To Republicans, no.
But that comes with a cost in credibility and social standing.
No one trusts liars. If you can’t get facts straight, people won’t listen to you. Climate deniers, anti-vaxxers, and election deniers are considered flakes, and aren’t taken seriously. And Republicans in general aren’t very socially respectable these days.
I don’t need to get philosophical about this. Facts obviously matter. In the movie Don’t Look Up, pretending the comet isn’t coming doesn’t save people from annihilation. An ostrich that buries its head in a road will get run over. Plenty of people refused to believe they had Covid-19 right up to their last breath. Reality bites, whether you acknowledge it or not.
George Santos, who’s maybe 34 years old, was elected last month to represent parts of Queens and Long Island in Congress. The only thing we can say for sure about him is that he identifies as a Republican. (He also says he’s gay, but he was married to a woman, and didn’t disclose his 2019 divorce, see that story here.)
On Monday, December 19, 2022, the New York Times published an exposé alleging Santos fabricated his resume. His alleged fibs include:
- Claiming he graduated from Baruch College in New York, which has no record of his attendance;
- Claiming he attended New York University, which has no record of him;
- Claiming he worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, which have no record of employing him;
- Claiming his family owns 13 New York properties, but the Times found no records of them;
- Claiming his company lost 4 employees in the Pulse Nightclub mass shooting, but the Times’ investigation of all 49 victims found no connection to any firms listed in his biography;
- Claiming he ran a tax-exempt pet rescue charity, but the IRS has no record of it
The New York Times story is behind a paywall; instead, read about it here (Yahoo News) or here (Guardian); many other media sources also picked up the story. Then, on Wednesday, December 21, 2022, additional questions arose about Santos:
- Whether he’s a resident of Florida instead of New York (details here); and
- Whether he’s Jewish as he claims (details here), and
- Whether his grandparents fled the Holocaust as he claims (details here).
In short, it appears he’s an imposter. The Times also discovered that Santos has a criminal record in his native Brazil for writing checks with a stolen checkbook when he was a teenager. Maybe that’s when his dishonesty started, but I’m guessing it began earlier, it being habitual. Maybe his mother dropped him on his head as a baby.
Lying and stealing aren’t the only raps against him; he’s also extremist. Yahoo News says he “appeared at a conservative gala in Manhattan earlier this month alongside white nationalists, rightwing conspiracy theorists and European representatives of far-right parties,” at which Marjorie Taylor Greene also appeared. Those aren’t reputable people to hang out with.
There are two sides to every story, which doesn’t imply both are truthful, but Santos should have a chance to defend himself. He was given that, and declined to be interviewed or answer questions, instead choosing to let his lawyer do the talking; so let’s see what the lawyer says.
Yahoo News reports Santos’ lawyer, Joe Murray, merely issued a statement saying, “It’s no surprise that Congressman-elect Santos has enemies at The New York Times who are attempting to smear his good name with these defamatory allegations.” Murray also wrote, “As Winston Churchill famously stated, ‘You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
But Winston Churchill didn’t say that, Victor Hugo did, in somewhat different wording (details here). If Santos’ lawyer can’t even get attribute a quotation correctly, are you going to listen to anything else he says? Murray didn’t deny anything, anyway. Calling the accusations a “smear” is virtually an admission of guilt.
But does truth even matter, when the voters elected Santos anyway? That’s hard to answer, because the voters didn’t know about this until after the election. A better test case is Herschel Walker. Most Georgia Republicans voted for him despite his prodigious lies, and they clearly don’t care about truth. But he drove away enough independents and Republicans to lose, so it did matter.
It will matter in Santos’ case, too, because when he takes his seat in the House of Representatives next month, nobody will trust him. That will make it excruciatingly hard to do political deals.
In ordinary life, facts always matter. A doctor who gets diagnoses wrong harms his patients. A lawyer who can’t get facts straight in court loses his cases. If a structural engineer miscalculates a load the building may collapse. You’ve got to be right, or things don’t work.
Shouldn’t we expect that in politics, too? Is governing the country any less important than those other things? I won’t even consider voting for Republicans until they get facts right and respect truth, because there’s just no logic to stuff they’re saying now. I’m pragmatic, and I want things to work.