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      Santos’s Lies Were Known to Some Well-Connected Republicans

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      In late 2021, as he prepared to make a second run for a suburban New York City House seat, George Santos gave permission for his campaign to commission a routine background study on him.Campaigns frequently rely on this kind of research, known as vulnerability studies, to identify anything problematic that an opponent might seize on. But when the report came back on Mr. Santos, the findings by a Washington research firm were far more startling, suggesting a pattern of deception that cut to the heart of the image he had cultivated as a wealthy financier.Some of Mr. Santos’s own vendors were so alarmed after seeing the study in late November 2021 that they urged him to drop out of the race, and warned that he could risk public humiliation by continuing. When Mr. Santos disputed key findings and vowed to continue running, members of the campaign team quit, according to three of the four people The New York Times spoke to with knowledge of the study.The episode, which has not been previously reported, is the most explicit evidence to date that a small circle of well-connected Republican campaign professionals had indications far earlier than the public that Mr. Santos was spinning an elaborate web of deceits, and that the candidate himself had been warned about just how vulnerable those lies were to unraveling.Fraudulent academic degrees. Involvement in a firm accused of a Ponzi scheme. Multiple evictions and a suspended driver’s license. All of it was in the report, which also said that Mr. Santos, who is openly gay, had been married to a woman. The report did not offer conclusive details, but some people briefed on the findings wondered whether the marriage was done for immigration purposes.It remains unclear who else, if anyone, learned about the background study’s contents at the time, or if the information made its way to party leaders in New York or Washington. Mr. Santos, 34, managed to keep almost all of it from the public until after he was elected, when an investigation by The Times independently unearthed the problematic claims documented by researchers and others that they missed.After The Times sent a detailed list of questions for this story, a lawyer for Mr. Santos, Joe Murray, said “it would be inappropriate to respond due to ongoing investigations.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Santos’s congressional office did not respond to a similar request for comment.Mr. Santos himself has admitted to some fabrications, but insists he was merely embellishing his qualifications. He has vowed to serve out a two-year term in Congress. State, local and federal prosecutors are now investigating his activity.A 2021 background check revealed that Mr. Santos had likely lied about graduating from Baruch College and New York University, which The New York Times publicly revealed a year later.Alejandra Villa Loarca/Newsday, via Getty ImagesThe existence of the vulnerability study underscores one of the most vexing questions still surrounding the strange saga of George Santos: How did the gate-keeping system of American politics — Republican leaders, adversarial Democrats and the prying media — allow a fabulist who boasted about phantom mansions and a fake résumé get away with his con for so long?Interviews with more than two dozen associates, adversaries and donors, as well as contemporaneous communications and other documents reviewed by The Times, show that Mr. Santos inspired no shortage of suspicion during his 2022 campaign, including in the upper echelons of his own party.Well-connected supporters suspected him of lying and demanded to see his résumé. Another former campaign vendor warned a state party official about what he believed were questionable business practices. And the head of the main House Republican super PAC told some lawmakers and donors that he believed Mr. Santos’s story did not add up.But in each case, rather than denounce Mr. Santos publicly, the Republicans looked the other way. They neglected to get the attention of more powerful leaders or to piece together shards of doubt about him, and allowed him to run unopposed in the 2022 primary. Some assumed that Mr. Santos’s falsehoods were garden variety political embellishments; others thought Democrats would do their dirty work for them and Mr. Santos would be exposed in the heat of a general election campaign.But Democrats struggled to do so. In 2020, the party incumbent, Tom Suozzi, dismissed Mr. Santos as a nonviable threat, and conducted no opposition research at all while cruising to victory. When Democrats did vet him two years later, they failed to find some of the most egregious fabrications that prompted members of Mr. Santos’s campaign team to quit.Democrats then labored unsuccessfully to convince the news media, which had been weakened by years of staff cuts and consumed by higher-profile races, to dig into the troubling leads they did unearth. Aside from The North Shore Leader — a small weekly newspaper on Long Island, which labeled Mr. Santos “a fake” — and a few opinion pieces in Newsday, New York’s media machine paid Mr. Santos scant attention.More on the George Santos ControversyBehind The Times’s Investigation: The Times journalists Michael Gold and Grace Ashford discuss how Representative George Santos was elected to Congress and how they discovered that he was a fraud.Split View: New York Republicans are ready to rid themselves of the newly elected representative after his pattern of deception was revealed. But House Republican leaders badly need his vote.Facing Inquiries: Federal and local prosecutors are investigating whether Mr. Santos committed crimes involving his finances or made misleading statements, while authorities in Brazil said they would revive a 2008 fraud case against him.“The reality is there’s no defense, it shouldn’t have happened,” said Gerard Kassar, the chairman of the New York Conservative Party, a small but influential partner to the Republican Party that backed Mr. Santos. “It would be impossible and probably incorrect for me to say this could never happen again, but it won’t be from me not looking again.”Early warning signs missedMr. Santos had never held elected office until joining Congress in January.Jackie Molloy/BloombergMr. Santos was a political neophyte when he first showed interest in running for a House seat made up of parts of Queens and Nassau County in 2020. His only real electoral experience ended quickly: A year earlier, he was forced to drop his insurgent campaign for a low-level party position in Queens because he lacked enough valid signatures to make the ballot, according to Joann Ariola, a New York City Council member who led the Queens Republican Party at the time.Among the tight-knit Republican circles on Long Island, he was virtually unknown. And in Queens, party leaders were still sour over his initial foray.In normal circumstances, Mr. Santos would have been shooed away. Republicans in Nassau County, which comprises the bulk of New York’s Third Congressional District, have long been famous for exercising tight control over who runs, grooming and rewarding a stable of candidates like an old-school political machine.But with the country in lockdown in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic and the district expected to remain under Democratic control, no one else put their hand up to run. Mr. Santos submitted a résumé and answered a vetting questionnaire riddled with lies, including that he had a 3.9 grade-point average from a college he never graduated from and job credentials he did not possess. A vetting team for the county Republican Party accepted his answers without question.