Will George Santos or reality win in 2023? | Will Bunch Newsletter

Despite the dense fog of dread, 2022 ended up being a year of rising hope … and unfinished business. I surely felt that as a sports nut, watching my two favorite teams, the Union and the Phillies, grasping for the top rung of the ladder and getting knocked off. America felt it, too. Democrats saved democracy but don’t have the votes to govern. Donald Trump is exposed but unpunished. Will 2023 bring more agony … or justice? Join me for the ride! And Happy New Year to all.

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Deep inside a daily political newsletter, under the sub-headline, “A new challenger rises,” Long Island’s once-honored, now-depleted hometown newspaper, Newsday, wrote about George Anthony Devolder Santos for the very first time on Nov. 13, 2019. It uncritically reported on his claim to work in private equity — “not a one percenter, I work for the one percent” — and his pledge in running for Congress to be “not your typical Republican,” as a gay man supporting marriage equality and a child of immigrants backing citizenship for young “Dreamers.”

Added Newsday: “His lighthearted Instagram account includes vacation pictures and hashtags like #funtimes and #foreveronvacation sprinkled with #maga and #americafirst.”

It turns out that Newsday, which has won 19 Pulitzer Prizes, didn’t dig as deep into Santos as an 18-year-old boyfriend did five years earlier. He told the New York Times that after Santos presented him with a gift of tickets for a Hawaii trip that proved to be fake, amid fear that this future congressman-elect had stolen and pawned his cell phone, the teen discovered in a simple Google search what eluded journalists and everyone else in two separate U.S. House campaigns: His now-ex had faced criminal charges as an alleged checkbook thief in Brazil.

Santos is far from the first candidate to hide an ugly truth from his past, but his legal woes in his parents’ native country are apparently just one molehill upon a mountain of lies with little precedent in American political history. He’s already admitted — after better-late-than-never reporting by the New York Times — that he lied about getting a college degree and working for two top Wall Street firms, and there’s substantial evidence he fibbed about other basic aspects of his life, such as owning 13 properties, as well as his concealed marriage to a woman.

The congressman-elect gives off the vibe of a compulsive liar. He needlessly claimed his mother, who was actually a cook, also worked on Wall Street and somehow died both in the 9/11 attacks and again in 2016. Nothing in his life suggests how he could have earned the more-than $700,000 he reported loaning to his 2022 campaign. Hours before Santos took the oath, Brazilian officials vowed to seek his re-arrest on the bad-check allegation, now that they know where he is.

Despite all that, House GOP leaders — especially the top man, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who desperately needs Santos’ vote to become speaker on Tuesday (and may still fall short) — have said nothing, and the current vibe is that there wouldn’t be enough Republican votes to expel Santos even if he is criminally charged here in the U.S. Given the mounting evidence, it’s not inconceivable that the Queens native could finish his two-year term from a prison cell.

There’s two reasons why the politically obsessed can’t stop talking about this. First, it’s just an incredible yarn, a tale certain to launch 1,000 podcasts, a Netflix documentary, a Hulu series, and God knows what else. But it also says so much about the state of the nation at the dawn of 2023. It’s almost a cliché to note that Santos — with his growing list of shocking transgressions — would be long gone as recently as a decade ago (or last week if he were a Democrat like Al Franken). How could he get away with it for so long? More specifically, how could this happen in a mostly affluent, well-educated — and media-saturated — congressional district?

To me, several factors stand out:

➡️ The decline of institutions. Full disclosure: I worked at Newsday, on Long Island and then New York City, from 1985-95, when it had a deep-pocketed corporate owner and seemingly endless resources. We covered the heck out of even the dullest congressional races (I’m still mad about missing Game 4 of the 1986 World Series to moderate a debate in one) and I can’t image Santos getting away with it back then. But Santos’ 3rd Congressional District on the north shore of western Long Island and Queens is also soaked with TV and radio stations, as well as three city newspapers — all of which failed to do the most basic background checks (while a small weekly that got part of the story was ignored) in today’s overworked arena of “hot takes” and clickbait.

But the media isn’t supposed to be the sole gatekeeper. The Nassau County Republican Party was a ruthlessly efficient (and, yes, corrupt in all the old-fashioned ways) machine when I worked on Long Island, and it’s mind-boggling that Santos could get vetted and nominated not once but twice — the second time for an open, competitive race. New York’s decrepit Democratic Party did a mild vetting that missed the worst stuff — and wasn’t picked up by anyone.

➡️ The Trump factor. The utter creation of a congressional candidate from whole cloth — to the point where folks are now wondering if he’s even a U.S. citizen, or really named George Santos — seems the inevitable consequence of the lack of consequences for a president who lied at least 30,573 times in office. (A good reminder this week was a 2020 clip of Trump telling a questioner that his tax returns would show he paid “millions of dollars.” Reality? He paid $750.) Trump lied so that Santos could invent.

