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      When American History Turns Into American Mythology

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      In the realm of folklore and ancient traditions, myths are tales forever retold for their wisdom and underlying truths. Their impossibility is part of their appeal; few would pause to debunk the physics of Icarus’s wings before warning against flying too close to the sun.In the worlds of journalism and history, however, myths are viewed as pernicious creatures that obscure more than they illuminate. They must be hunted and destroyed so that the real story can assume its proper perch. Puncturing these myths is a matter of duty and an assertion of expertise. “Actually” becomes an honored adverb.I can claim some experience in this effort, not as a debunker of myths but as a clearinghouse for them. When I served as the editor of The Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section several years ago, I assigned and edited dozens of “5 Myths” articles in which experts tackled the most common fallacies surrounding subjects in the news. This regular exercise forced me to wrestle with the form’s basic challenges: How entrenched and widespread must a misconception be to count as an honest-to-badness myth? What is the difference between a conclusive debunking and a conflicting interpretation? And who is qualified to upend a myth or disqualified from doing so?These questions came up frequently as I read “Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past,” a collection published this month and edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, historians at Princeton. The book, which the editors describe as an “intervention” in long-running public discussions on American politics, economics and culture, is an authoritative and fitting contribution to the myth-busting genre — authoritative for the quality of the contributions and the scope of its enterprise, fitting because it captures in one volume the possibilities and pitfalls of the form. When you face down so many myths in quick succession, the values that underpin the effort grow sharper, even if the value of myths themselves grows murkier. All of our national delusions should be exposed, but I’m not sure all should be excised. Do not some myths serve a valid purpose?Several contributors to “Myth America” successfully eviscerate tired assumptions about their subjects. Carol Anderson of Emory University discredits the persistent notion of extensive voter fraud in U.S. elections, showing how the politicians and activists who claim to defend “election integrity” are often seeking to exclude some voters from the democratic process. Daniel Immerwahr of Northwestern University puts the lie to the idea that the United States historically has lacked imperial ambitions; with its territories and tribal nations and foreign bases, he contends, the country is very much an empire today and has been so from the start. And after reading Lawrence B. Glickman’s essay on “White Backlash,” I will be careful of writing that a civil-rights protest or movement “sparked” or “fomented” or “provoked” a white backlash, as if such a response is instinctive and unavoidable. “Backlashers are rarely treated as agents of history, the people who participate in them seen as bit players rather than catalysts of the story, reactors rather than actors,” Glickman, a historian at Cornell, writes. Sometimes the best myth-busting is the kind that makes you want to rewrite old sentences.The collection raises worthy arguments about the use of history in the nation’s political discourse, foremost among them that the term “revisionist history” should not be a slur. “All good historical work is at heart ‘revisionist’ in that it uses new findings from the archives or new perspectives from historians to improve, to perfect — and yes, to revise — our understanding of the past,” Kruse and Zelizer write. Yet, this revisionist impulse at times makes the myths framework feel somewhat forced, an excuse to cover topics of interest to the authors.Sarah Churchwell’s enlightening chapter on the evolution of “America First” as a slogan and worldview, for instance, builds on her 2018 book on the subject. But to address the topic as a myth, Churchwell, a historian at the University of London, asserts that Donald Trump’s invocation of “America First” in the 2016 presidential race was “widely defended as a reasonable foreign policy doctrine.” (Her evidence is a pair of pieces by the conservative commentators Michael Barone and Michael Anton.)In his essay defending the accomplishments of the New Deal, Eric Rauchway of the University of California, Davis, admits that the policy program’s alleged failure “is not a tale tightly woven into the national story” and that “perhaps myth seems an inappropriate term.” He does believe the New Deal’s failure is a myth worth exploding, of course, but acknowledges that there are “many analytical categories of falsehood.” The admission deserves some kudos, but it also might just be right.In Kruse’s chapter on the history of the “Southern Strategy” — the Republican Party’s deliberate effort to bring white Southerners to its side as the Democratic Party grew more active in support of civil rights — the author allows that “only recently have conservative partisans challenged this well-established history.” This singling out of conservatives is not accidental. In their introduction, Kruse and Zelizer argue that the growth of right-wing media platforms and the Republican Party’s declining “commitment to truth” have fostered a boom in mythmaking. “Efforts to reshape narratives about the U.S. past thus became a central theme of the conservative movement in general and the Trump administration in particular,” they write.The editors note the existence of some “bipartisan” myths that transcend party or ideology, but overwhelmingly, the myths covered in “Myth America” originate or live on the right. In an analysis that spans 20 chapters, more than 300 