“I guess unfortunately we rely on the person to be truthful to us,” Joseph G. Cairo Jr., the Republican Party county chairman, said in an interview. This week, he called on Mr. Santos to resign and said he would no longer be welcome in the Nassau Republican Party.When Mr. Santos chose to run again two years later, local Republicans again gave him their support. They expected that flipping the district would once again be a stretch and, in any case, Mr. Cairo’s priority was winning state and local offices, which control thousands of local jobs and major tax and spending decisions. Efforts to recruit a more formidable candidate, like State Senator Jack Martins, did not pan out.There were already questions swirling by that time among donors and political figures about where exactly Mr. Santos lived and the source of the money that supported the lavish lifestyle he boasted about.In the summer of 2021, one of the former advisers to Mr. Santos, who insisted on anonymity, discovered his connections to Harbor City Capital, the Florida-based firm accused of a Ponzi scheme, and to other suspicious business practices that Mr. Santos had obscured. The adviser said he took the findings to a state party official later that fall and tried to pitch the story to a newspaper, which he said did not pursue it. The Harbor City connection was later reported in The Daily Beast.Joseph G. Cairo Jr., the Nassau County Republican committee chairman, was among nearly two dozen local Republicans who recently called for Mr. Santos’s resignation.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesAround that time, Mr. Santos began attracting the suspicion of a pair of friends and potential donors active in New York Republican circles. Mr. Santos claimed to one of them, Kristin Bianco, to have secured the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, when he had not. That prompted her to express concerns about Mr. Santos to plugged-in Republicans, including associates of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, one of Mr. Santos’s biggest early backers whose top political aide was assisting his campaign. Later Ms. Bianco and her friend became suspicious that they could not verify his work history.“We’re just so tired of being duped,” Ms. Bianco texted Mr. Santos in early 2022, after he refused her request to produce his résumé. Mr. Santos wrote back that he found the request “a bit invasive as it’s something very personal.”In the run-up to the 2022 contest, Dan Conston, a close ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy who leads the Congressional Leadership Fund, the main House Republican super PAC, also confided in lawmakers, donors and other associates that he was worried information would come out exposing Mr. Santos as a fraud, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations who insisted on anonymity to describe them and declined to provide more detail.In the spring of 2022, Mr. Santos’s race suddenly became competitive, after a state court undid a Democratic gerrymander and adopted new congressional boundaries friendlier to Republicans. Despite the prime pickup opportunity, the Congressional Leadership Fund deliberately withheld support from the contest — but never spoke about it publicly. A spokesman for Mr. Conston’s group declined to comment on its campaign strategy or its leaders’ conversations.If party leaders were aware of any of the concerns about Mr. Santos, or others raised by his former vendors, they found ways to reassure themselves.“The thinking was the guy went through a campaign with Suozzi, who was a pretty tough and thorough guy,” said Peter T. King, a retired longtime Republican congressman from Nassau County. “So anything would have come out.”Opposition research misses the markRobert Zimmerman, center, opted not to spend campaign funds on opposition research against Mr. Santos as they ran to replace Representative Tom Suozzi, center right.John Minchillo/Associated PressThe assumption that any damaging information about Mr. Santos would have been found in the 2020 campaign turned out to be misguided. Mr. Suozzi, the popular Democratic incumbent, got a quote for the cost of an outside firm to do opposition research on Mr. Santos. But he decided not to spend the money — sparing Mr. Santos meaningful scrutiny in his first race.“No one knew George Santos, and he had less than $50,000 in campaign funds against a popular incumbent who never even said his name,” said Kim Devlin, a Suozzi adviser. “We didn’t feed anything to the press because why would we give him press?”With a more competitive race expected in 2022, researchers at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee did the first meaningful opposition research on Mr. Santos that summer, assembling an 87-page opposition research book. It extensively documents Mr. Santos’s past statements — including his extreme views on abortion rights and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.Using public records, the committee’s researchers also turned up some red flags in Mr. Santos’s biography: multiple evictions; no I.R.S. registration for an animal charity he had claimed to have created; details about his involvement with Harbor City (Mr. Santos himself was not named in the Ponzi scheme allegations) and more recent suspicious business dealings; as well as apparent discrepancies in his financial disclosure forms that raised questions about the source of hundreds of thousands of dollars he had lent his campaign.But with orders to produce similar research books on dozens of other candidates across the country, the committee’s strained research team left stones unturned. At several points, researchers explicitly flagged the need for follow-up inquiries, such as to “determine whether Santos has a criminal record.” And their study failed to turn up key problems that prompted Mr. Santos’s own vendors to quit months earlier: his fabricated educational record, his marriage to a woman and questions about his residency.A spokeswoman for the D.C.C.C. declined to comment.Opposition research by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee suggested that further inquiries should ascertain whether Mr. Santos had a criminal record.Mary Altaffer/Associated PressMr. Santos’s 2022 opponent, Robert Zimmerman, got hold of the research book in late August, right after he won a competitive and costly Democratic primary. He decided not to spend what would have likely been tens of thousands of dollars to do more rigorous outside research.Other Democrats have second-guessed that decision in recent weeks, but at the time, Mr. Zimmerman had his reasons. While presidential and Senate campaigns typically have the financial and staff resources for exhaustive opposition research, House campaigns tend to rely on the D.C.C.C. to conduct their research.Strapped for time and cash, Mr. Zimmerman concluded that his money would be better spent on advertising and canvassing operations. And he believed that the campaign committee’s report as well as Mr. Santos’s far-right views on abortion and Jan. 6 — two of the year’s most prominent campaign themes — gave him powerful campaign fodder.“We knew a lot about him did not add up; we were very conscious of that,” Mr. Zimmerman said in an interview. “But we didn’t have the resources as a campaign to do the kind of digging that had to be done.”Mr. Zimmerman said his campaign tried to prod reporters at local and national news outlets with leads about Mr. Santos, but had little luck. The candidate himself, a public relations executive, did not hold news conferences or use paid advertising to draw attention to known discrepancies in his opponent’s record.