George Santos and the fascinating psychology of compulsive liars
Anyone who’s taken a passing look at the news lately knows about the short, ill-fated political career of George Santos. Charged with crimes ranging from false statements to fraud, the former golden boy of the Republican Party was ousted by his own colleagues in December. How did it all go so wrong?
When the 34-year-old representative from New York’s 3rd congressional district flipped the seat in the November 2022 midterm elections, it was celebrated by Republicans as a rare and significant victory. This was a once-safe Democratic seat, where people voted for Joe Biden by a double-digit margin in 2020. How did Santos do it? The answer seems to be: By fictionalizing himself into the perfect candidate.
Aside from the financial and legal crimes he’s been charged with, Santos also stands accused of lying about the entire contents of his résumé, including where he went to college, and even where he went to high school; whether he is married to a man or a woman (he spoke of a husband in his campaign bio, but records only appear to show a marriage and divorce to a woman); how his mother died (not in 9/11, it turns out); whether his grandmother was in the Holocaust and indeed whether any of his family is actually Jewish (it appears they are all actually Brazilian Catholics.) An indictment suggests he allegedly lied about being unemployed in order to collect fraudulent benefits, and spent “thousands of dollars [in campaign funds solicited from the public] on personal expenses, including luxury designer clothing and credit card payments”. He even seems to have claimed he was running an imaginary animal charity. These alleged lies range from the very serious to the comically absurd, from the personal to the professional, and from the clearly self-serving to the head-scratchingly strange. There is a feeling of compulsion to them.
Republicans began stepping away from the Santos bandwagon at the beginning of 2022. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told CNN in January of that year that he about the congressman’s résumé. Representative Nick LaLota — a fellow New York Republican — and six others by the Department of Justice and by the Federal Elections Commission. Former GOP representative Adam Kinzinger to boot Santos out of office. Unsurprisingly, Democratic reactions to Santos’ behavior were even more fiery: Ritchie Torres, the Democratic representative for New York’s 15th congressional district who works near the beginning of the year titled “My new co-worker George Santos is a distraction and a danger to democracy” that called Santos a “liar, cheat and fraud” and “deceitful to the core” within the first two sentences.
