George Santos Can’t Lie This Away

There was nothing really wrong in the mirror. Round cheeks, friendly eyes, an open face. George Santos had an expressive mouth, a large build, and smooth skin. But what he wanted was something different.

Or so he told people.

One of his campaign aides in 2022 recalled that she’d be driving around and then her phone would ring—it would be Santos, excited to talk about body modification. He had just gotten back from having his lips done, he’d gush. The doctor was amazing. “New lips kicked in lol,” he texted once. Or he’d confide about getting liposuction.

Such procedures did not become public knowledge—at least, not until a House Ethics committee report revealed this month that Santos used campaign funds on Botox—but they were sprinkled through many conversations he was having about sculpting his body, both during his campaign and while in office. He talked to one former volunteer about how he’d recently shed weight and also spent big for his Botox. He told a reporter that he’d lost six pounds from walking in his first days in D.C. He mentioned these details in passing, but they were deeply tied to his self-worth, which was clear when he brought the matter up once in an important political meeting. He was pitching himself to some of Long Island’s GOP leadership ahead of his second run, arguing that he could really win. He’d be serious; he’d present an appealing version of himself to voters. So he said he was getting lap band surgery.

Or in the darker moments of election night 2022, when he thought he had lost to his well-coiffed Democratic opponent: “Fuck,” he joked, loudly enough that others heard, “I guess he does have better lip filler than me.” As if that was how voters made their decision.

The vote tally turned his way, however, and that’s why we know his name today—George Santos, the grifter New York congressman, the man who made up almost everything. His college diplomas and his Wall Street jobs. His Holocaust-fleeing grandparents. His education at the fancy private high school, Horace Mann. The four employees he’d personally lost in the Pulse nightclub shooting. The Broadway producer gig for Spider-Man. On and on. Each claim more like a mirage, at best a wild exaggeration. He is a fabulist. These were all just stories he told.

That was something his mother used to say, years before his political career, when she was confronted with yet another lie: “Oh my god, Anthony and his stories.” She said it repeatedly, one ex-roommate remembers. “Don’t listen to him,” she would say of her son, with a tone of exasperation. His fake jobs, his fake life, his fake anecdotes. They’re just stories.

But they were so simple to tell. They smoothed life, like a suction tube can smooth stomachs.

Of course, lies can only smooth so much surface area. They only work until they don’t.
Which is how we got to the 23 charges Santos is facing in federal court; the House Ethics Committee report that found even more obvious, and sleazy, wrongdoing; and a very likely expulsion from Congress later this week, despite his promise not to run for reelection in 2024. He can’t lie this away.

From the beginning Santos had this drive to present a more attractive, higher-class existence, and so he fretted over his looks and he made up fantasies. The changes were unsatisfying, and never more than temporary. They were a shortcut, like Ozempic, the miracle drug celebrities started using to drop pounds right around the time Santos got into national politics. So of course Santos wanted to follow suit. In fact he said so at a Ronald Reagan Republican Club gathering in Commack, New York, where he raved about the results he had seen from his own Ozempic use—and claimed he had stock in the company, too.

This was at a meet-the-candidate night at Mario’s Pizzeria, the April before he won, before he made history. He was still anonymous then, just a guy with a big smile talking next to a silhouette image of the trim, forgiving Gipper. You could have a thought about cholesterol at an event like this, looking out at the trays of pepperoni, the pale senior citizens clutching canes or pillbox-conveyor purses. Santos stood in front of a line of silver catering trays in the pizzeria’s back room, and he did his stump speech, with Ozempic thrown in. Who knows if he really was on the drug at that moment, of course. Who knows if he really had stock in Ozempic’s parent company. His disclosure forms certainly don’t mention the company, even though, ironically, his opponent’s did, in a retirement account. One can’t trust much about Santos’ paperwork—they have been the partial subject of his federal indictment. The record is studded with lies.

Why does Santos fabricate? A family member of his likes to say that with Santos, it’s “a pebble of truth and a mountain of lies.” The mountains, rising higher and higher, are defenses against a deep sense of self-doubt. He himself has sometimes spit out the word “insecurity” when asked about his résumé myths. His happy-go-lucky and even optimistic exterior conceals a churn of enviousness, plus the kind of anxiety that once made him rush back to his campaign staff in the basement of a church in Whitestone, Queens, one freezing New York evening, to erupt into fury about the fuzzy vest he was wearing.

“I can’t believe that nobody told me what I look like in this vest,” he could be overheard saying, remarking on a garment that was perhaps a little too small (a passerby had noted as much). “I’m out there looking like this in front of this crowd of people,” he went on. “It’s embarrassing.” He turned nasty, one bystander said. This was a friendly crowd for Santos, one that was on his side no matter what he looked like or wore—which goes to show how deeply embedded the insecurity was. This was the kind of crowd where a guy with a Santos button told a bystander about once being a Democrat but then switching sides since he didn’t believe in killing babies after they’re born. Lies are contagious and when they spread, they make the whole system sick.

Which is another reason Santos lies. In a political atmosphere full of fabrication and exaggeration, there is often little to no penalty for making things up. His lying had personal benefits, allowing him to get work with few qualifications, to raise money that would have been much harder to garner if he stuck to the truth. He stands accused of cadging government benefits, reimbursing himself for fake loans, and even using the credit card information of donors. His stories paid off—at least until he got elected.

But altogether, the scope of his lying certainly seems to go beyond dishonesty or dissembling for monetary gain alone. It may approach something more clinical—like pseudologia fantastica, defined by Kaplan & Sadock’s Synopsis of Psychiatry as “a type of lying in which a person appears to believe in the reality of his or her fantasies and acts on them.” Factual material is mixed with belabored, creative fluff. Patients “give false and conflicting accounts” of their lives and assume the identities of prestigious others: “Men, for example, report being war heroes and attribute their surgical scars to wounds received during battle or in other dramatic and dangerous exploits,” the textbook claims.

Santos has not (to my knowledge) fabricated a military background for himself. Yet his inventions paint a ghostly picture of the American icon he wanted to become—the made-up character he wanted to see when he looked in the mirror. This hero was contoured and svelte, wealthy and suave, a Wall Street whiz and owner of land, a man who wore Brioni suits and a Cartier family heirloom watch. A well-educated cosmopolitan gent whose inherited family riches were expanded under his watch, a man who understood the economy and helped people manage their money, which was how he made money of his own. A man who got into politics to just bring some sanity back to the proceedings in that unmathematical, emotionally charged field.

This was the man Santos wanted to be, and was anything but. He was often poor, always mooching, rarely gainfully employed for long. He squeezed into shared apartments and wished he could look better and lose a few pounds. His family could not afford fancy private school, the kind that serves as a smooth feeder to elite East Coast colleges, and so he did not graduate from any college at all. He was self-taught, always on edge, sometimes bumbling, and had difficulty finding a score in a modern economy that seems to produce little but money for other people. He jumped into politics because of the grand carnival stage it offered, the only platform he could force his way onto—one of the only real ones to occasionally allow those who do not inherit power to earn it instead. It is a democracy, after all.

Excerpted from The Fabulist, published by One Signal/Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. Copyright © 2023 by Mark Chiusano.