Free at last!
George Santos is Rep. Santos no more. In a bipartisan vote that handily exceeded the two-thirds requirement, the U.S. House voted to expel the mutiply indicted Santos on Friday morning.
Not to worry, George Washington Anthony Elizabeth Taylor Devolder Kitara Julius Caesar Santos will land on his feet, even if he has (for now) denied he is in talks with “Dancing With the Stars.” He’ll have no trouble staying busy. Facing 23 felony charges (he has pleaded not guilty) Santos has a full schedule planning for his trial in September next year:
The schemes laid out by prosecutors are wide ranging. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York say he falsified campaign reports with fake donations and fictional personal loans to artificially bolster his standing. They say he stole from donors, using their credit cards without authorization and through a Florida company called Redstone Strategies. And they have charged him with collecting more than $20,000 in unemployment payments when he was, in fact, employed.
Prosecutors say that Mr. Santos used the money on personal expenses, including designer goods and credit card payments. (House ethics investigators added more detail, showing that Mr. Santos used donor funds on Botox treatments, his rent and a website called OnlyFans known for adult content.)
Santos will have his Trumpish revenge on his former colleagues sooner (Newsweek):
Santos hit back on X, formerly Twitter, in a series of posts. He wrote that he will report four of his former colleagues, three Republicans and one Democrat, who voted against him to the Office of Congressional Ethics. Those listed were New Jersey Democrat Rob Menendez and Republicans Nicole Malliotakis, Mike Lawler and Nick LaLota. Newsweek has reached out to the offices of Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, Rep. Mike Lawler and Rep. Nick LaLota by email, as well as that of Rep. Rob Menendez by telephone and voicemail message.
Posting on X, Santos wrote that he would request an investigation into Malliotakis, “regarding her questionable stock trading since joining the Ways and Means committee this Congress.”
The disgraced former congressman accused Lawler of “questionable campaign finance violations,” adding: “Congressman Lawler owns portion of Checkmate Strategies and he uses the same firm that he is a beneficiary of to pay for services related to his campaign. The concerning questions are; is Mr Lawler engaging in laundering money form his campaign to his firm then into his own pocket?” Newsweek has not as yet been able to verify Santos’ claims.
In recognition of his accomplishments in the field of public corruption, Michelle Goldberg declares Santos a Child of the MAGAverse:
Should the blessed day ever arrive when Donald Trump is sent to federal prison, only one of his acolytes has earned the right to share his cell: George Santos, who on Friday became the sixth person in history to be expelled from the House of Representatives, more than seven months after he was first charged with crimes including fraud and money laundering. (He’s pleaded not guilty.) A clout-chasing con man obsessed with celebrity, driven into politics not by ideology but by vanity and the promise of proximity to rich marks, Santos is a pure product of Trump’s Republican Party. “At nearly every opportunity, he placed his desire for private gain above his duty to uphold the Constitution, federal law and ethical principles,” said a House Ethics Committee report about Santos released last month. He’s a true child of the MAGA movement.
No less than the trees and the stars….
That movement is multifaceted, and different politicians represent different strains: There’s the dour, conspiracy-poisoned suburban grievance of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the gun-loving rural evangelicalism of Lauren Boebert, the overt white nationalism of Paul Gosar and the frat boy sleaze of Matt Gaetz. But no one embodies Trump’s fame-obsessed sociopathic emptiness like Santos. He’s heir to Trump’s sybaritic nihilism, high-kitsch absurdity and impregnable brazenness.
Santos learned from the master and earned his star in the MAGA Walk of Shame:
As New York magazine’s Shawn McCreesh reported in March, at a Manhattan birthday party for the Breitbart editor Emma-Jo Morris, Santos was “the ‘It’ girl. His wrists are bedizened with bling from Hermès and Cartier, and fawning fans line up for selfies.” A month later, The Intercept’s Daniel Boguslaw described Santos being feted at a bar in Washington: “A milieu of young conservatives, operatives and House staffers were assembling to howl in the next-gen model of Donald Trump’s societal wrecking ball, and the name on everybody’s lips was George Santos.” A hard-core MAGA group called Washington, D.C. Young Republicans posted about Santos’s “inspirational remarks” at that event, including his insistence that his enemies will have to “drag my cold, dead body” out of Congress. Gosar chimed in with an admiring response: “Based.”
Adam Serwer, Goldberg reminds readers, observed that for Trumpists, “the cruelty is the point.” Beyond that, however, “Rule breaking is key to Trump’s transgressive appeal; it situates him as above the strictures that govern lesser men while creating a permission structure for his followers to release their own inhibitions.”
Perhaps that is part of Trump’s appeal to evangelicals. Their faith is a web of prohibitions and peer pressure to conform to the oversold image of what a Christian husband or wife is. Add to that prohibitions on drinking or dancing or fun outside church and the pressures to deliver must be intense, almost but not quite cult-like.
Trumpism is like a papal indulgence to throw off all that and … indulge. Indulge in hating your enemy, in bathing in riches, in lying and cheating. All secure in the belief that their liberation has received the Donald J. Trump Seal of Approval.
“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”