He has presented himself as a symbol of the “American dream” but embodies the lie in politics even before taking the oath: New York Republican elected to Congress George Santos admits he has “beautified” his resume but remains deaf to calls to resign.
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Having become famous since the New York Times unveiled the many gray areas of his biography just before Christmas, the 34-year-old elected this week appeared rather isolated in the House of Representatives and escaped journalists’ questions.
Also mistreated on the conservative fetish channel Fox News, where he admitted the “mistake” of having “embellished” his career, this congressional newbie in Washington, now the target of several legal inquiries, including one in Brazil for fraud in stolen checks, refuses to resign.
“I’m not fake,” assured Fox News.
Among the Republicans, embroiled in the impossibility of electing a “speaker”, no heavyweight has publicly asked him to give up his seat, overjoyed by the Democrats in the 3rd district of the state of New York, in the suburbs of the megalopolis.
“Gatsby”
Crossed out baby face with large glasses, George Santos still presents himself on his site as the son of Brazilian immigrants in search of the “American dream”, raised in New York’s popular Queens and openly showing his homosexuality.
But several mentions of his biography have disappeared. Therefore, he did not graduate from Baruch College, nor did he attend the Horace Mann School, a prestigious private high school in the Bronx. He neither worked for Citigroup or Goldman Sachs.
Compared to ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ or ‘The Great Gatsby’, George Santos is also accused of lying or exaggerating reality by portraying himself as ‘a proud American Jew’ – he grew up in a Catholic family but claims his “heritage is Jewish” — or the grandson of Holocaust survivors who fled Nazi barbarism. Head of a financial advisory firm, he also allegedly inflated his financial income and real estate holdings.
” Old ”
Beyond the calls to resign from the Democratic camp, the revelations have sparked a form of astonishment, while the fragile state of American democracy and the misdeeds of disinformation are omnipresent in the public debate in the United States.
For Joshua Tucker, co-director of the Center for the Study of Social Networks and Politics at New York University, it’s more about “old-fashioned political history” than “misinformation about social networks”.
“But the crazy thing about this story is the extent of his lie (…) it’s quite surprising that in the age of modern digital information he got away with it for so long,” he explains to AFP.
Some observers have seen it as a symptom of the difficulties of the local press, in a country where, on average, more than two newspapers disappear a week, according to a report by the Medill School of Journalism of Northwestern University (Illinois) in 2022.
At all costs
However, a conservative local newspaper, The North Shore Leader, had expressed serious doubts about George Santos’ financial situation before his election, but the information was not picked up nationally. Mr. Santos also benefited from disaffection with Democrats in upstate New York during the November midterm elections.
“The press is too easy a target,” wrote two Middle Tennessee State University professors, Ken Paulson and Kent Syler, in The Tennessean newspaper.
According to them, the reproaches should rather be aimed at the Republican and Democratic parties, guilty of not having identified the faults of George Santos much earlier.
“Today’s hyperpolarized political culture is fueled by a win-win mentality where the ends justify the means,” they add.
“People have always lied on their resumes,” Joshua Tucker shades. But what has “perhaps changed” according to him, after Donald Trump’s mandate, is that the limit beyond which a politician is forced to resign has been pushed back.
