If George Santos is expelled, I’m going to miss him

On Tuesday afternoon in Washington, D.C., a group of volunteers flew a 15-foot-tall balloon with the likeness of George Santos between the Capitol and the Washington Monument. The balloon Santos wore glasses much like those worn by the human Santos, as well as a suit and a tie that read, “Full of lies.”

Last week, Santos said he will not be running to keep his seat in Congress representing New York’s 3rd District. He made the announcement shortly after the release of a 55-page report from the House Ethics Committee. The report states, among other things, that Santos spent campaign funds on Botox treatments and extravagant trips to the Hamptons and Atlantic City.

The ethics investigation appears to have convinced some of Santos’ colleagues from his own party to vote to expel him, including Ethics Chairman Michael Guest, R-Miss., who will bring an expulsion resolution to the House floor as early as this week.

Santos, a Republican, seems to think his expulsion is inevitable. During a conversation on X Spaces over the weekend, Santos said, “I know I’m going to get expelled when this expulsion resolution goes to the floor. I’ve done the math over and over, and it doesn’t look really good.”

So our final hours with Santos in the U.S. House of Representatives are nigh, it seems. And should the House vote to expel, despite my better judgment, I will miss him.

Obviously, this man should not be in the highest legislative body in the land. Or in any profession that requires honesty, fiduciary prudence or decency.

The time for him to be expelled was a year ago when we first learned he had lied about pretty much every bullet point on his resume. According to The New York Times, Santos never worked at Citigroup or Goldman Sachs, and never attended Baruch College or NYU, despite his claims otherwise. His so-called “family firm” had no clients and was named “The Devolder Organization,” a name so clearly fake, it would make even George Costanza, he who named Vandelay Industries, scoff.

His pet “charity” allegedly never did anything charitable, and the only employment that could be verified by the Times was a role in a company that turned out to be running a Ponzi scheme.

But instead of admitting to having lied about his entire life story, Santos dug his heels in, denied the allegations and has spent the past year producing a torrent of even more lies and shenanigans, each one more absurd than the one before.

It’s been embarrassing for the country and our reputation. For those of us who have a touch of political nihilism and a love for drama, though, it’s been more than a little amusing.

So, in remembrance of Santos’ single year in office, I’ve decided to revisit some of the strangest Santosisms from the last year.

He may or may not be married

Though his original campaign biography mentioned a husband, The Daily Beast was unable to find any record of his marriage. There is a record, however, of his divorce from a woman in 2019. They had been married for five years. During their marriage, Santos planned an engagement party to celebrate his upcoming nuptials to his boyfriend, but the party never happened because the boyfriend did not accept the proposal. Maybe because Santos was married to a woman at the time? I got really into “Days of Our Lives” one summer and no plot line on that soap ever came close to this level of complication.

He claimed to have been a Broadway producer

During his 2021 campaign, Santos reportedly told donors he was one of the producers of the Broadway production “Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark.” The actual producers deny this claim, which was a curious one for Santos to make. The play seemed cursed with all kinds of production problems, including injuries, delays and millions of dollars lost. The play was such a flop that I have to wonder if Santos was somehow involved. It would honestly explain a lot.

Related

• George Santos won’t run for reelection after ethics committee released report

• Why the Justice Department filed criminal charges against George Santos

He gave snacks to the press but refused to answer questions

Maybe he was trolling members of the media. Maybe he was lonely and trying to make friends. Maybe the chicken sandwiches were an attempt at distracting reporters and the American people from his alleged deceptions. Maybe he thought waffle fries worked in lieu of answers to serious questions.

He compared himself to Rosa Parks after Mitt Romney said Santos should sit in the back

After an inaudible but visibly aggressive exchange of words between Sen. Mitt Romney and Santos in the House chamber ahead of the State of the Union address, Romney told reporters, “Given the fact that (Santos) is under ethics investigation, he should be sitting in the back row and staying quiet.”

And Santos just couldn’t help himself:

He maybe tried to steal a baby?

In October, while the House was trying to elect a speaker — surely a stressful time for the members — Santos walked out of Rep. Tim Burchett’s office holding a baby. When someone asked if it was Santos’ baby, Santos replied “Not yet!”

Though Santos’ staff claimed the baby belonged to a staffer, according to Business Insider, the baby did not belong to any of Burchett’s staffers. Burchett wasn’t even in his office at the time.

He pretended to be a Mets fan and sort of sang, badly, in a video

Actual New York Mets fans did not take kindly to Santos’ display of support on X.

In a Wiki post, he claimed to have been on ‘Hannah Montana’

The user Anthony Devolder, an alias for Santos, created a Wikipedia bio in which he claimed to have appeared on the Disney Channel series alongside Miley Cyrus. The bio also stated that he appeared in a movie starring Uma Thurman named “The Invasion.” Uma Thurman has never been in a movie named “The Invasion.”

These are the more harmless of Santos’ antics, the ones that are easy to laugh about. Lies and actions so strange that even the most imaginative writers could never dream of creating a character so outlandish and unintentionally hilarious.

Santos has, of course, allegedly done far more insidious things, like committing identity theft, lying about his mother’s death being a result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, claiming his grandmother was a Holocaust victim, stealing money from a veteran, stealing money from donors and lying to Congress.

These are all above and beyond grounds for expulsion, and it’s shameful it’s taken this long to get him out of the Capitol.

But the part of me that has been delighted by the never-ending supply of absurd news stories with Santos at the center — like some sort of deranged box of chocolates — will miss him when he’s gone.