pages and centuries of American history and public discourse, this emphasis is striking. Do left-wing activists and politicians in the United States never construct and propagate their own self-affirming versions of the American story? If such liberal innocence is real, let’s hear more about it. If not, it might require its own debunking.One of those bipartisan myths, typically upheld by politicians of both major parties, is the ur-myth of the nation: American exceptionalism. In his essay on the subject, David A. Bell, another Princeton historian, can be dismissive of the term. “Most nations can be considered exceptional in one sense or another,” he writes. Today, the phrase is typically deployed as a “cudgel” in the country’s culture wars, Bell contends, a practice popularized by politicians like Newt Gingrich, who has long hailed the United States as “the most unique civilization in history” and assails anyone who does not bow before the concept. “For Gingrich, demonstrating America’s exceptionality has always mattered less than denouncing the Left for not believing in it,” Bell writes.When exploring earlier arguments about America’s unique nature, Bell touches on John Winthrop’s 17th-century sermon “Model of Christian Charity,” in which the future governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared that the Puritan community would be “as a city on a hill” (a line that President Ronald Reagan expanded centuries later to a “shining city upon a hill”). The reference is obligatory in any discussion of American exceptionalism, though Bell minimizes the relevance of the lay sermon to the exceptionalism debates, both because the text “breathed with agonized doubt” about whether the colonists could meet the challenge and because the sermon “remained virtually unknown until the 19th century.”It is an intriguing assumption, at least to this non-historian, that the initial obscurity of a speech (or a book or an argument or a work of any kind) would render it irrelevant, no matter how significant it became to later generations. It is the same attitude that Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale and the author of a chapter on myths surrounding the Constitution, takes toward Federalist No. 10. James Madison’s essay “foreshadowed much of post-Civil War American history,” Amar writes, in part for its argument that the federal government would protect minority rights more effectively than the states, “but in 1787-1788, almost no one paid attention to Madison’s masterpiece.” Unlike other Federalist essays that resonated widely during the debates over constitutional ratification, Amar writes, No. 10 “failed to make a deep impression in American coffeehouses and taverns where patrons read aloud and discussed both local and out-of-town newspapers.” Alas, Mr. Madison, your piece was not trending, so we’re taking it off history’s home page.To his credit, Amar is consistent in privileging immediate popular reactions in his historical assessments. He criticizes the argument of Charles Beard’s 1913 book, “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution,” that the Constitution was an antidemocratic document. “If the document was truly antidemocratic, why did the People vote for it?” Amar asks. “Why did tens of thousands of ordinary working men enthusiastically join massive pro-constitutional rallies in Philadelphia and Manhattan?” Even just in the aftermath of the 2020 election and the Capitol assault of Jan. 6, however, it seems clear that people in a free society can be rallied to democratic and anti-democratic causes, with great enthusiasm, if they come to believe such causes are righteous.Other contributors to “Myth America” are more willing to squint at the first impressions of the past. In a chapter minimizing the transformational impact of the Reagan presidency, Zelizer laments how “the trope that a ‘Reagan Revolution’ remade American politics has remained central to the national discourse,” even though it “has been more of a political talking point than a description of reality.” (Reminder: Calling them “tropes” or “talking points” is an effective shorthand way to dismiss opposing views.) When Zelizer looks back on a collection of historians’ essays published in 1989, just months after Reagan left office, and which argued that Reagan’s 1980 victory was “the end of the New Deal era,” he does not hesitate to pass judgment on his professional colleagues. “Even a group of historians was swept up by the moment,” he writes.Here, proximity to an earlier historical era renders observers susceptible to transient passions, not possessors of superior insights. If so, perhaps an essay collection of American myths that is published shortly after the Trump presidency also risks being swept up by its own moment. (Incidentally, that 1989 book, edited by the historians Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle and titled “The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980,” shares one contributor with “Myth America.” Michael Kazin, take a bow.)Zelizer writes that the notion of a revolutionary Reagan era did not emerge spontaneously but was “born out of an explicit political strategy” aimed at exaggerating both conservative strength and liberal weakness. This is another recurring conclusion of “Myth America” — that many of our national mythologies are not the product of good-faith misunderstandings or organically divergent viewpoints that become entrenched over time, but rather of deliberate efforts at mythmaking. The notions that free enterprise is inseparable from broader American freedoms, that voting fraud is ubiquitous, that the feminist movement is anti-family — in this telling, they are myths peddled or exaggerated, for nefarious purposes, by the right.But in his essay on American exceptionalism, Bell adds in passing an idea somewhat subversive to the project of “Myth America,” and it separates this book from standard myth-quashing practices. After writing that narratives about America’s exceptional character were