“The response we got back pretty universally was they just didn’t have the personnel, the time or the money to do it,” Mr. Zimmerman said, referring to the publications the campaign contacted. “One person said to me, there are 60 to 80 crazy people running, we can’t investigate them all.”One outlet stood out, The North Shore Leader in Long Island, run by a Republican lawyer and former House candidate, Grant Lally. The paper published a pair of articles casting doubt on Mr. Santos’s claims that he owned extravagant cars and homes, and labeling him a “fabulist — a fake,” though it did not have other specifics that would later come out about his falsified résumé or his past.None of the bigger outlets, including The Times, followed up with extensive stories examining his real address or his campaign’s questionable spending, focusing their coverage instead on Mr. Santos’s extreme policy views and the historic nature of a race between two openly gay candidates.What did top Republicans know?Representative Daniel Goldman of New York, who has called for Mr. Santos’s resignation, filed a formal ethics complaint against him.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesIn the aftermath of Mr. Santos’s exposure, Democrats have said that their researchers would likely not have turned up much of the information uncovered by The Times and other media outlets after the election. Private institutions like schools and businesses are more inclined to share educational and employment records with reporters than with political parties, they say.But the opposition research firm Mr. Santos hired in the fall of 2021 — his campaign reported spending $16,600 on Capital Research Group LLC — seems to have had relatively little trouble turning up some of that same information.People working for his campaign had grown accustomed to Mr. Santos’s braggadocio and outlandish claims. But when they approached him about conducting a vulnerability study, the objective was more routine: producing a record of his past statements and other public information that would be useful later when his opponents started crafting attacks.Mr. Santos quickly signed off, but as the research dragged on, he asked to cancel the contract with the firm. When the results came back, it was clear why.Researchers found no evidence that Mr. Santos had earned degrees at Baruch College and New York University, as he had claimed. They turned up records showing his involvement with the company accused of a Ponzi scheme — a relationship he had played down. They found eviction records, business records and a suspended Florida driver’s license, which together raised questions about whether he was a legal New York resident and as rich as he claimed to be.The report also said that Mr. Santos, who was openly gay and appeared to be living with a man at the time, had been married to a woman. The study missed other fabrications that The Times later uncovered, including false claims that he worked at Citibank and Goldman Sachs. Nor did it turn up records of fraud charges in Brazil years earlier.The Times has not seen the vulnerability study, but it was described in recent days by four people with knowledge of the report who were granted anonymity because it remains confidential.The people working for Mr. Santos convened an emergency conference call to discuss the results on Dec. 1, 2021. They presented him with a choice: bow out of the race with dignity, or stay in and risk letting the Democrats turn up the same information and use it to destroy his political and personal future.After promising to produce diplomas that would prove his degrees (he ultimately did not), Mr. Santos said he would think it over. When he came back a few days later, he said he had spoken with other advisers and was convinced the findings were not as bad as they were being portrayed. He was staying in the race. Most of his team quit.What top Republicans were told of Mr. Santos’s issues is more difficult to chart. Mr. Santos required those working for his campaign to sign nondisclosure agreements, limiting the spread of the vulnerability report. But one person who was briefed on its contents said that questions about Mr. Santos’s background were discussed well beyond campaign vendors. The National Republican Congressional Committee, which closely monitors House candidates and backed Mr. Santos, sometimes requests such reports as a condition of its support.A spokesman for the group declined to comment for this article, but pointed to an earlier statement denying it had previous knowledge that Mr. Santos’s record was largely fabricated. The N.R.C.C. typically does not conduct its own independent vulnerability studies on candidates.Mr. McCarthy, who ultimately endorsed Mr. Santos and helped his campaign, has said relatively little about the fabrications, and has refused calls to try to oust him from the House as the speaker seeks to maintain an exceedingly narrow majority in Washington. This week, Mr. McCarthy played down Mr. Santos’s lies, comparing them to other politicians who have embellished parts of their résumés and implying he would not undo the will of voters who elected him.The House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, has refused calls to push for Mr. Santos’s ouster.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesSpokesmen for Mr. McCarthy did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story, and a spokesman for Ms. Stefanik, the highest-ranking New York House Republican, declined to comment. Allies of Mr. McCarthy maintain that they did not know about the baldest fabrications and misrepresentations, like those turned up by Republican researchers in late 2021, but only had more general concerns about his honesty.Despite the financial resources he helped marshal to the race, Mr. McCarthy had good personal reason to be wary of Mr. Santos. Earlier in 2021, an aide to the candidate was caught impersonating Mr. McCarthy’s chief of staff while soliciting campaign contributions.By the spring of 2022, Mr. Santos was in need of a new team of consultants. With help from Ms. Stefanik’s top political aide, he chose a new consulting firm and shared the vulnerability study.The new crop of vendors, led by Big Dog Strategies, never spoke to their predecessors, though, and did not know why they had left the campaign. After Mr. Santos again insisted he had graduated from college, and addressed other red flags raised in the report, the new team accepted his explanations and began plotting a campaign. They would use issues — not the candidate’s biography — to win the race.Mr. Santos has said he will not resign, and intends to serve out his two-year term.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesReporting was contributed by More

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      George Santos Faces an Investigation and Public Dismay

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      The Nassau County district attorney said her office would examine Mr. Santos, who has admitted lying about his work and educational history during his campaign.Days after Representative-elect George Santos admitted misrepresenting his background, a Long Island prosecutor said she would investigate whether he had committed any crimes, while those who supported his campaign expressed mixed emotions about the revelations now swirling around him.Anne Donnelly, the Nassau County, N.Y., district attorney, said in a statement that the “numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-elect Santos are nothing short of stunning.”