pocketed the funds.

Then there is the infamous $700,000 he loaned to his campaign. No one knows (and Santos isn’t telling) where he got the money, and his source of finance has been the subject of speculation.

Santos ran as an openly gay GOP candidate. Turns out he was married to a woman for seven years and then divorced. He said he had a husband to whom he announced his engagement five years before his divorce. But his intended never said yes, and the marriage evidently never happened.

He said that the 9/11 attacks claimed his mother’s life, but she died in 2016, 15 years after the tragedy, and documents showed she was in Brazil at the time of the event.

He claimed his grandmother survived the Holocaust. In fact, his family was not Jewish, and the claim was a total lie. He said he lost four employees in the 2016 Pulse night club shooting. But none of the 49 victims at the Orlando club worked for any of his companies.

Shame on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and his MAGA base. Santos does not make America great; he demeans our institutions.

What motivated Santos to be such a fraud? Why do people lie about their backgrounds? And why do we believe them?

The answer is perhaps found in the 1999 film “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” inwhich the sociopathic imposter Tom Ripley tries to explain himself: “I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.” So let it be with George Santos.

James D. Zirin is a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.