long deployed to justify U.S. aggression abroad and at home, Bell posits that notions of exceptionalism “also highlighted what Americans saw as their best qualities and moral duties, giving them a standard to live up to.”Bell does not suggest that the belief in American exceptionalism fulfills this latter role today; to the contrary, its politicization has rendered the term vacuous and meaningless. “The mere notion of being exceptional can do very little to inspire Americans actually to be exceptional,” he writes. Still, Bell has opened a door here, even if just a crack. National myths can be more than conspiratorial, self-serving lies spread for low, partisan aims. They can also be aspirational.American aspiration, idealism and mythology have mingled together from the start. In her 2018 one-volume American history, “These Truths,” Jill Lepore wrote eloquently of those self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence — political equality, natural rights, popular sovereignty — that the country never ceases to claim yet always struggles to uphold. It is the argument, often made by former President Barack Obama, that America becomes a more perfect union when it attempts to live up to its ideals and mythologies, even if it often fails. The tension between myth and reality does not undermine America. It defines it.In his best book, “American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony,” published in 1981, the political scientist Samuel Huntington distills the tension in his final lines: “Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.” The authors and editors of “Myth America” do plenty to discredit the lies and reveal the disappointments, as they well should. Reimagining myth as aspiration can be a task for historians, but it is not theirs alone.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

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      Trump Calls on Republicans to Embrace McCarthy for Speaker

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      Former President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday made a direct appeal to House Republicans to support Representative Kevin McCarthy of California for speaker, after Mr. McCarthy lost three successive votes for the post amid a hard-right rebellion led by some of Mr. Trump’s most loyal allies in Congress.“Some really good conversations took place last night, and it’s now time for all of our GREAT Republican House Members to VOTE FOR KEVIN, CLOSE THE DEAL, TAKE THE VICTORY,” Mr. Trump, who is running for president, wrote on his website, Truth Social.On Tuesday, as the California Republican suffered defeat after humiliating defeat on the House floor, Mr. Trump had refused to reiterate his endorsement for Mr. McCarthy, telling NBC News’ Garrett Haake, simply, “We’ll see what happens.”Mr. Trump and Mr. McCarthy then spoke Tuesday night, after the embarrassing once-in-a-century debacle on the House floor and after Mr. Trump made his tepid comment on NBC.After the conversation, Mr. Trump arrived at a more full-throated statement reiterating his backing for Mr. McCarthy, though he still tempered his praise.“REPUBLICANS, DO NOT TURN A GREAT TRIUMPH INTO A GIANT & EMBARRASSING DEFEAT,” he wrote. “IT’S TIME TO CELEBRATE, YOU DESERVE IT. Kevin McCarthy will do a good job, and maybe even a GREAT JOB — JUST WATCH!”Whether Mr. Trump can sway enough of the holdouts who are opposing Mr. McCarthy is an open question, and one that will test Mr. Trump’s ongoing influence over the House Republican conference, a wing of which has crafted itself in his image, as he mounts his third presidential campaign.Despite Mr. Trump’s earlier endorsement of Mr. McCarthy and his effort to whip votes for him ahead of the speaker vote, 20 Republicans still voted against Mr. McCarthy. The most aggressive McCarthy detractor, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, is also one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal allies in Congress. Mr. Trump’s support for Mr. McCarthy has done nothing to temper his opposition. More

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      ¿Trump o DeSantis? Los evangélicos hispanos entre dos opciones

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      Aunque Donald Trump es el único republicano que ha anunciado su candidatura a la presidencia, el gobernador de Florida también es un contendiente posible. Un enfrentamiento entre los dos podría hacer que los evangélicos latinos emitan un voto determinante.MIAMI — El gobernador de Florida, Ron DeSantis, todavía no ha anunciado que contenderá a la presidencia. Pero entre los bloques de electores de derecha que lo apoyan para que participe en las elecciones primarias de 2024 se encuentran algunos de sus más grandes seguidores: los cristianos evangélicos hispanos.No es que se opongan al expresidente Donald Trump, el único republicano que ya se ha declarado candidato. Pero un enfrentamiento entre los dos titanes de la derecha podría hacer que los evangélicos latinos emitan un voto pendular determinante en Florida, lo cual potenciaría su influencia y centraría una enorme atención nacional en sus iglesias, su política y sus valores.“Si hay elecciones primarias, no hay duda de que habrá fragmentación en el movimiento conservador y de que eso será cierto también para los evangélicos hispanos”, dijo el reverendo Samuel Rodriguez, pastor en Sacramento, California, y presidente de la Conferencia Nacional de Liderazgo Cristiano Hispano. “Conocemos los valores que mantenemos y las políticas que queremos. La pregunta que surge es: ¿quién los reflejará de verdad?”.El grupo de Rodriguez celebró una reunión el mes pasado en Tampa, Florida, con cientos de pastores de todo Estados Unidos, donde los asistentes dijeron que entre cada sesión se hablaba más de política que de las Escrituras.La conversación se resumía a una elección: ¿Trump o DeSantis?Son pocos quienes ya tienen una respuesta, lo que no es sorprendente, dado que falta más de un año para las primeras votaciones de la campaña de 2024. Pero hablar de 2024 (de Trump, quien pasó años cortejando a los evangélicos, y de DeSantis, quien se ha inclinado por las batallas culturales que atraen a muchos cristianos conservadores) mostró tanto las mayores expectativas entre los líderes evangélicos hispanos en Florida como su deseo de demostrar la fuerza de su cristianismo, ahora abiertamente politizado.