“No one is above the law, and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it,” Ms. Donnelly, a Republican like Mr. Santos, said in the statement, which was first reported by Newsday.Ms. Donnelly’s statement added to the growing pressure on Mr. Santos, who was elected in November to represent northern Nassau County and northeast Queens in Congress beginning in January but who has come under scrutiny after The New York Times uncovered numerous discrepancies in his campaign biography and in his descriptions of his business dealings.In interviews with several other media outlets on Monday, Mr. Santos confirmed some of the inaccuracies identified by The Times. He admitted that he had lied about graduating from Baruch College — he said he does not have a college degree — and that he had made misleading claims about working for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.Mr. Santos also acknowledged not having earned substantial income as a landlord, something he claimed as a credential during the campaign. In making his admissions, he has sought to explain his dishonesty as little more than routine résumé padding.But among more than two dozen Long Island residents interviewed on Wednesday, many, including some who said they had supported Mr. Santos, expressed disappointment at his actions and anger over his explanations.Felestasia Mawere, who said she had voted for Mr. Santos and had given money to his campaign, insisted that he should not serve in Congress after admitting to having misled voters.Felestasia Mawere, an accountant from Manhasset, N.Y., voted for Representative-elect George Santos. But now she said he should resign after lying to voters about his background.Johnny Milano for The New York Times“He cheated,” Ms. Mawere, an accountant who lives in Manhasset, said. Of the falsehoods in his biography, she added, “He intentionally put that information knowing that it would persuade voters like me to vote for him.”Nonetheless, Mr. Santos appeared to retain the support of many in his party, including those who are set to be his constituents.Jackie Silver, of Great Neck, said she had voted for Mr. Santos and would do so again. Ms. Silver said that those calling for him to face further investigation, or even relinquish his seat, were only targeting him because he is a Republican.“When they don’t like someone, they really go after them,” Ms. Silver, a courier for Uber Eats and DoorDash, said, before echoing Mr. Santos’s primary defense: “Everyone fabricates their résumé. I’m not saying it’s correct.”Others who made financial contributions to Mr. Santos’s campaign did not appear ready to cast him aside, although only a few of about three dozen donors contacted for comment responded.Lee Mallett, a general contractor from Louisiana and the chairman of the state contractors’ board there, said Mr. Santos’s immediate task was straightforward.“He has to ask for forgiveness, and he’ll be forgiven,” Mr. Mallett, a registered Republican, said. He added: “He’s just making it way too complicated. It’s really simple.”Barbara Vissichelli of Glen Cove, N.Y., said that she had met Mr. Santos while helping to register voters and had bonded with him over their shared love of animals. Ms. Vissichelli contributed $2,900 to his campaign and said she would continue to support him.“He was never untruthful with me,” she said.House Republican leaders have so far been silent amid the persistent questions about Mr. Santos, but he has gotten a tougher reception close to home. Ms. Donnelly is just one of several Long Island Republicans to show a willingness to examine him closely over his statements during the campaign and on his financial disclosure forms.On Tuesday, Representative-elect Nick LaLota, a Republican who won election in a neighboring Long Island district, said the House Ethics Committee should investigate Mr. Santos. Nassau County’s Republican Party chairman, Joseph G. Cairo Jr., said he “expected more than just a blanket apology” from Mr. Santos.Another incoming member of New York’s Republican House delegation, Mike Lawler of Rockland County, sounded a similar refrain.“Attempts to blame others or minimize his actions are only making things worse and a complete distraction from the task at hand,” Mr. Lawler said in a message posted on Twitter. He added that Mr. Santos should “cooperate fully” with any investigations.Anne Donnelly, the Nassau County district attorney, said the “numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with” Mr. Santos were “nothing short of stunning”Johnny Milano for The New York TimesMr. Santos and his representatives have not responded to The Times’s repeated requests for comment, including to detailed questions raised by the newspaper’s reporting and to an email seeking a response to Ms. Donnelly’s statement.In an interview broadcast on Fox News Tuesday night, Mr. Santos again asserted that he had merely “embellished” his résumé. The interviewer, Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress who left the party in October, challenged him bluntly.“These are blatant lies,” Ms. Gabbard said. “And it calls into question how your constituents and the American people can believe anything that you may say when you’re standing on the floor of the House of Representatives.”On Wednesday, one more possible misrepresentation emerged. During his first campaign, Mr. Santos said on his website and on the campaign trail that he attended the Horace Mann School, an elite private school in Riverdale in the Bronx, but that his family’s financial difficulties caused him to drop out and get a high school equivalency diploma.But a spokesman for the school told The Washington Post that it could not locate records of Mr. Santos’s attendance, using several variations of his name. The spokesman, Ed Adler, confirmed that report to The Times. Mr. Santos’s press team did not respond to a request for comment.Questions also remain about how Mr. Santos has generated enough personal wealth to be able, as campaign finance filings show, to lend his campaign $700,000. Mr. Santos has said his money comes from his company, the Devolder Organization, but he has provided little information about its operations.On Wednesday, the news site Semafor published an interview with Mr. Santos in which he said his work involved “deal building” and “specialty consulting” for a network of 15,000 wealthy people, family offices, endowments and institutions.As an example, he said, he might help one client sell a plane or a boat to someone else, and that he would receive fees or commissions on such sales. But he provided no details on his contracts or clients to Semafor and has not answered similar questions from The Times.Mr. Santos’s exercise in damage control has also involved cleaning up his personal biography, which was removed from his campaign website for most of Tuesday. By the time an updated version appeared on Wednesday, it had been stripped of several significant details.Gone, for instance, was the claim that he had received a degree from Baruch College. (Another profile of him, on the House Republicans’ campaign committee website, said he had studied at New York University; that information is now gone as well.)Mr. Santos’s campaign biography also no longer mentions work on Wall Street, including his previous claims that he was a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” who had taken part in “landmark deals.” A reference to Mr. Santos’s mother working her “way up to be the first female executive at a major financial institution” has also been expunged.Mr. Santos also deleted a reference to past philanthropic efforts. He previously claimed he had founded and run a tax-exempt charity, Friends of Pets United. The Internal Revenue Service and the New York and New Jersey attorney general’s offices said they had no records of a registered charity with that name.In an interview with the political publication City & State, Mr. Santos said he was not the charity’s sole owner and that he was responsible for the “grunt work.” But he did not address the lack of official documents related to the organization and was not questioned further about whether it was tax-exempt as he had claimed.The revised biography now also omits any mention of where Mr. Santos lives, another detail thrown into doubt by the The Times’s reporting.Dana Rubinstein More

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      George Santos Is In a Class of His Own. But Other Politicians Have Embellished Their Resumes, Too.

