So now that George Santos has been indicted for financial crimes, you might think that the Republican party would want to be done with him. After all, this is the group that looked at Hillary Clinton, who was never accused of any crime, and demanded “lock her up,” and it’s the party that is even now gunning for Hunter Biden, who likewise hasn’t been charged.
But Santos is more than just gooey flotsam in the backwash of a Trump White House that floated on fabrications – ranging from the Inauguration Day weather to the president’s body weight. Santos has a vote that matters to Republican power. So while federal prosecutors have charged him with crimes that could put him in prison for 20 years, the House’s Republican leaders are insisting that he is staying put until he is convicted – if he is convicted.
Santos isn’t just a shake-your-head sideshow revealing how far conservatism has fallen from the standards of integrity exemplified by the likes of Dwight Eisenhower and John McCain. He actually represents the broad threat that is posed by a major political party’s unmooring from truth.
What’s troubling is this: Santos may be brought down by financial shenanigans – you know, a guy who couldn’t pay his rent somehow found $700,000 to lend his campaign – but you’d think the range of his other lies would make him persona non grata among Republican leaders. And that is not what’s happening.
People all across America know Santos for the fabrication of his backstory, which is arguably what got him elected: He made up where he went to college (and he wasn’t a star on that school’s champion volleyball team); he concocted where he worked (it wasn’t for big Wall Street firms); he told of heart-rending but wholly imaginary connections to 9/11 and the Pulse nightclub shootings, and claimed that he was the grandson of Jewish Holocaust survivors, when, actually, his grandparents were born in Brazil, which was not a target of Hitler’s Final Solution.
All that seems to be OK with Republican leaders, including Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, of Upstate New York. So consider this: What if Santos hadn’t needed money? You know, what if those resumé lies were his only offenses? It suggests that a well-funded fabulist might see in George Santos the very model of the modern-day successful politician.
I mean, an ambitious young Republican might reasonably conclude that you can lie absurdly and still get ahead in politics, as long as you don’t break the law. It’s not a crime to lie to voters; indeed, it has come to be a mark of belonging in today’s Republican Party. Santos represents the evolution of the party that once rather ostentatiously stood for rectitude and virtue, but which now has habituated lying.
Six out of 10 Republicans still believe that Joe Biden didn’t win fair and square in 2020. Donald Trump is again the Republican presidential frontrunner, despite overwhelming evidence that he is a pathologic liar – and he insists that candidates who want his endorsement must parrot his Big Lie about 2020.
But that’s not all. There’s the House committee probing imagined “weaponizing” of the federal government, which is itself a weaponizing of Congress for partisan ends. We have Stefanik, whose ambition has clearly outrun her conscience, falsely claiming that poll data proves the 2020 election results would have changed if voters had known what was on Hunter Biden’s laptop. We have Ron DeSantis saying that the bivalent booster vaccine increases the chance that people will get Covid-19. None of that is true.
It's not true that Trump’s tax cuts benefited the middle class. It’s not true that there’s so much vote fraud that we need to tighten restrictions to disenfranchise young people and people of color. It’s not true that the government is coming to take away your guns.
The peril this presents is deep, and it’s embedded in human nature — specifically, in the portion of the brain known as the amygdala. Sophisticated imaging experiments at University College London have shown that the amygdala — which controls our behavioral and emotional responses — adapts to dishonest behavior. So small lies over time make bigger lies easier for our brains to accept, and minor acts of dishonesty more easily escalate into larger ones.
Thus, science shows us how Trump’s Big Lie – that he actually won the 2020 election – can be embraced by so many people: They have grown accustomed to so many smaller lies that they can swallow the big one.
Ironically, it is the reality of the Republican decline into chronic dishonesty that best argues for the party’s rejuvenation in our political scheme. Vladimir Putin’s easy deception – selling the war in Ukraine to the Russian people – shows what can happen when a society lacks a strong political opposition. America needs two parties that openly and honestly compete on the same field, so that citizens can choose the nation’s course. If one party doesn’t play by the rules — which surely must include a basic respect for facts — then we are aimed toward the sort of imbalance that allows the public will to be distorted and perverted by those who care less about the basic human right to self-government.
The fact that Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik and other Republican leaders won’t do anything about the lies of George Santos reveals that a quarter century of distortion of truth, year by year and issue by issue, has yielded a discernible and dangerous wave of disrespect for democracy. That is why George Santos, no less than Vladimir Putin, reveals that the fight for truth is always one that demands more perseverance and energy than we might have imagined.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.