“Tiene que ver con la moral y hay un partido en este momento que refleja nuestra moral”, dijo Dionny Báez, un pastor de Miami que encabeza una red de iglesias. “No podemos tener miedo de recordarle a la gente que tenemos valores por los que los republicanos están dispuestos a luchar. Tengo la responsabilidad de dejar claro en qué creemos. No podemos seguir haciendo de eso un tabú”.Desde hace mucho tiempo, los evangélicos hispanos han tenido una influencia enorme en Florida, donde los latinos conforman casi un 27 por ciento de la población y el 21 por ciento de los ciudadanos que pueden votar. Aunque los superan los hispanos que son católicos romanos, los evangélicos son mucho más proclives a votar por republicanos. En general, los votantes hispanos en el estado favorecieron a los republicanos por primera vez en décadas en las elecciones de medio mandato de noviembre.DeSantis se fue acercando a los evangélicos hispanos a medida que aumentaba su perfil a nivel nacional.Cuando el año pasado promulgó una ley que prohíbe los abortos después de las 15 semanas de gestación, lo hizo en Nación de Fe, una enorme iglesia evangélica hispana en el condado de Osceola. Declaró el 7 de noviembre, un día antes de las elecciones de medio mandato, como el “Día de las Víctimas del Comunismo”, lo cual hacía referencia no solo a los cubanos en el estado, sino a los inmigrantes venezolanos y nicaragüenses, que han contribuido a llenar los bancos de las iglesias evangélicas de Florida. Sus asesores de campaña hablaron en varias ocasiones con pastores hispanos, para cultivar un apoyo que muchos esperan que DeSantis intente capitalizar en una campaña presidencial.Claro que Trump también puede recurrir a sus leales: Rodriguez habló en su toma de posesión en 2017 y otros líderes evangélicos hispanos lo respaldaron.Simpatizantes latinos de Trump en un mitin en Miami en noviembre. Desde el ascenso político del expresidente en 2016, los republicanos han ganado terreno entre los votantes latinos en Florida.Scott McIntyre para The New York TimesPero DeSantis podría complicar la ecuación en las futuras elecciones primarias republicanas en 2024 debido a la concentración y considerable influencia de los evangélicos hispanos en Florida. Muchos ven a DeSantis como un héroe de la pandemia, ya que lo elogian porque no exigió el cierre de las iglesias ni hizo obligatoria la vacunación.Una batalla por las lealtades evangélicas hispanas solo consolidaría aún más su importancia en Florida y más allá, a medida que se organicen y traten de ejercer el poder con mayor eficacia.En Miami y otros lugares, las iglesias evangélicas hispanas abarcan desde pequeños establecimientos comerciales hasta megaiglesias con bandas de seis músicos y cafeterías con todos los servicios. Ciudadanos estadounidenses de segunda y tercera generación rezan junto a inmigrantes recién llegados de Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Cuba y la República Dominicana. Las misas suelen celebrarse en español, aunque muchos fieles son bilingües y desean que sus hijos hablen inglés y español.Muchos no votaron sino hasta la última década y su primer voto fue por Trump en 2016 o 2020. Su estilo político ha servido de modelo para algunos pastores evangélicos latinos que han avivado la ira por las restricciones del coronavirus. Según los pastores, la asistencia a las iglesias aumentó durante la pandemia.En Segadores de Vida, una iglesia evangélica en Southwest Ranches, al oeste de Fort Lauderdale, donde más de 6000 fieles asisten a los servicios dominicales, el reverendo Ruddy Gracia ha subido al púlpito para criticar las restricciones de la pandemia que cerraron iglesias en otros estados y para menospreciar las vacunas contra la COVID-19, exhortando a los congregantes a confiar en la inmunidad divina.En una entrevista, Gracia dijo que sus prédicas sobre política habían atraído a más miembros, muchos de los cuales, añadió, compartían sus dudas sobre el rumbo económico, político y espiritual de Estados Unidos.“Los principios de los liberales en Estados Unidos son malos según las normas bíblicas, no según mis normas —la Biblia—, y eso antes no era así”, dijo Gracia. “Somos ultraconservadores. Así que cada vez que subimos al púlpito o hablamos, en realidad estamos hablando de política”.Gracia, quien emigró de la República Dominicana cuando era joven y ahora tiene 57 años, se describe a sí mismo como “anticuado” en sus ideas sobre el liderazgo, y pasa tiempo leyendo sobre emperadores y generales famosos. Eso influyó en sus opiniones sobre DeSantis y Trump, dijo.“Siempre he sido un gran admirador de las agallas y de ser agresivo, y ambos tienen ese comportamiento de verdadero líder”, dijo, reflexionando en voz alta sobre si los dos rivales republicanos podrían presentarse en una candidatura conjunta. “Veo en estos dos hombres un empuje y una tensión que son extremadamente necesarios en el tipo de mundo en el que vivimos hoy”.Daniel Garza, director ejecutivo de Libre, un grupo conservador centrado en los hispanos, dijo que había asistido a iglesias evangélicas de todo el país y se había dado cuenta de que los pastores hablaban de manera más abierta de política desde el púlpito. “Siempre hemos tenido una familiaridad, pero lo que vemos ahora es una especie de intimidad que no se había visto en el pasado”, dijo.Los evangélicos siguen siendo una minoría entre el electorado latino, pero las encuestas muestran que son mucho más propensos a votar por republicanos que los católicos o aquellos que no tienen una afiliación religiosa, aunque no son un bloque monolítico de votantes.A menudo están más abiertos a relajar algunas normas migratorias que