➡️ Lack of accountability. The George Santos moment comes just as many Americans are starting to wonder if anyone in a position of power or influence can ever be held to serious account for their transgressions. Trump, whose business empire is getting slapped on the wrist for years of accounting fraud, and who travels the country running for president despite a failed coup and making off with top-secret papers, is Exhibit A. But whether it’s Mark Meadows’ voting shenanigans or Rep. Matt Gaetz’s peccadillos or the subpoena defiance of McCarthy and other House Republicans, the powerful always seem to walk in the end. If Santos stays in Congress despite his massive fraud, does anything matter anymore?

The irony here is that Santos’ win occurred, to steal a soccer phrase, against the run of play. His victory was aided by fluky New York-area political conditions — local Democratic incompetence, media hysteria over urban crime — in a year in which, nationally, voters seemed to crave a return to normalcy as epitomized by President Biden. As Mr. Santos goes to Washington this week, Biden heads to Cincinnati for a head-turning fixing-the-bridges media event with GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. POTUS 46 is betting that voters want bland bipartisanship over political melodrama, and will reward results, not Fox News chyrons, as he inevitably seeks reelection in 2024.

George Santos is a real-life test of just how far America has come on the two-year anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and failed coup. Personally, I don’t see how this freshman survives two months on Capitol Hill, let alone two years — but then it never should have come nearly this far. That said, if the hammer of accountability finally comes down on this congressional con artist, can actual justice for his role model — Trump — and the ex-president’s band of co-conspirators be far behind? Happy New Year, indeed.

Question: Do you think [Attorney General Merrick] Garland indicting Trump for mishandling documents, but bailing on Jan. 6 charges, will appease those who oppose him, or enrage them? — Via John Boyko (@RandyJMacon) on Twitter

Answer: That’s a great question. The walls are clearly closing in on Donald Trump as 2023 arrives. The damning report of the House Jan. 6 Committee, the lethargic and weak launch of Trump’s supposed 2024 presidential campaign, unforced errors like the antisemitic summit at Mar-a-Lago — all of these things have made it more likely that prosecutors will finally find the guts this year to charge a former POTUS for at least some of his myriad crimes. Given Garland’s legendary caution, it’s feasible to see the top federal lawman taking the “courageous” and unprecedented step of charging Trump in the open-and-shut case of making off with classified documents, and doing little else. But stopping there would be a tragic and consequential error. Germany after 1923 learned the mistake of not treating an attempted coup with the utmost seriousness. Failing to charge the mastermind of America’s putsch ensures something worse in the near future.

For too many residents of beleaguered Buffalo this holiday season, it was the question of a lifetime. Which was a bigger risk: Venturing out in a historically bad blizzard with zero visibility as snowfall climbed to four feet in some neighborhoods — or the consequences of missing work in a blue-collar city where so many families exist from paycheck to paycheck? Some of those who felt they had to make their appointed rounds of work paid the ultimate price, in a weather calamity that has claimed at least 39 lives. “Most of the calls were people trapped in their cars,” emergency services technician Felicia Williams told the Washington Post. “We were doing everything in our power to get to them, but the truth is those people in stuck vehicles shouldn’t have been there and there will be many deaths because of that.”

This weekend marked the end of 2022 — a year in which America fixated on the myriad holes in our democracy but did precious little to address our other failing mega-system: late-stage capitalism. Millions of Americans clung to the cruel contract of their “essential” jobs with little help from a bare-bones government more fixated on keeping taxes low (or hiring more cops) than providing help. That was a lethal cocktail for some folks in upstate New York. But the warped incentives of our capitalist system also drove the other big story of Christmas week: the implosion of Southwest Airlines that wrecked holiday travel for thousands. It turned out that an airline that took in $7 billion in federal COVID-19 aid gave its CEO a big raise and bought back stock to enrich investors but didn’t spend a dime on upgrading the outdated information technology that predictably failed last week. And once again, the government watched, helplessly.

The chaos and catastrophe of Christmastime 2022 held a lesson: Making sure that election deniers and QAnon wackadoodles don’t take office is just a first step toward saving the American Experiment — and maybe the easiest one. The things that are needed to bring back the middle class — a guaranteed living wage, stronger unions, aid to families that includes child care and the child tax credit, free higher-ed options, higher taxes on the rich, checks on corporate greed, and a stress on social services instead of overpolicing — look unlikely, at least from a gridlocked federal government. And you won’t really save democracy until you fix these flaws of capitalism — hopefully before its meltdown produces the kind of demagogue that will make us nostalgic for Donald Trump.