George Santos Is Not a Human, But an Ideal.

He is the man who invented himself.

If George Santos is not a Veep B-plot, he is an exceedingly normal modern conservative. The MAGA movement is built on insane lies with the express intent to grift rubes, and this plays out as a fervid rolling panic attack that raises questions but never answers them. Lionel Trilling described the reactionary mindstate as “a series of irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas” and this has morphed into a more gleeful expression of itself. The style and substance of Republican politics are simultaneously cynical and credulous, blithely predatory and perpetually self-victimizing, bottomlessly thirsty, too angry to think coherently.

Santos has spent his days in Congress as a fabulist dressed like a Paddington bear, wandering into variously humiliating scenarios and looking flummoxed and then posting about it. His list of haphazard and blustering lies is breathtaking: being the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, being the son of a 9/11 victim, working for several Wall Street firms, employing four men killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting, producing Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark, mimicking his campaign opponent’s answer line for line on the question of “what do you like to do with your family?” He seems to earnestly like dogs, but even that’s difficult to parse because of how often he siphoned money intended to help sick dogs and redirected it to his own accounts.

If Santos represents a stress test of America’s flailing democracy, then it failed in precisely the way it has been failing for some time. In a nation that just had Donald Trump as its president, his continued presence in Congress represents less a collapse of the broader system than maddening evidence of the broader system continuing to dither and drift.

There’s something accidentally poignant here. Politicians increasingly behave like influencers—not expected to fix problems, but always ready to project a depraved ideal. Santos holds office to reflect the idle grievances and memetic horror and headlong heedlessness of those vain and furious rubes back at themselves. In the blankest and most implicating sense, he doesn’t deviate from the Republican template—he’s just more overtly fraudulent.