George Santos Is The Poster Child For The Trump Era

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Fred Wertheimer’s Weekly Note | May 11, 2023

On Wednesday, Rep. George Santos (R-NY) was arrested and charged with 13 federal crimes – seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of making false statements to Congress.

With so much in the news this week – from former President Trump’s guilty verdict in the sexual abuse and defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll in New York, to the debt crisis that is bringing us ever closer to a financial catastrophe, to the latest mass shootings – it would be easy to shrug off the news of Santos’s arrest.

But we dismiss this grifter at our peril.

He is not a punch line. George Santos is the latest poster child for a political era created by former President Trump and his disdain for truth, democratic values, and the rule of law.

When Donald Trump entered the 2016 presidential campaign, few realized that a boastful, lying con man would be taken seriously as a presidential candidate. Late-night television hosts had a field day. We dismissed him at our peril, as we learned during his destructive and dishonest presidency.

Back in January, on the first day of the new Congress, Democracy 21 called on the House Ethics Committee to immediately investigate Santos and we recommended he be expelled from the House.

We cited the House’s own “Code of Official Conduct” that states that a Member “shall behave at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House.”

An expeditious investigation of Santos, we wrote, would show beyond any reasonable doubt that his duplicitous campaign and egregious deception of the voters in his district failed “to reflect creditably on the House” and made him unfit to serve as a Member of Congress.

Even as more and more evidence of Santos’s deceits came to light over the past four months, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans stayed mostly silent. Yesterday, following Santos’s arrest, McCarthy said the House would not act to remove him.

While MAGA Republicans in the House continue their partisan attacks and phony investigations of what they have dubbed the “weaponized” federal government, they have chosen to pretty much ignore a real investigation in plain sight – the frauds and lies of George Santos.

And, Santos isn’t the only one whose unacceptable conduct gets a “pass” from House Republicans.

Last month, McCarthy said he had no concerns, “not at all,” about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after ProPublica  investigations revealed that Thomas had failed to disclose, as required, luxury gifts from a Republican megadonor. These included expensive vacations, a rent-free house for Thomas’s mother, and tuition payments for a child Thomas was “raising like a son.”

House MAGA Republicans also continue to give former President Trump a pass on his innumerable transgressions. McCarthy has gone out of his way to thank Trump for being with him “since the beginning,” and was quick to attack Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg when the DA brought charges against the former President in March.

Also in the news this week, Tucker Carlson announced that his canceled Fox News show would be reinvented on Twitter.

“At the most basic level, the news you consume is a lie,” he said on Tuesday, suggesting that only his show would give the truth. Rich words, indeed, from the man who regularly spread disinformation and whose texts after the 2020 election showed that he didn’t believe the lies his show was spreading that the election had been stolen from Trump.

Carlson continues to be a mouthpiece for the lies of Trump and his MAGA supporters. He has helped embolden the violent fringe of the MAGA movement and has spewed anti-immigrant and racist hatred on his program.

Citizens must not shrug off the lies, deceits, and duplicity of former President Trump, George Santos, Tucker Carlson, and others.

We deserve better than the liars, scammers, and grifters who sow division, hatred, and violence, and who seek to damage our democracy and tear our nation apart.

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Fred’s Weekly Note appears each Thursday in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s and other recent newsletters here. And, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.