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
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- 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
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