los líderes republicanos e incluso algunos de los que apoyaron a Trump se desanimaron por sus mensajes antiinmigrantes.Báez celebró un bullicioso servicio en la iglesia H2O de Miami. “Tiene que ver con la moral y hay un partido en este momento que refleja nuestra moral”, dijo en una entrevista.Saul Martinez para The New York TimesCuando Trump comenzó su acercamiento a los evangélicos en su campaña de reelección de 2020, lo hizo en el Ministerio Internacional el Rey Jesús, una enorme congregación hispana de Miami. El pastor de la iglesia, Guillermo Maldonado, aseguró a sus miembros, entre los que hay un gran número de inmigrantes indocumentados de Centroamérica y el Caribe, que no tenían que ser ciudadanos estadounidenses para asistir al mitin.Algunos líderes evangélicos hispanos sienten escalofríos ante la idea de que el grupo represente un bloque de voto unificado que favorezca automáticamente a los republicanos. Los evangélicos hispanos son más proclives a elegir a los demócratas que los evangélicos blancos, señalan. Aun así, incluso esos líderes se muestran entusiastas a la hora de describir al grupo como un voto indeciso por excelencia que no está totalmente comprometido con ninguno de los dos partidos.“Ser evangélico no es una denominación política”, dijo Gabriel Salguero, pastor en Orlando que dirige la Coalición Nacional Evangélica Latina y mantiene sus preferencias políticas en privado por una cuestión de principios. “Se trata de nuestra fe en Cristo y nuestro compromiso con el Evangelio. Así que no ponemos nuestra confianza en la política, pero deberíamos participar”.En todo el país, muchos líderes evangélicos hispanos han adoptado hablar más explícitamente de política en sus sermones.Báez, pastor de la red de iglesias, evitó durante años cualquier mención a la política cuando su púlpito estaba en Filadelfia. Consideraba que su papel en aquel momento estaba por encima de la política. Incluso, rara vez votaba.Pero desde que se mudó a Florida en 2019 y comenzó una nueva congregación que se reúne en un antiguo club nocturno en el centro de Miami, casi nunca duda en hablar sobre temas políticos.Báez bautizando a una integrante de la iglesia durante un servicio en H20 Miami. Después de evitar la política durante muchos años, dijo, ahora rara vez duda en hablar del tema.Saul Martinez para The New York TimesBáez ha contado a los feligreses su decisión de dejar de permitir que sus hijos pequeños vean películas de Disney. Dijo que la compañía había ido demasiado lejos en su apoyo a los derechos de las personas trans, y aplaudió la ley aprobada el año pasado por DeSantis y los republicanos del estado que restringe la instrucción en las aulas sobre orientación sexual e identidad de género.Báez también se ha opuesto abiertamente a las escuelas que educan a los niños sobre la identidad de género.“Ningún profesor debería hablar a los niños pequeños sobre la sexualidad; déjame a mí como padre hacer eso”, dijo, y agregó que se dio cuenta por primera vez de la cuestión durante los debates de la llamada ley de los baños hace años. “Nos hemos pasado a las opiniones extremas al respecto. Tenemos que respetar a los padres, no imponer un punto de vista”.Cada domingo, Báez celebra un bullicioso servicio en H2O Miami, como se conoce a la iglesia, con cientos de personas reunidas alrededor de mesas para cantar junto a una banda de rock cristiano, levantando las manos en señal de alabanza. Cuando terminan los servicios, de dos horas de duración, los feligreses se abrazan y se reúnen al borde del escenario para pedir a Báez y a su esposa que pongan sus manos sobre ellos en oración.Al igual que otros líderes evangélicos hispanos, Báez cuenta con un gran número de fieles simpatizantes tanto en Estados Unidos como en América Latina y casi un millón de seguidores en las redes sociales. Aparece con frecuencia en la televisión en español, por lo general centrándose en mensajes optimistas de esperanza en lugar de menciones explícitas a Jesús o a los valores conservadores.“Hay una razón por la que la mayoría de los latinos son liberales: es lo que ven en la televisión”, dijo mientras desayunaba en el jardín de su casa en Miramar, un suburbio a media hora al norte de Miami. “Queremos dar una visión alternativa a eso”.Jennifer Medina es una reportera de política estadounidense y cubre las actitudes políticas y el poder con énfasis en el oeste de Estados Unidos. Originaria del sur de California, ha pasado varios años cubriendo la región para la sección Nacional. @jennymedina More

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      A Con Man Is Succeeding Me in Congress Today

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      Today is my last day as a member of Congress, and George Santos is about to be sworn in to take the seat I held for six years. He will take an oath to “bear true faith” to the Constitution and take this obligation without any “purpose of evasion.” I’ve lost track of how many evasions and lies Mr. Santos has told about himself, his finances and his history and relationship with our stretch of Long Island and northeastern Queens. When he is seated, it will diminish our Congress, our country and my constituents — soon his constituents. It saddens me that after 30 years of public service rooted in hard work and service to the people of this area, I’m being succeeded by a con man.Yet I’m clinging to my sense of optimism. I believe that as slow and frustrating as it sometimes is, our democracy, our free press and the rule of law work. They have to.I also know the voters of the Third District pretty well; they believe in the rule of law, in playing by the rules. They like authenticity in their leaders and pride themselves on having a good BS detector. The fact is that Mr. Santos’s behavior went beyond BS: He fabricated the basics of his biography to an extent that most voters wouldn’t have thought possible. The shame would be too great, right? I am certain that if the Third District’s voters have an opportunity to weigh in on his political future