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      Mr. Santos, a Republican representative-elect from Long Island, has admitted to lying about his professional background, educational history and property ownership.With his admission this week that he lied to voters about his credentials, Representative-elect George Santos has catapulted to the top of the list of politicians who have misled the public about their past.Mr. Santos, a New York Republican, fabricated key biographical elements of his background, including misrepresentations of his professional background, educational history and property ownership, in a pattern of deception that was uncovered by The New York Times. He even misrepresented his Jewish heritage.While others have also embellished their backgrounds, including degrees and military honors that they did not receive or distortions about their business acumen and wealth, few have done so in such a wide-ranging manner.Many candidates, confronted over their inconsistencies during their campaigns, have stumbled, including Herschel Walker and J.R. Majewski, two Trump-endorsed Republicans who ran for the Senate and the House during this year’s midterms.Mr. Walker, who lost Georgia’s Senate runoff this month, was dogged by a long trail of accusations that he misrepresented himself. Voters learned about domestic violence allegations, children born outside his marriage, ex-girlfriends who said he urged them to have abortions and more, including questions about where he lived, his academic record and the ceremonial nature of his work with law enforcement.Mr. Majewski promoted himself in his Ohio House race as a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but the U.S. Air Force had no record that he served there. He lost in November.Some of the nation’s most prominent presidential candidates have been accused of misrepresenting themselves to voters as well; perhaps none more notably than Donald J. Trump, whose 2016 campaign hinged on a stark exaggeration of his business background. While not as straightforward a deception as Mr. Santos saying he worked somewhere he had not, Mr. Trump presented himself as a successful, self-made businessman and hid evidence he was not, breaking with decades of precedent in refusing to release his tax records. Those records, obtained by The Times after his election, painted a much different picture — one of dubious tax avoidance, huge losses and a life buttressed by an inherited fortune.Prominent Democrats have faced criticisms during presidential campaigns too, backtracking during primary contests after being called out for more minor misrepresentations:Joseph R. Biden Jr. admitted to overstating his academic record in the 1980s: “I exaggerate when I’m angry,” he said at the time. Hillary Clinton conceded that she “misspoke” in 2008 about dodging sniper fire on an airport tarmac during a 1996 visit to Bosnia as first lady, an anecdote she employed to highlight her experience with international crises. And Senator Elizabeth Warren apologized in 2019 for her past claims of Native American ancestry.Most politicians’ transgressions pale in comparison with Mr. Santos’s largely fictional résumé. Voters also didn’t know about his lies before casting their ballots.The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsCovid Myths: Experts say the spread of coronavirus misinformation — particularly on far-right platforms like Gab — is likely to be a lasting legacy of the pandemic. And there are no easy solutions.Midterms Misinformation: Social media platforms struggled to combat false narratives during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, but it appeared most efforts to stoke doubt about the results did not spread widely.A ‘War for Talent’: Seeing misinformation as a possibly expensive liability, several companies are angling to hire former Twitter employees with the expertise to keep it in check. A New Misinformation Hub?: Misleading edits, fake news stories and deepfake images of politicians are starting to warp reality on TikTok.Here are some other federal office holders who have been accused of being less than forthright during their campaigns, but got elected anyway.Representative Madison Cawthorn, who lost his primary this year, was elected in 2020 despite a discrepancy over his plans to attend the Naval Academy.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesMadison Cawthorn’s 2020 House campaignMadison Cawthorn became the youngest member of the House when he won election in 2020, emerging as the toast of the G.O.P. and its Trump wing. North Carolina voters picked him despite evidence that his claim that the 2014 auto accident that left him partly paralyzed had “derailed” his plans to attend the Naval Academy was untrue.Reporting at the time showed that the Annapolis application of Mr. Cawthorn, who has used a wheelchair since the crash, had previously been rejected. Mr. Cawthorn has declined to answer questions from the news media about the discrepancy or a report that he acknowledged in a 2017 deposition that his application had been denied. A spokesman for Mr. Cawthorn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Cawthorn, whose term in Congress was marked by multiple scandals, lost the G.O.P. primary in May to Chuck Edwards, a three-term state senator who represents the Republican old guard.Andy Kim’s 2018 House campaignAndy Kim, a Democrat who represents a New Jersey swing district, raised eyebrows during the 2018 campaign when his first television ad promoted him as “a national security officer for Republican and Democratic presidents.”While Mr. Kim had worked as a national security adviser under President Barack Obama, his claim that he had filled a key role in the administration of former President George W. Bush was not as ironclad.A Washington Post fact check found that Mr. Kim had held an entry-level job for five months as a conflict management specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development.Mr. Kim’s campaign manager at the time defended Mr. Kim, telling The Post that he played a key role as a public servant during the Bush administration that involved working in the agency’s Africa bureau on issues like terrorism in Somalia and genocide in Sudan.Voters did not appear to be too hung up about the claims of Mr. Kim, who last month was elected to a third term in the House.During the 2010 Senate campaign, Senator Marco Rubio described being the son of Cuban immigrants who fled Fidel Castro, but his parents moved to the United States before Castro returned to Cuba.Steve Johnson for The New York TimesMarco Rubio’s 2010 Senate campaignMarco Rubio vaulted onto the national political stage in the late 2000s after a decade-long rise in the Florida Legislature, where he served as House speaker. Central to his ascent and his 2010 election to the Senate was his personal story of being the son of Cuban immigrants, who Mr. Rubio repeatedly said had fled during Fidel Castro’s revolution.But Mr. Rubio’s account did not square with history, PolitiFact determined. In a 2011 analysis, the nonpartisan fact-checking website found Mr. Rubio’s narrative was false because his parents had first moved to the United States in 1956, which was before Castro had returned to Cuba from Mexico and his takeover of the country in 1959.Mr. Rubio said at the time that he had relied on the recollections of his parents, and that he had only recently learned of the inconsistencies in the timeline. He was re-elected in 2016 and again in November.Mark Kirk’s 2010 and 2016 Senate campaignsMark Kirk, who was a five-term House member from Illinois, leaned heavily on his military accomplishments in his 2010 run for the Senate seat once held by Barack Obama. But the Republican’s representation of his service proved to be deeply flawed.Mr. Kirk’s biography listed that he had been awarded the “Intelligence Officer of the Year” while in the Naval Reserve, a prestigious military honor that he never received. He later apologized, but that was not the only discrepancy in his military résumé.In an interview with the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Kirk accepted responsibility for a series of misstatements about his service, including that he had served in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, that he once commanded the Pentagon war room and that he came under fire while flying intelligence missions over Iraq.Mr. Kirk attributed the inaccuracies as resulting from his attempts to translate “Pentagonese” for voters or because of inattention by his campaign to the details of his decades-long military career.Still, Illinois voters elected Mr. Kirk to the Senate in 2010, but he was defeated in 2016 by Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran who lost her legs in the Iraq war. In that race, Mr. Kirk’s website falsely described him as an Iraq war veteran.Richard Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist during the Vietnam War, but did not enter combat, as he had suggested.Christopher Capozziello for The New York TimesRichard Blumenthal’s 2010 Senate campaignRichard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, misrepresented his military service during the Vietnam War, according to a Times report that rocked his 2010 campaign.Mr. Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist but did not enter combat. After the report, he said that he never meant to create the impression that he was a combat veteran and apologized. Mr. Blumenthal insisted that he had misspoken, but said that those occasions were rare and that he had consistently qualified himself as a reservist during the Vietnam era.The misrepresentation did not stop Mr. Blumenthal, Connecticut’s longtime attorney general, from winning the open-seat Senate race against Linda McMahon, the professional wrestling mogul. She spent $50 million in that race and later became a cabinet member under Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly zeroed in on Mr. Blumenthal’s military record.Wes Cooley’s 1994 House campaignWes Cooley, an Oregon Republican, had barely established himself as a freshman representative when his political career began to nosedive amid multiple revelations that he had lied about his military record and academic honors.His problems started when he indicated on a 1994 voters’ pamphlet that he had seen combat as a member of the Army Special Forces in Korea. But the news media in Oregon reported that Mr. Cooley had never deployed for combat or served in the Special Forces. Mr. Cooley was later convicted of lying in an official document about his military record and placed on two years of probation.The Oregonian newspaper also reported that he never received Phi Beta Kappa honors, as he claimed in the same voters’ guide. He also faced accusations that he lied about how long he had been married so that his wife could continue collecting survivor benefits from a previous husband.Mr. Cooley, who abandoned his 1996 re-election campaign, died in 2015. He was 82.Kirsten Noyes More

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      George Santos, the Falsehoods and the Facts

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      More from our inbox:Sam Bankman-Fried’s Release on BondHarmful Stereotypes About AfricaWhy Fewer Women Become TeachersCuba’s DepopulationPhoto illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Caroline Brehman/EPA, via ShutterstockTo the Editor:Re “Santos Admits to a Long List of Falsehoods” (front page, Dec. 27):Representative-elect George Santos told The New York Post that he was “embellishing my résumé.” No. They were lies!As a constituent of the Third Congressional District, I don’t want Mr. Santos representing me. We don’t need a deadbeat liar who has not answered where the $700,000 donation that he made to his campaign came from. We need to see the paperwork. We don’t need another politician who promises to release his return after the audit.He’s worse than a joke. Have we no respect for the truth and a little integrity?Robert DetorPort Washington, N.Y.To the Editor:I am grateful to George Santos for redefining lying as a “poor choice of words.” For the past few years, I’d been confined to explaining eye-opening statements as “alternate facts.” I can finally bid farewell to Kellyanne Conway’s creativity and move on to the new standard for political opportunism without consequences.Michael EmmerBrooklynTo the Editor:Re “How Opposition Research Really Works,” by Tyson Brody (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 26), about opposition research on George Santos:After 40 years of working with my late husband, who delved into the background of dozens of high-level candidates, I do know this: It’s a serious job that requires diligent work and professional skills.The real work is in following up. It’s the legwork — hours searching paper land records, visiting residences, interviewing people — that makes the real difference. A candidate cannot simply rely on computer research or popular websites to get the job done.Once the information is found the opposition researcher works directly with reporters with whom they have developed a relationship and whom they trust. Reporters often don’t have time or resources to do all the legwork. Nor can a candidate rely on political party committees.Persistence, attention to detail, legwork, and an honest relationship with the press and professional campaign staff are often the key to winning an election.Otherwise, the voters may have the kind of buyer’s remorse that so many of Mr. Santos’s new constituents are now experiencing.Sandy CheitenNew YorkTo the Editor:Tyson Brody describes the process behind the Democrats’ failure to expose George Santos’s multiple misrepresentations about his life. He explains that “a junior researcher” documented some of the issues, which appeared “in small sections interspersed through a nearly 90-page document.”As a corporate investigator who has spent more than 30 years supervising hundreds of researchers producing thousands of reports, I always insist on executive summaries covering the key points in the report. I have, on countless occasions, repeated the admonition, “Don’t bury the lede.”Ernest BrodNew YorkThe writer is president of Brod Global Intelligence.Sam Bankman-Fried’s Release on BondSam Bankman-Fried, founder of the crypto firm FTX, leaving Federal District Court in Manhattan after being released on a $250 million bond.Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Disgraced FTX Co-Founder Freed on $250 Million Bond” (Business, Dec. 23):So, Sam Bankman-Fried, the Bernie Madoff of his generation, is freed on bond less than two weeks after his arrest at a luxury apartment complex in the Bahamas. How lovely for him that his parents were willing and able to secure this bond, risking their own home — and perhaps, their reputations — in the process.It took years of vigorous advocacy for New York State to enact some form of cash bail reform for nonviolent offenders who so often languished at Rikers Island because they couldn’t raise even the minimal funds they needed to be released pending trial.It strikes me as obscene that Mr. Bankman-Fried, whose treachery and cheating have ruined so many lives, spent virtually no time in jail. Even with a firmly affixed ankle bracelet, he will clearly be living a pretty comfortable life safely ensconced in his parents’ home.One can only hope that he will eventually receive the punishment he so richly deserves.Carol NadellNew YorkHarmful Stereotypes About AfricaMauricio Lima for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Putin Wants Loyalty, and He’s Found It in Africa” (front page, Dec. 25):I was disappointed in The Times’s portrayal of Russian involvement in the Central African Republic. On what basis is the relationship between Russia and the Central African Republic characterized as one of African fealty and passive subjugation — of “master” and “vassal”?African states, and countries in the Global South more generally, continue to be inaccurately portrayed as lacking agency in how they conduct their foreign relations. We can certainly debate and inquire into the motives of the leaders of the Central African Republic in partnering with Russia. We can also debate the wisdom of this decision or how likely Russia is to be a good partner to smaller, weaker countries (just as we can question how good of a partner the West is to these same countries).However, it perpetuates harmful stereotypes to presume that the leaders and citizens of African states are merely passive recipients of the desires of foreign actors or to suggest that Western governments know what is best for them.Katherine BeallPrinceton, N.J.The writer is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University.Why Fewer Women Become TeachersCalla Kessler/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “There’s a Reason There Aren’t Enough Teachers in America. Many Reasons, Actually,” by Thomas B. Edsall (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Dec. 14):The enormous drop in the number of college