Opinion: George Santos should be the new face of the GOP

Ultimately, the newly elected representative. George Santos (RN.Y.) is the perfect metaphor for today’s Republican Party. He is the living embodiment of the perpetual dishonesty of the GOP, the physical manifestation of it. Santos puts the “con” – three of them, actually – in “contemporary conservative congressman”.

Santos is to the GOP what Thanos is to the MCU, only then a finger snaps and Republican integrity crumbles to dust.

Listen: Perhaps about five years ago, George Santos lying to Congress would have been shocking news, no matter what party he ran for. He is a man who seems to have lied about their ancestors and family background, religious affiliation, education, work history, finances, grandparents flee the Holocaust and his mother die in the September 11 attacks. And these are just a few of his false and misleading statements.

Yes, we should all find that shocking― but then I remember Herschel Walker.

Not too long ago, Walker was a handful of MAGA votes away from representing Georgia in the Senate, despite lying and/or misleading his work with law enforcement and the FBI. , being in the army, donate company profits to charity and start a charity for veterans. He also wrongly claimed he graduated from the University of Georgia ― then wrongly claimed he didn’t wrongly claim.

Let’s say Walker had been elected to the Senate. What exactly would have been the difference between him and Santos? (To be fair, Walker didn’t lie about parents fleeing or dying in Hurricane Katrina or anything like that.)

In fact, Santos and Walker might even have lied about joint charities, as Santos recently did. accused by a disabled Navy veteran for pocketing funds he supposedly raised for life-saving surgery for the veteran’s service dog. (Santos denies the allegation.)

Before Walker and Donald Trump and MAGA and “stop theft” and January 6th and Marjorie Taylor Greene and QAnon and Lauren Boebert and the conservative scaremongering war on critical race theory (and the subsequent gentrification of the word “woke”) and so on and so on and so on – before all of that, Santos’ rise to Congress would have been extraordinary. Still shameful, but extraordinary. Now he just seems like the new ordinary.

Speaking of Trump, it should come as no surprise that on January 6, 2021 – just before a mob of disgruntled Republican voters, who were all lied to, attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn a legitimate election – Santos spoke at Trump’s infamous rally in Washington, D.C. Not only did Santos echo Trump’s big ‘stop theft’ lie, but he claimed, without evidence, that his own previous 2020 congressional bid was stolen from him through voter fraud (imaginary).

“If you’re from New York, you know what they did to me ― they did to me what they did to Donald J. Trump,” Santos exclaimed. “They stole my election!” (According to his ex-roommate, the only thing Fly has been the scarf that Santos wore at the time.)

“For 14 days, I served as a congressman-elect from New York’s 3rd congressional district,” he continued. “The first ever biggest upset for a Republican in New York, and what did they do? When they were too busy printing 280,000 ballots ― in my district and shipping them to Pennsylvania ― they slipped a few -some of my opponent.(That would now be former Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat.)

So here, Santos has taken Trump’s election-stealing voter-cheating fantasy and incorporating his own election-stealing voter-cheating fantasy into it. (It’s like “Inception,” but with GOP propaganda.)

Considering that Republican lawmakers helped a sitting president foster a political environment where anything goes and anything can be said, no matter how dishonest, dangerous, and ridiculous he is, it would be hard to take one of them seriously. between them beginning to feign shock and awe because now an alleged crook has joined their ranks. (That’s why I’m not terribly impressed with the growing number of Republican officials calling on Santos to step down.)

Remember, 147 Republican lawmakers voted to nullify a valid election based on Trump’s big scam, which Santos endorsed and even added. Now Santos is the ‘big lie’. And it’s not that Trump and Santos are two peas in a pod — it’s that so many prominent Republicans are becoming the people of the pod who conform to the illusion and lower what should be the standard for the elect. And that’s how someone like Santos—who is currently the subject of federal, state, and international investigations, all based on suspicion of fraud—can slip through the cracks and land straight into a congressional seat. .

Look, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m being too hard on the GOP and ignoring the possibility that the next variation of Anna Delvey to fake (to voters) until they get there (to Congress) might be a Democrat. Maybe it was just a matter of verification that got Santos through, not the political culture of normalized lying that I believe the Republican Party has spent most of the past decade doubling, tripling on and quadruple. All I can say for sure is that it shouldn’t be so easy to lie and get away with it for the people in charge of the legislation.

But Santos makes it look easy, and so does his party. And that doesn’t sound like a coincidence, does it?