again, he will be gone.But for now, there is no getting around the fact that Mr. Santos’s con game is a manifestation of a growing political phenomenon of saying or doing anything, with no automatic consequences. Whether it be far-right election deniers, personal attacks that call for violence against opponents, claims of false-flag mass shootings, extremists spouting the first thing that comes to mind and even one politician saying he could “shoot somebody” on Fifth Avenue and still not lose supporters. If we are going to subdue the tyranny of unchecked liars and their lies, then Mr. Santos must be held accountable: He must be removed by Congress or by prosecutors, because there is no indication that he will be moved by conscience to voluntarily resign.I do not say these things lightly. Expelling a member of Congress is no easy task, and the bar is rightly high. Our country’s democracy is based on free and fair elections, the wisdom of the voters and the peaceful transfer of power. Some of my constituents even now are saying that they don’t want their vote overridden and Mr. Santos ousted.But now we know that no one voted for the real George Santos. Sure, some candidates say and do anything to get into office and then abuse the public trust. In Mr. Santos, we have someone who abused the public trust even before he got into office; it’s mind-boggling to think what his actions and conversations will be like in Congress on behalf of his constituents.I know from my experience as a mayor of my hometown, as a county executive and as a member of Congress that you cannot get things done without building trust with your colleagues. How can Mr. Santos be trusted? How could he be effective?Even before Mr. Santos’s lies were exposed in the media, he showed himself to be an avatar of this age of no-consequences impunity. He ran against me in 2020: It was the middle of the Covid pandemic, he did not live in the district, and no one had heard of him. He had little in campaign funds, and during our few joint campaign appearances, all virtual, he came across as a phony. I ignored him, hardly mentioned his name and beat him by 12 points.On election night 2020, Mr. Santos jumped on Donald Trump’s discredited “stop the steal” bandwagon. We knew on Election Day we had won and won big, but he used the Trump movement to raise funds online and attended the orientation for new members before the race was called. I was sworn in on Jan. 3, 2021, without much ado. Then we learned he attended the Jan. 6 Trump rally at the Ellipse. He went on to boast that he had written “a nice check for a law firm” to help defendants who had stormed the Capitol. (He probably didn’t even do that.) His behavior should have alerted us all, but he wasn’t taken seriously, and unfortunately, as Robert Zimmerman, his Democratic opponent in the 2022 election, has said, the press didn’t really grasp the level of his deceit. His actions and comments around Jan. 6 didn’t have the consequences they should have.We now know more about his phony biographical information. We are appalled by his insensitive and fallacious pandering to the Jewish community. His apology tour has been cringeworthy and continues to raise more disturbing questions. We will learn more about his newfound wealth and questionable financial disclosures and campaign financing as the press, law enforcement and, ideally, the House Ethics Committee dig in. But we already know enough.Could he be enjoying all the attention? This inexperienced newcomer who fabricated much of his life story is now better known than most members of Congress, including me. He’s becoming as well known as others who abused trust, like Sam Bankman-Fried and Bernie Madoff. Not unlike them, he appears to have conducted his finances in highly unusual, if not unlawful, ways. But I have to wonder, having seen his delight for attention and his self-regard, if he loves that everyone now knows his name — even though it’s because of yet another big lie.The people of my district are holding rallies, signing petitions and calling on the Republican leadership to act. The district is a model for moderation, seen by most political observers as a 50-50 district with constituents who embrace a get-it-done attitude. They dislike partisanship and value tell-it-like-it-is leadership. They are now being saddled with a slippery, inexperienced liar who tells it like it isn’t. They’ve been reaching out every day to ask, “How could this have happened?” and “What can we do?” We are counting on the press to keep digging in, law enforcement to keep investigating and the political pressure to keep building on the House.But again, I believe we will get this right. So many panicked people came to me during Mr. Trump’s presidency, fearful that his tactics would win a second term — and one with a mandate, no less. He lost. I was one of the last people in the chamber as the Jan. 6 riot intensified, and people legitimately worried that the insurrectionists would succeed. We certified the election that night, and more than 960 people have been charged. The election deniers were decisively turned back.One of my favorite lines from the 2011 film “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” has always stayed with me: “Everything will be all right in the end. So if it is not all right, then it is not yet the end.” That’s how I feel about America right now. It’s not a naïve idea; it’s what keeps us sane and able to keep moving forward in the age of Mr. Santos and Mr. Trump. The system works — if not right away, then ultimately. It has worked throughout our history, and it will work now.Tom Suozzi, a Democrat, has represented New York’s Third Congressional District since 2017. He is a former Nassau County executive and mayor of Glen Cove on Long Island and ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of New York in 2022.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

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      Hispanic Evangelical Leaders Ask: Trump or DeSantis?