students graduating with degrees in education (from 176,307 in 1970-71 to 104,008 in 2010-11) coincides perfectly with the rise of the feminist movement, which gave women a far greater range of employment opportunities than earlier, when teacher, nurse and secretary were the predominant jobs for female college graduates.Without denigrating the many excellent K-12 teachers, I think it is safe to say that many women who would have been teachers a generation earlier chose different career paths with higher salaries and, often, prestige.Ellen T. BrownSt. Paul, Minn.Cuba’s DepopulationEliana Aponte Tobar for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Largest Exodus Imperils Future of Ailing Cuba” (front page, Dec. 11):Cuba has had many mass migrations since 1959. In fact, the exodus has never stopped, only waxed and waned as the government alternatively cracked down on or encouraged emigration, or as the means to escape became more, or less, easy.In the nearly 64 years of communist rule, one of every six Cubans has left the island. More than 10,000 have drowned or disappeared in the Florida Straits, trying to reach the freedom of the U.S. Scores have been murdered by the regime’s security forces trying to escape.This depopulation is not because of U.S. sanctions; it is because of political repression and Marxist economics. Fidel Castro himself, while alive and the sole ruler, ridiculed the embargo, because he was receiving ample economic aid from the Soviets. It was only when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 that Castro began blaming the U.S. for the problems communism had created.Otto J. ReichFalls Church, Va.The writer is the president of the Center for a Free Cuba and a former diplomat in the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. More

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      The Inside Joke That Became Trump’s Big Lie

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      Donald Trump’s so-called big lie is not big because of its brazen dishonesty or its widespread influence or its unyielding grip over the Republican Party. It is not even big because of its ambition — to delegitimize a presidency, disenfranchise millions of voters, clap back against reality. No, the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election has grown so powerful because it is yoked to an older deception, without which it could not survive: the idea that American politics is, in essence, a joke, and that it can be treated as such without consequence.The big lie depends on the big joke. It was enabled by it. It was enhanced by it. It is sustained by it.When politicians publicly defend positions they privately reject, they are telling the joke. When they give up on the challenge of governing the country for the rush of triggering the enemy, they are telling the joke. When they intone that they must address the very fears they have encouraged or manufactured among their constituents, they are telling the joke. When their off-the-record smirks signal that they don’t really mean what they just said or did, they are telling the joke. As the big lie spirals ever deeper into unreality, with the former president mixing election falsehoods with call-outs to violent, conspiratorial fantasies, the big joke has much to answer for.Recent books like “Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell” by a former Republican operative and campaign consultant, Tim Miller, and “Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission” by The Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich place this long-running gag at the center of American politics. The big joke drains language of meaning, divorces action from responsibility and enables all manner of lies. “Getting the joke” means understanding that nothing you say need be true, that nobody expects it to be true — at least nobody in the know. “The truth of this scam, or ‘joke,’ was fully evident inside the club,” Leibovich writes. “We’re all friends here. Everyone knew the secret handshake, spoke the native language, and got the joke.”Without the big joke, the big lie would not merit its adjective. Its challenge to democracy would be ephemeral, not existential.The chroniclers of Donald Trump’s election lie typically seek out an origin story, a choose-your-own adventure that always leads to the Capitol steps on Jan. 6, 2021. In his book, “The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020,” Politico’s Jonathan Lemire pinpoints an August 2016 campaign rally in Columbus, Ohio, during which Trump first suggested that the contest against Hillary Clinton would be rigged against him. This, Lemire writes, was when “the seeds of the big lie had been planted.”Tim Alberta of The Atlantic starts six months earlier, when Trump accused Senator Ted Cruz of Texas of cheating in the Iowa caucuses. “That episode was a bright red, blinking light foreshadowing everything that was to come,” Alberta told PBS Frontline. In “The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party,” the Washington Post columnist (and my former colleague) Dana Milbank offers a far longer accumulation of lies from the right: The notion that Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in the death of the White House lawyer Vince Foster, the illusions behind President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the birther concoctions, the death-panel ravings — all building toward the big one. “The G.O.P.’s quarter-century war on facts had come to this, a gargantuan fabrication aimed at discrediting democracy itself,” Milbank sums up. And Leibovich quotes Representative Adam Schiff’s view of how his House colleagues slowly submitted to Trump’s fantasies. “It’s one small lie, followed by a demand for a bigger lie and a bigger concession, a bigger moral lapse, until, you know, these folks that I admired and respected, because I believe that they believe what they were saying, had given themselves up so completely to Donald Trump.”Such accounts reflect the common understanding that the big lie is really all the little lies we told along the way — a cycle of deceit and submission, culminating in a myth so powerful that it transcends belief and becomes a fully formed worldview. Lemire notes how Trump’s assertion that he had been wiretapped by President Barack Obama during the 2016 campaign seemed like a pretty gargantuan lie at the time, one that Trump tweeted “without any evidence.” (Journalists love to note that the former president utters falsehoods “without evidence,” an adorable euphemism for “making stuff up.”) But even this one dissipates in the wake of the big lie. After “big,” the term “unprecedented” may be the election lie’s most common descriptor.But it is not without precedent. After all, what was birtherism if not the same lie? Its underlying racism rendered the grotesque theory about Obama’s birthplace especially repugnant, but the basic assertion is familiar: that a president whom the American people lawfully chose is not legitimate, is something less than the real thing.The 2020 election lie is not bigger than birtherism. History should not remember the effort to delegitimize Obama’s presidency as just another rung on the ladder toward the big lie. The lies are akin even in their power of persuasion. Leibovich recalls how in 2016, 72 percent of Republicans said they believed Trump’s lies about Obama’s background. This figure is comparable with the 71 percent of Republicans who said in late 2021 that they believed President Biden was not a fully legitimate president. And much as support for the 2020 election lie provides a loyalty test in the Trumpified Republican Party, a willingness to believe the worst of Obama was a near-requirement in the party during his presidency. “A testing ground for Republican squishiness was how strongly, and how bitterly, one opposed Obama,” the historian Nicole Hemmer recalls in her new book, “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s,” on the rise of the post-Reagan right. “To match the response of the party’s base, politicians would need to reflect the emotions gripping it.” And they did.For Hemmer, the Republican Party’s evolution from the party of Reagan to the party of Trump began with Pat Buchanan, the White House aide, television pundit and authoritarian-curious presidential candidate who “fashioned grievance politics into an agenda,” she writes — a program that emphasized identity, immigration and race as its battlegrounds. For Milbank, it was Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and