The Interesting Question About George Santos

In case this is not known to you, George Santos is a 34 year old man who was elected to the federal House of Representatives from some district in NY.

It turns out that more or less nothing Santos said about himself when he was running was true.  He did not graduate from any college (nor attend them, and he claimed degrees from two), he was not an employee of either company he named, he did not have employees who were killed in the Pulse nightclub as he alleged, he did not own several residences (he lived with his sister), he is not Jewish (nor were his close ancestors) -- he tried to clean that up by some other collection of lies about his close ancestors, and say he meant "Jew-ish" -- and the "truth" of him is frankly entirely unknown.  He had some sort of business of some kind, but it did not pay him remotely what he claimed to have made.  (He seems to have loaned himself money from his campaign accounts, and claimed it as income.)  Those were the lies of commission.  The lies of omission were the multiple evictions and debt defaults in NY, and the criminal fraud conviction in Brazil.  It's hard to know how to categorize the claim of having been divorced from a woman, and being homosexual and married to a man, when no marriage to a man has been found on record.  The New York Times investigated him for some reason, and turned up this astonishing list of frank lies Santos told.  Santos had refused to talk to Times reporters and investigative staff, but he lashed out at them after they published their column about him, essentially accusing them of picking on him.  But he also admitted to every one of the lies, claiming, as a junior high school or high school student, caught with his pants down, might, that lots of people "embellish" their resumes.  He portrayed it as a sort of essentially harmless white lie.  The only problem with this dodge is that he used these lies to appeal to voters when he was running (he won!) for Congress.  And he's to be sworn in next week, despite calls for his resignation first.

There's a video in this story -- Another one of George Santos's claims has unraveled in less than 24 hours (msn.com) -- and one of the presenters poses a question at the end of the clip: "did he have to lie?"

Santos was running for office.  He told an astonishing list of lies about himself, to make himself more appealing (somehow better qualified; more deserving of sympathy) than he really was.  One way to interpret the presenter's question -- did he need to lie? -- is would he have been less likely to get elected if he had not lied.  No one can know that.  Even if anyone could go back to every citizen who cast a vote, and ask them if they would vote for him now, or even if they would still have voted for him then, if he had not lied, they now know two things about him they didn't know before.  One is his real resume, and the other is that he is an inveterate liar.  It might be hard for them accurately to reconsider whether or not they would have voted for him if they known his resume was in fact very thin, now that they also know how shockingly dishonest he is.  It might be hard for them to factor out what they now know about his ethical sense, or lack of one.

But perhaps the more important answer to the "did he have to lie" question is that he apparently thought he had to lie.  Lying was his choice.  He had less confidence in his chances if he didn't lie.

So, maybe that's the answer: yes, he had to lie.  He thought he did, he lied, and he got elected.  He calculated that he needed the lies in order to get votes.  (He ran in '20, and didn't get elected, and ran in '22, and did get elected.  I have not seen any reports as to whether he told the same lies in '20 that he did in '22.  I don't know if telling these lies was a new strategy, and it worked, or if the approach to the voters was the same both times, but for some reason, the outcome was different this time.)  But, he doesn't deserve the votes, and he should step down.  He's a kid, but he's not a child, and it's unlikely he'll have learned a lesson from this.  That needs to be his problem.