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      In Florida, where Hispanic evangelicals carry outsize influence, many of their pastors view the budding 2024 rivalry as a sign of the potency of their unabashedly politicized Christianity.MIAMI — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida hasn’t announced he’s running for president yet. But among the right-leaning voting blocs that are pulling for him to enter the 2024 primary field are some of his biggest fans: Hispanic evangelical Christians.It’s not that they’re opposed to the one Republican who has already declared himself a candidate, former President Donald J. Trump. But a showdown between the two titans of the right wing could turn Latino evangelicals into a decisive swing vote in Florida — supercharging their influence and focusing enormous national attention on their churches, their politics and their values.“If there is a primary, there’s no doubt there will be fragmentation in the conservative movement, and there’s total certainty that will be true of Hispanic evangelicals as well,” said the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, a pastor in Sacramento, Calif., and the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. “We know the values we keep and the policies we want. The question that arises is, who will really reflect those?”Mr. Rodriguez’s group held a gathering last month in Tampa, Fla., with hundreds of pastors from across the country, where attendees said the hallways buzzed between sessions with more chatter about politics than about Scripture.Much of it, they said, came down to a choice: Trump or DeSantis?Few have settled on an answer yet, not surprisingly given that the first votes of the 2024 campaign are over a year away. But the talk of 2024 — of Mr. Trump, who spent years courting evangelicals, and of Mr. DeSantis, who has leaned into the cultural battles that appeal to many conservative Christians — showed both the heightened expectations among Hispanic evangelical leaders in Florida and their desire to demonstrate the potency of their now unabashedly politicized Christianity.“It is about morals, and there is one party right now that reflects our morals,” said Dionny Báez, a Miami pastor who leads a network of churches. “We cannot be afraid to remind people that we have values that the Republicans are willing to fight for. I have a responsibility to make clear what we believe. We can no longer make that taboo.”Hispanic evangelicals have long had outsize influence in Florida, where Latinos make up roughly 27 percent of the population and 21 percent of eligible voters. Though they are outnumbered among Hispanics by Roman Catholics, evangelicals are far more likely to vote for Republicans. Overall, Hispanic voters in the state favored Republicans for the first time in decades in the midterm elections in November.Mr. DeSantis has courted Hispanic evangelicals assiduously as his national profile has risen.When he signed a law last year banning abortions after 15 weeks, he did so at Nación de Fe, a Hispanic evangelical megachurch in Osceola County. He declared Nov. 7, the day before the midterm election, as “Victims of Communism Day,” appealing not just to Cubans in the state, but also immigrants from Venezuela and Nicaragua, who have helped swell the pews of evangelical churches in Florida. His campaign aides frequently spoke with Hispanic pastors, cultivating support that many expect Mr. DeSantis to try to capitalize on in a presidential campaign.Of course, Mr. Trump, too, can call upon loyalists: Mr. Rodriguez spoke at his inauguration in 2017, and other Hispanic evangelical leaders endorsed him.Latino supporters of Mr. Trump at a rally in Miami in November. Since the former president’s political ascent in 2016, Republicans have made gains among Latino voters in Florida.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesBut Mr. DeSantis could complicate the equation in a potential 2024 Republican primary because of Hispanic evangelicals’ concentration and considerable sway in Florida. Many view Mr. DeSantis as a hero of the pandemic, praising him for not requiring churches to shut down or instituting vaccine mandates.What to Know About Donald Trump TodayCard 1 of 4Donald J. Trump is running for president again, while also being investigated by a special counsel. And his taxes are an issue again as well. Here’s what to know about some of the latest developments involving the former president:Tax returns. More

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      Trying to Trademark ‘Rigged Election,’ and Other Revelations From the Jan. 6 Transcripts

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      The Jan. 6 committee released a whirlwind of documents in its final days and wrapped up its work on Monday.WASHINGTON — The nation’s top military officer saw the Jan. 6 attack as similar to the “Reichstag moment” that led to Nazi dictatorship. Aides for former President Donald J. Trump saw their future job opportunities slipping away, and predicted being “perpetually unemployed.” Mr. Trump himself saw the push to overturn the 2020 election as a financial opportunity, moving to trademark the phrase “Rigged Election.”These were among the latest revelations from the House Jan. 6 committee, which released a whirlwind of documents in its final days and wrapped up its work on Monday. Since Friday night, the panel has released several troves of evidence, including about 120 previously unseen transcripts along with emails and text messages obtained during its 18-month inquiry, totaling tens of thousands of pages.The evidence touched on nearly every aspect of Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election. It provided new details about how some of his top allies lobbied for aggressive plans to keep him in power, while others lamented how the dark day of Jan. 6, 2021, had negatively affected their employment prospects.The panel said it has now turned over an “enormous volume of material” to the Justice Department as Jack Smith, the special counsel, conducts a parallel investigation into the events of Jan. 6.“Accountability is now critical to thwart any other future scheme to overturn an election,” the committee’s leaders, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, said in a statement.In the end, the committee released about 280 transcripts of interviews. Though the panel interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, only a few hundred sessions took the form of formal depositions or transcribed interviews. Lawmakers said they withheld certain transcripts that contained sensitive information.Here are some takeaways from the recently released evidence:A senior military adviser said Mr. Trump seemed to acknowledge his defeat.In a 302-page transcript of his interview with the committee, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the voluble chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the panel about a meeting in the Oval Office a few weeks after Election Day, in which he said Mr. Trump seemed to acknowledge he was not going to be sworn in again.General Milley described Mr. Trump saying “words to the effect of: Yeah, we lost, we need to let that issue go to the next guy. Meaning President Biden.”That statement built on other evidence the committee spent significant time documenting: That Mr. Trump was aware he had lost but continued to falsely claim otherwise. At one point General Milley suggested it might have been another adviser who said it, but stated when asked again that it was Mr. Trump.General Milley also recalled seeing the Nazi imagery in the crowd on Jan. 6 and saying to his staff: “These guys look like the brown shirts to me. This looks like a Reichstag moment.”Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.Aides saw their futures damaged.Some of the most striking exchanges in the committee’s text messages were between Mr. Trump’s longtime adviser Hope Hicks and Julie Radford, the chief of staff to Mr. Trump’s oldest daughter, Ivanka.In them, both women lamented that Mr. Trump had caused irreparable harm to his own staff as the violence played out.“In one day he ended every future opportunity that doesn’t include speaking engagements at the local Proud Boys chapter,” Ms. Hicks fumed in a message. “All of us that didn’t have jobs lined up will be perpetually unemployed.”More evidence emerged that Trump planned to join the crowd at the Capitol.Several Trump advisers made clear that Mr. Trump had intended for days to join a crowd of his supporters marching on the Capitol.“POTUS expectations are to have something intimate at the ellipse, and call on everyone to march to the capitol,” Katrina Pierson, a Trump spokeswoman, wrote in a Jan. 2, 2021, email.Kayleigh McEnany, Mr. Trump’s press secretary, also wrote in a note on Jan. 6 that Mr. Trump had wanted to walk alongside the crowd as it descended on the Congress: “POTUS wanted to walk to capital. Physically walk. He said fine ride beast.”Bannon continued to agitate.Stephen K. Bannon, an outside adviser to Mr. Trump, continued to endorse extreme tactics even after the violence of Jan. 6.On Jan. 8, 2021, he wrote in a text message to his spokeswoman, Alexandra Preate, that he wanted one million people to surround the Capitol after Mr. Biden was seated in the White House.“I’d surround the Capitol in total silence,” Mr. Bannon wrote, according to a transcript of Ms. Preate’s interview.Mr. Bannon also advised that Mr. Trump should have nothing to do with Patrick Byrne, the wealthy businessman who financed efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “Steve Bannon once told me, he said, Patrick Byrne’s crazy, and he should not be on the stage with Donald Trump,” Ms. Preate testified.Trump lawyers investigated fraud claims and couldn’t prove them.Joshua Findlay, a Trump campaign lawyer, told the panel he was tasked with looking into fraud allegations in Georgia, but came up empty.“The big complaints that you would hear about, you know, massive vote flips and things like that, we just didn’t ever — at least in Georgia — we did not ever find any evidence of that,” he testified.Nevertheless, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, joined forces with another lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro, who devised ways to challenge the 2020 election through the use of alternative slates of electors.Mr. Findlay said Mr. Chesebro and Mr. Giuliani teamed up “promoting these theories and being aggressive, you know, aggressively promoting them,” Mr. Findlay recalled.“Rudy Giuliani was making a lot of the decisions about litigation strategy,” he testified. “He really bought into Ken’s theory on this.”Kash Patel was a recurring figure.Mr. Smith, the special counsel, is also investigating Mr. Trump’s handling of sensitive documents.A figure in both the documents investigations and the committee’s inquiry was Kash Patel, currently one of Mr. Trump’s representatives to the National Archives. Several witnesses testified about a push to install Mr. Patel, a Trump loyalist, in a high-ranking C.I.A. post, something that the agency’s director, Gina Haspel, along with Vice President Mike Pence and the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, moved to stop. But not everyone found Mr. Patel objectionable.Robert C. O’Brien, Mr. Trump’s final national security adviser, called Mr. Patel a “good guy” in his testimony.General Milley took a different view, describing the elevation of Mr. Patel as concerning.He recalled confronting Mr. Patel and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, while in a V.I.P. box at the Army-Navy game.“To Kash Patel, I said: ‘So, Kash, which one are you going to get, C.I.A. or F.B.I.?’ And Patel’s face, you know, he looks down and he comes back and says: ‘Chairman, Chairman.’ And I looked at White House Chief of Staff Meadows and said: ‘What are you guys trying to do?’”Trump wanted to trademark ‘Rigged Election.’During the tumultuous post-election period, Mr. Trump and his team worked intensely at raising money — bringing in hundreds of millions — while trying to register trademarks about fighting election results, the transcripts show.In one recent transcript, the committee revealed an email from Dan Scavino Jr., a deputy White House chief of staff, to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and adviser, titled “POTUS requests.”“Hey Jared! POTUS wants to trademark/own rights to below, I don’t know who to see — or ask…I don’t know who to take to,” the email states, before providing two bolded terms: “Save America PAC!” with an exclamation mark and “Rigged Election!”“Guys — can we do ASAP please?” Mr. Kushner then wrote, forwarding the request.‘I don’t recall.’The transcripts also, once again, show the difficulties for investigators.Mr. Chesebro repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, while Molly Michael, an assistant to Mr. Trump, told the committee more than 100 times that she couldn’t recall events from Jan. 6.The committee ran into a similar problem with Anthony Ornato, a former deputy chief of staff at the White House who had also been the special agent in charge of Mr. Trump’s Secret Service detail. He said he did not remember significant moments that multiple witnesses recounted to the panel. “I don’t recall any conversation taking place about the possible movement of the president to the Capitol,” Mr. Ornato testified.The committee published excerpts from text messages between Mr. Ornato and a White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson — whose statements have at times been in conflict — that appeared to support her memory of some events on Jan. 6 that she has spoken of. In the messages, she relayed that Mr. Trump was talking, as he had previously, about going to the Capitol himself, with Mr. Ornato replying to her comment.Trump was directly involved in the false elector scheme.Mr. Trump personally involved himself in the false elector scheme, according to Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. Ms. McDaniel recounted a call after the election in which Mr. Trump introduced her to John Eastman, the lawyer who wrote a now-infamous memo that laid out a path for the former president to remain in power.Mr. Eastman, she said, then spoke about how he believed it was important for the committee to help the Trump campaign “gather these contingent electors,” she said.Stephanie Lai 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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      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