Am I the only person on the planet who missed the news? A press release from the Eastern District of New York US Attorney’s Office a month ago announced George Santos’s guilty plea. He admitted to filing fraudulent FEC reports, embezzling funds from campaign donors, charging credit cards without authorization, stealing identities, fraudulently obtaining unemployment benefits and lying to the House of Representatives.
Announcing the plea, Thomas M. Fattorusso, Special Agent in Charge, said,
“Today, for what may seem like the first time since he started his campaign for Congress, Mr. Santos told the truth about his criminal schemes. He admitted to lying, stealing and conning people,” stated U.S. Attorney Breon Peace for the Eastern District of New York. “By pleading guilty, Mr. Santos has acknowledged that he repeatedly defrauded federal and state government institutions as well as his own family, supporters and constituents. His flagrant and disgraceful conduct has been exposed and will be punished. Mr. Santos’s conviction demonstrates this Office’s enduring commitment to rooting out corruption and grift by public officials.”
The relative quiet about this makes me wonder if outrageous, even criminal behavior, by political figures has become normalized to the extent that what should be a major news story gets so little buzz.
The New York Times ran an opinion piece the other day by Michael Hirschorn, former head of programming at VH1, about how reality TV, something Trump has more than passing familiarity with, has shaped our collective political sensibilities. He initially wonders, along with the rest of us,
“…how Donald Trump could remain within sight of being our president again despite flattering dictators, inspiring an attempted coup, getting convicted on 34 felony counts, vowing to shred the Constitution and imprison opponents, and decorating his bathroom with state secrets, not to mention blustering semi-coherently in Tuesday’s debate…”
He explains this, along with the bad behavior of other political figures, by looking at the ways in which reality TV shows like Survivor, Real Housewives and The Apprentice featured cast members (sorry to burst the bubble for anyone who still might think that there’s any reality there) who achieved their dominance and popularity by being nasty and underhanded.
I think Hirschorn is onto something. Reality stars’ formula for success became the blueprint for Trump, Santos, Elise Stefanik, Marjory Taylor-Green, Lauren Boebert, Kari Lake, Josh Hawley, Jim Jordan, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz and many, many more. Take a look at a the results of a “Worst” poll in The New Republic for a much more comprehensive list that includes many categories of awfulness.
Put your nominees for worst in the comments section. Let’s see who comes out on top in a real reality show.
I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Hi Alan. There were about umpteen other news stories that were getting coverage that week. It is unsurprising that news of the Santos plea was missed.
My Republican opponent, Elise Stefanik, is a former "bestie" of (Little Boy) George Santos. She opposed the initial attempts to have him removed from Congress. I suppose she needed as many Republican misfits in the NY Congressional Delegation as possible.
The amazing thing to me about George Santos is that his political career ever happened at all. How is it that Santos managed to petition and get on the ballot? How is it that he had enough fundraising to fund his candidacy? The answer is through party support. Wanna run for office? Put an "R" behind your name and you're in. And through PAC money and voter numbers in many counties, you're soon packing your bags for DC. Am I envious? Kinda, but no. I would much rather be a member of a party that maintains a healthy cynicism and skepticism about its candidates, than to be in a party that is desperately seeking its next 90-day-wonder. But we should take caution: the 90-day-wonders of the MAGA party (JD Vance, Elise Stefanik, Josh Hawley, Mike Johnson, and that ilk) are young, well-educated, and well-funded. I'm in my race because I see the threat of their collective power to be far more ominous than the threat of MAGA in Chief Donald Trump. Trump will leave the scene one day (soon, I hope). But he will leave behind a relatively young class of political misfits who have spent 8-10 years under his gaze, and who are now morally and ethically bankrupt. It will take at least a generation to correct what happened in approximately 10 years.
--Paula Collins, Democratic Candidate, NY's 21st Congressional District.
Agreed. "Reality" television, with its ever-lowering standards and modeling of behavior, along with similar in social media "discourse," has facilitated the utter debasement of public life. Even twenty years ago, the contemptible likes of Trump, Santos, Taylor-Greene and Vance would be gone -- simply banished from politics and government. Objectively it is remarkable what has happened to us, but in the end it is sad, really.