George Santos is the congressman America deserves
He is the right man for a democracy where winning matters more than anything else
Editor’s note: On May 10th federal prosecutors in New York unveiled 13 criminal charges against Mr Santos. The charges include wire fraud, money laundering, stealing public funds and lying to the House of Representatives. Mr Santos pled not guilty.
Why do the many lies of George Santos matter? Maybe some of Mr Santos’s constituents, in a district stretching along the North Shore of Long Island, voted for him in November because they were impressed he was a volleyball star at Baruch College and worked at Goldman Sachs, though none of that is so. Maybe they voted for him because he claimed to be Jewish, though he says now, with Seinfeldian sangfroid, that he meant only that he was “Jew-ish”. If such qualities did in fact seem like reasons enough to cast a ballot for someone, well, the voters deserve what they got.
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “The end of trust”
United States January 21st 2023
- Incomes are rising in America, especially for the poorest
- The presidential mislaying of classified documents is infectious
- How America’s far right flits from issue to issue
- What the spread of universal basic-income schemes says about America’s safety net
- It is still legal to hit children in school in 19 American states
- George Santos is the congressman America deserves
More from United States
An alternative theory to explain America’s murder spike in 2020
What if it wasn’t about policing?
Donald Trump’s defining decade
Will America’s president overcome the 1970s, or just refight its battles?
Donald Trump revives ideas of a Star Wars-like missile shield
He wants a swarm of missile-toting satellites to take out incoming threats
America’s foreign aid pause puts lives at risk
Donald Trump sought disruption. He hurt America first.
Donald Trump goes to war with his employees
The president wants to shrink and remake the civil service
Kash Patel is a crackpot
Is he also a menace?