The (in)credible Mr. Santos: A test of integrity in public life

Whenever money, power, and politics are on the line, there are not just a few who will lie or steal to grab as much as they can.

That’s been true since the dawn of human civilization, which is in many ways defined by its particular social contracts and the layers of safeguards and systems of rewards and punishments that create incentives for citizens to abide by their terms.

The ongoing saga of newly elected Republican Rep. George Santos, however, has highlighted how much various social arenas rely on the value of personal integrity. Many of the ebbs and flows of human interactions are beyond the scope of the systems designed to encourage people to follow the rules. Clothed in notions of honor and social mores, including honesty and citizenship, that contribute to the common good, personal integrity often underlies a healthy, well-functioning society.

Mr. Santos appears to have fabricated most every part of the person he presented to voters, including his entire education and employment history, his property holdings, and especially his family history and ethnic background. He falsely claimed to be the grandson of Holocaust survivors, falsely claimed his mother died in the 9/11 attacks, falsely claimed to have founded a charity for animals, and falsely claimed that four employees of an unnamed company he said he owned were killed during the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. Perhaps most legally perilous: It is unclear what the source is for the more than $700,000 he loaned his campaign last fall. Mr. Santos is now being investigated by Nassau County, the Eastern District of New York, and the country of Brazil, which has reopened a 2008 fraud case involving a stolen checkbook. Despite all that, he was sworn in Saturday morning with the rest of the 118th Congress.

“Part of the reason that George Santos slipped through is because the kinds of lies that he told were not just over-the-top lies; they were the kinds of lies that people don’t even think to check most of the time, because who tells lies like that?” says Justin Buchler, professor of political science at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. “When somebody just makes up the kinds of lies that a normal, sane person would not think to lie about, then few are going to check it.”

On Monday, the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group in Washington, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, accusing the congressman of violating campaign finance law. Given his fabricated biography, the complaint said, the commission should investigate “what appear to be equally brazen lies about how his campaign raised and spent money.”

For his part, Representative Santos has admitted to fabricating his education and “embellishing” his employment history, but says he is not a criminal.

A failure of the system?

But there is also what might be called systematic integrity. On the one hand, there can be questions about whether institutions and systems are actually designed to serve the values embedded within a social contract – like racial fairness and equal justice for all. But in the case of George Santos, there are also questions about why the traditional layers of political vetting didn’t identify such an apparent fabulist in time.

“I kind of feel sorry for him in some ways – not as a politician, but as a human being,” says William Yousman, professor of communication and media studies at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. “This is someone who clearly has some deep-seated problems.”

“But since he’s a member of Congress now,” he continues, “obviously, this is not something that we can abide.” Professor Yousman also criticizes “the astounding neglect” of journalistic research or opposition research by his Democratic opponents. 

Mary Altaffer/AP/File

George Santos (left) talks to a voter while campaigning outside a Stop and Shop, Nov. 5, 2022, in Glen Cove, New York. Media critics say his election is an example of the dangers of news voids and low news literacy in modern America. While a hyperlocal site did uncover a number of his fabrications, larger publications missed the story.

“There’s always been people who are not truth tellers in politics and who embellish their reputations,” says Patrick McGinnis, a venture capitalist who is part of the Leadership Now Project and BridgeUSA, which work to strengthen American democracy. “But I think in this day and age, the institutions that we expect to do due diligence did not.”

“One of the roles of political parties is to vet their candidates,” he says. “Why is that? Because not only are they putting them forward for consideration, they’re encouraging people to send all this money to them so they can represent your voice,” Mr. McGinnis says. “So much about elections these days is simply focused on fundraising, so much energy goes into raising money and then running ads [rather] than finding good candidates.”

“For me as a business person, it’s like, who is your fiduciary responsibility to?” he asks. “To me, it’s to the people who support them, and therefore it’s incumbent upon parties to do the work that they clearly haven’t done to vet their candidates in this case.”

There is at least some evidence that Republicans were indeed concerned about some of Mr. Santos’ claims. Before the election, The Cook Political Report quoted an unnamed senior Republican House aide wary of the candidate’s business background who said, “We’re not touching him with a 10-foot pole.”

In its detailed 87-page opposition research dossier on Mr. Santos in July, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee presented its findings, emphasizing Mr. Santos’ participation in Stop the Steal rally on Jan. 6, his own claims of election fraud during his loss in 2020, and details of his conservative positions on abortion, guns, and tax policy. The report included his work for a financial company exposed as a Ponzi scheme, and the animal rescue nonprofit he claimed to have launched, even though the IRS had no record it was ever registered.

“People might find opposition research unseemly, but it is something that everybody has to do in today’s political environment,” says Professor Yousman. “Were the Democrats just distracted by other races? Was it hubris on their part?” he says, since President Joe Biden won this New York district by over 8 percentage points in 2020. “With so much at stake, the control of the House, to me, that’s the most mysterious and the most inexplicable failures here.” 

The cost of news voids

Mr. Santos’ election has also brought attention once again to the state of the news media, especially the long and precipitous decline of local news organizations, which have traditionally served as the first line of independent political vetting. A hyperlocal newspaper did uncover a number of Mr. Santos’ falsehoods before the election, but regional and national news failed to magnify the reporting.

In the history of liberal democracy, the guild of journalism has from the start understood itself as a kind of guardian over the integrity of politics and governance, one of its roles being to verify whether what candidates say is true. As journalists sometimes like to quip, “Your mother tells you she loves you? Check it out.”

“From a journalism standpoint, it’s clear to me that what many of us feared could happen, as news voids are created at an alarming rate, has in fact happened,” says John Roche, professor of journalism at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury. “This isn’t meant as an excuse for us, the news media, in allowing Santos’ record to go unchecked. But the fact is, the news media, especially local news, has been decimated by fiscal cuts, newspaper shutdowns, and ill-conceived corporate choices.”

The news media, too, is just a part of a digital media landscape in which misinformation and angry, partisan vitriol is algorithmically fed into individual’s personal feeds.   

“Politics has become almost like one of those superhero movies – people see it as this battle of good versus evil,” says Professor Yousman. “And of course, both sides see the other side as the evil ones, so it becomes justified then to do anything you can to defeat them because they represent such a threat.”

How much is the truth worth?

Political scientists such as Professor Buchler, however, believe voters make more rational calculations when considering candidates with rough edges, and whose competence, honesty, and integrity might be lacking.

“Polarization is part of this complicated moment, but I think it’s not so much about reflexive partisanship,” he says. He sees a number of competing forces at work.

On the one hand, voters do consider a candidate’s honesty and competence as two essential traits. “But let’s say I’m a voter who leans slightly to the right, and I’m looking at a candidate very far to the left. The fact that this candidate is very far to the left means that the policy costs for me is really high, so I might look at a Republican who is dishonest.”

“If the Democrat were more centrist, I would be more willing to make a concession and vote for a slightly less liberal candidate of the opposing party, and that cuts both ways,” Professor Buchler says. “So as the parties move further apart ... incentives for competence and honesty go down.”

The scope and kind of Representative Santos’ fabrications, however, could challenge even the most partisan of nose-holding calculations, since nearly all of his campaign biography has proven false. 

“Will all that’s happened with the ongoing Santos saga prove to be a red flag for what needs to be done about preserving integrity in politics, governance, and democracy?” asks Professor Roche. “Or will it be a white flag signaling our collective surrender in the fight to demand a functional truth?”