the “savage politics he pioneered” in advance of the Republican Revolution of 1994. “There was nobody better at attacking, destroying, and undermining those in power,” Milbank writes. Gingrich made compromise a thought crime and labeled his opponents as sick and traitorous, tactics that should also sound familiar.You needn’t pick between Buchanan and Gingrich — it’s enough to say that Buchanan gave the modern Republican Party its substance and Gingrich provided its style. (I imagine they’d both be honored by the distinctions.) When Trump dispatched his supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6, telling them to “fight like hell,” urging them to preserve a country that was slipping away, calling them patriots who could take back an election stolen by the radical left, he was channeling both men. The big lie is part of their legacy, too.In his j’accuse-y yet semi-confessional “Why We Did It,” Miller, now a writer at large for the anti-Trump conservative forum The Bulwark, tries to grasp why his old colleagues followed Trump all the way to his rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6. “I needed to figure out where our parting had started,” he writes. Miller grasps the futility of seeking a single origin story — “I’m sure a student of history might be able to trace it back to the Southern Strategy or Lee Atwater or, hell, maybe even Mark Hanna (give him a Google),” Miller writes — but he does hazard some explanations. He points to Republicans’ ability to compartmentalize concerns about Trump. Their unquenchable compulsion to be in the mix. Their self-serving belief that they could channel dark arts for noble purposes. Their desire to make money. (Miller acknowledges his own paid work helping the confirmation of Scott Pruitt as Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, a stint that makes Miller more of a Barely Trumper than a Never Trumper.) Most of all, his old colleagues succumbed to Trump because they believed they were playing “some big game devoid of real-world consequences.”Miller lingers on this game — the amoral world of tactics, messaging and opposition research, the realm of politics where facts matter less than cleverness and nothing matters more than results. He once thought of it as winning the race, being a killer, just a dishonest buck for a dishonest day’s work. “Practitioners of politics could easily dismiss moralistic or technical concerns just by throwing down their trump card: ‘It’s all part of the Game,’” Miller writes. He has a nickname for the comrades so immersed in the game that they are oblivious to its consequences: the LOL Nothing Matters Republicans. “The LOLNMRs had decided that if someone like Trump could win, then everything that everyone does in politics is meaningless.”The big lie thrives on LOL Nothing Matters.What Miller calls “the game” becomes “the joke” in Leibovich’s book, the depressing tale of the high-level supplicants who surrounded Trump during his presidency and continue to grovel in what they hope will be an interregnum. If the purely transactional nature of Washington power was the subject of Leibovich’s 2013 best seller, “This Town,” the mix of mendacity and subservience behind every transaction is the theme of his latest work. Reince Priebus, during his incarnation as Republican National Committee chairman before his six-month sojourn as Trump’s White House chief of staff, explained to Leibovich that of course, he got the joke. “This was his way of reassuring me that he understood what was really happening beyond his surface niceties about unity, tolerance, grace, or the idea that Trump could ever ‘pivot,’” Leibovich writes. In other words, don’t take his words seriously. “He got the joke and knew that I did, too.”The platonic ideal of the big joke was immortalized in The Washington Post the week after the 2020 election, uttered by an anonymous senior Republican official reflecting on Trump’s election claims. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change. He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20.” It was wrong in so many ways — the downside would prove enormous, the believers would become legion, the plotting was underway.The big lie is that the election was stolen; the big joke is that you can prolong that lie without consequence. The former is a quest for undeserved power; the latter is an evasion of well-deserved responsibility.Other renditions of the big joke were more subtle. A few days after the election, a reporter asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo if the State Department was preparing to work with the Biden team to facilitate a “smooth transition” of power. “There will be a smooth transition,” Pompeo responded, making the slightest of pauses before adding, “to a second Trump administration.” He then chuckled, a possible signal that he was aware of the truth, and that he “hoped that perhaps everyone understood his position,” Leibovich writes.Pompeo got the big joke about the big lie. Yet the man charged with representing American values to the world still felt he had to tell both.Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of 10 Republican House members to vote in favor of Trump’s second impeachment, says the joke is well understood among his party colleagues. “For all but a handful of members, if you put them on truth serum, they knew that the election was fully legitimate and that Donald Trump was a joke,” Kinzinger told Leibovich. “The vast majority of people get the joke. I think Kevin McCarthy gets the joke. Lindsey gets the joke. The problem is that the joke isn’t even funny anymore.” Humoring Trump has grown humorless.There was a time when even Trump grappled with the truth. Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as communications director in the Trump White House, told PBS’s “Frontline” that the president admitted defeat in the days after the election was called for Biden. “There was one moment where in this period he was watching Joe Biden on TV and says, ‘Can you believe I lost to this (blank) guy?’”But what once may have sounded like a rhetorical lament — can you believe I lost? — now seems like a challenge to anyone questioning the big lie. Can you believe I lost? There is only one acceptable answer. In his rally last weekend in Youngstown, Ohio, Trump reiterated his commitment to the lie. “I ran twice. I won twice,” he declared. For a moment, when bragging about how many more votes he won in 2020 than in 2016, the veil almost fell. “We got 12 million more and we lost,” Trump said, before recovering. “We didn’t lose,” he continued. “We lost in their imagination.” It was a classic Trumpian projection: The lie is true and the truth is fake.The big lie appeared to crescendo on Jan. 6, 2021. The big joke, however, was retold during the early hours of Jan. 7, when the election results were certified, with 147 Republican lawmakers — more than half of the total — having voted to overturn them. As Milbank puts it, “once you’ve unhitched yourself from the truth wagon, there’s no limit to the places you can visit.” You can use exaggerated warnings of voter fraud to justify state-level initiatives tightening ballot access. (Lemire warns that the big lie has “metastasized” from a rallying cry into the “cold, methodical process of legislation.”) You can select election deniers to carry the party banner in midterm contests. And yes, you can visit the Capitol on the day the voters’ will is being affirmed, trash the place and tell yourself, as the Republican National Committee suggested, that you’re engaging in “legitimate political discourse.”The R.N.C.’s statement, part of a resolution censuring Kinzinger and Representative Liz Cheney for participating in the House’s Jan. 6 investigation, seemed to rebrand the assault as an exercise in civic virtue. The R.N.C. soon backtracked, professing that the resolution had not endorsed the violence at the Capitol.In a perverse sense, though, the R.N.C. was right. Not about the rioters, but about the discourse. Political debate has become so degraded that it includes every kind of offense, be it anonymous officials humoring the former president, QAnon conspiracists exalting him or frenzied die-hards perpetrating violence on his behalf. Together, the big joke and the big lie have turned the nation’s political life into a dark comedy, one staged for the benefit of aggrieved supporters who, imagining that the performance is real and acting on that belief, become its only punchline.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