George Santos

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      in US Politics

      George Santos says he won’t resign as fellow Republicans call on him to quit

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      George Santos says he won’t resign as fellow Republicans call on him to quitChair of Nassau county committee says Santos ran ‘a campaign of deceit, lies and fabrication’ to win third district The Republican George Santos said on Wednesday he would not resign from Congress less than a week after being sworn in, despite calls to do so from the chairman of his district committee and a fellow New York representative, amid continuing scrutiny of Santos’s mostly made-up résumé and growing calls for campaign finance investigations.In Santos’s district, reactions to brazen lies remain mixed: ‘I might let him slide’Read moreIn a tweet, Santos said: “I was elected to serve the people of the New York third district not the party and politicians, I remain committed to doing that and regret to hear that local officials refuse to work with my office to deliver results to keep our community safe and lower the cost of living.“I will NOT resign!”He was responding to remarks to reporters by Joseph Cairo, chair of the Nassau county Republican committee, who said Santos ran “a campaign of deceit, lies and fabrication” to win the third district last year.At the same time, a first sitting Republican congressman, Anthony D’Esposito, also of New York, called on Santos to quit.Santos has faced a barrage of negative coverage.He has admitted to “embellishing” his résumé, including lying about his college record – he did not attend Baruch and New York University – and saying a “poor choice of words” created the impression he worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.He has claimed a tragic link to the Pulse nightclub shooting and said the attacks on New York on 11 September 2001 “claimed my mother’s life”. His mother died in 2016.He has claimed to have Jewish roots and to be descended from Holocaust survivors.He is under investigation in New York and in Brazil, in the latter case over the use of a stolen chequebook.His Democratic predecessor in the third district has called him a “conman”.Cairo said Santos “deceived the voters of the third congressional district, he deceived the members of the Nassau county Republican committee, elected officials, his colleagues, candidates, his opponents and even some of the media.“His lies were not mere fibs. He disgraced the House of Representatives. In particular, his fabrications went too far. Many groups were hurt. Specifically, those families that were touched by the horrors of the Holocaust. I feel for them.“He has no place in the Nassau county Republican committee, nor should he serve in public service nor as an elected official. He is not welcome here at Republican headquarters for meetings or at any of our events. As I said, he’s disgraced the House of Representatives, and we do not consider him one of our congresspeople.“Today, on behalf of the Nassau county Republican committee. I am calling for his immediate resignation.”In his own statement, to Politico, D’Esposito said Santos’s “many hurtful lies and mistruths … have irreparably broken the trust of the residents he is sworn to serve. For his betrayal of the public’s trust, I call on [him] to resign”.Santos was sworn into Congress last weekend, almost a week late after backing Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, through 15 votes for speaker.Casting one vote, Santos appeared to flash a “white power” sign. He has previously claimed to be partly Black. He also told the New York Post he was “Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish’.”Another newly elected New York Republican, Nick LaLota, has called for an investigation. On Tuesday, two New York Democrats who hand-delivered a request for an ethics investigation of Santos, Daniel Goldman and Ritchie Torres, said they had heard from Republicans who supported such a step.But Republican leaders have not acted.On Tuesday, Politico reported that Republicans were discussing what to do. Santos told the site he expected to be given committee assignments. On Wednesday, asked if Santos would sit on top committees, McCarthy said: “No.”Seizing on Cairo’s remarks, Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, tweeted that McCarthy’s “spine found a new home in Nassau county”.Harrison added: “It is shameful that a New York county party chair has to protect and defend the honor of the House of Representatives against the lies of Santos while McCarthy is too scared to even utter his name.”In Washington on Tuesday, Goldman and Torres delivered to Santos their demand for an investigation by the House ethics committee.Goldman, like Santos elected last November, said: “Santos, we have a complaint for you.”Santos said: “Sure.”In their complaint, Goldman and Torres cited “extensive public reporting – as well as Santos’s own admissions … that Mr Santos misled voters in his district about his ethnicity, his religion, his education, and his employment and professional history, among other things”.They requested an investigation of Santos for “failing to file timely, accurate and complete financial disclosure reports as required by law”.Santos’s campaign finances are the subject of a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission by the Campaign Legal Center (CLC), a non-partisan watchdog.George Santos scandal: Democratic predecessor calls him a ‘conman’Read moreThe CLC complaint questions the source of Santos’s personal wealth and the propriety of loans to his own campaign.Torres and Goldman called Santos’s financial reports for a failed run in 2020 and his win in 2022 “sparse and perplexing”, adding: “At a minimum it is apparent he did not file timely disclosure reports for his most recent campaign.”They wrote: “If Mr Santos’s 2020 and 2022 financial disclosures are to be believed, his salary increased from $55,000 in 2020 to $750,000 in 2021 and 2022, of which he gave a whopping $705,000 to his campaign.“The committee should investigate the veracity of these claims and whether Mr Santos has engaged in fraudulent activity.”Santos told reporters that though Goldman and Torres were “free to do whatever they want to do”, he was not concerned, as he had “done nothing unethical”.Asked if he had done anything wrong, he said: “I have not.”Torres and Goldman also said Santos had “failed to uphold the integrity expected of members of the House of Representatives”.TopicsGeorge SantosRepublicansDemocratsNew YorkUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS political financingnewsReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      The Sad Tales of George Santos

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      What would it be like to be so ashamed of your life that you felt compelled to invent a new one?Most of us don’t feel compelled to do that. Most of us take the actual events of our lives, including the failures and frailties, and we gradually construct coherent narratives about who we are. Those autobiographical narratives are always being updated as time passes — and, of course, tend to be at least modestly self-flattering. But for most of us, the life narrative we tell both the world and ourselves gives us a stable sense of identity. It helps us name what we’ve learned from experience and what meaning our life holds. It helps us make our biggest decisions. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once observed, you can’t know what to do unless you know what story you are a part of.A reasonably accurate and coherent autobiographical narrative is one of the most important things a person can have. If you don’t have a real story, you don’t have a real self.George Santos, on the other hand, is a young man who apparently felt compelled to jettison much of his actual life and replace it with fantasy. As Grace Ashford and Michael Gold of The Times have been reporting, in his successful run for Congress this year he claimed he had a college degree that he does not have. He claimed he held jobs that he did not hold. He claimed he owned properties he apparently does not own. He claims he never committed check fraud, though The Times unearthed court records suggesting he did. He claims he never described himself as Jewish, merely as adjacently “Jew-ish.” A self-described gay man, he hid a yearslong heterosexual marriage that ended in 2019.All politicians — perhaps all human beings — embellish. But what Santos did goes beyond that. He fabricated a new persona, that of a meritocratic superman. He claims to be a populist who hates the elites, but he wanted you to think he once worked at Goldman Sachs. Imagine how much inadequacy you’d have to feel to go to all that trouble.I can’t feel much anger toward Santos for his deceptiveness, just a bit of sorrow. Cutting yourself off to that degree from the bedrock of the truth renders your whole life unstable. Santos made his own past unreliable, perpetually up for grabs. But when you do that you also eliminate any coherent vision of your future. People may wonder how Santos could have been so dumb. In political life, his fabrications were bound to be discovered. Perhaps it’s because dissemblers often have trouble anticipating the future; they’re stuck in the right now.In a sense Santos is a sad, farcical version of where Donald Trump has taken the Republican Party — into the land of unreality, the continent of lies. Trump’s takeover of the G.O.P. was not primarily an ideological takeover, it was a psychological and moral one. I don’t feel sorry for Trump the way I do for Santos, because Trump is so cruel. But he did introduce, on a much larger scale, the same pathetic note into our national psychology.In his book, “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump,” the eminent personality psychologist Dan McAdams argues that Trump could continually lie to himself because he had no actual sense of himself. There was no real person, inner life or autobiographical narrative to betray. McAdams quotes people who had been close to Trump who reported that being with him wasn’t like being with a conventional person; it was like being with an entity who was playing the role of Donald Trump. And that role had no sense of continuity. He was fully immersed in whatever dominance battle he was fighting at that moment.McAdams calls Trump an “episodic man,” who experiences life as a series of disjointed moments, not as a coherent narrative flow of consciousness. “He does not look to what may lie ahead, at least not very far ahead,” McAdams writes. “Trump is not introspective, retrospective or prospective. There is no depth; there is no past; there is no future.”America has always had impostors and people who reinvented their pasts. (If he were real, Jay Gatsby might have lived — estimations of the precise locations of the fictional East and West Egg vary — in what is now Santos’s district.) This feels different. I wonder if the era of the short-attention spans and the online avatars is creating a new character type: the person who doesn’t experience life as an accumulation over decades, but just as a series of disjointed performances in the here and now, with an echo of hollowness inside.This week Santos tried to do a bit of damage control in a series of interviews, including with WABC radio in New York. The whole conversation had an air of unreality. Santos was rambling, evasive and haphazard, readjusting his stories in a vague, fluid way. The host, John Catsimatidis, wasn’t questioning him the way a journalist might. He was practically coaching Santos on what to say. The troubling question of personal integrity was not on anybody’s radar screen. And then the conversation reached a Tom Wolfe-ian crescendo when former Congressman Anthony Weiner suddenly appeared — and turned out to be the only semi-competent interviewer in the room.Karl Marx famously said that under the influence of capitalism, all that’s solid melts into air. I wonder if some elixir of Trumpian influence and online modernity can have the same effect on individual personalities.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More