“‘I am running to protect the American dream.’” These are the words Republican nominee George Anthony Devolder Santos told the Long Island Herald in his 2022 bid for New York’s 3rd (NY-3) congressional district representative.
Santos won the representative seat by 7.6 points against his opponent, Robert Zimmerman, by promoting a platform of reduced inflation. As a populist, he disavowed establishment politicians and touted his outsider status as a Wall Street banker, leveraging his dual degrees from Baruch College and New York University (NYU) to appeal to the electorate of District Three. But we know the legacy of Santos isn’t that of the bold demagogue, making the lives of his fellow man better; instead, we are left with a parable of contradictions and lies — an indictment of the same media system that let him through the double doors of Congress.
The noble persona that Santos presented in 2022 is a far cry from the Santos that we find ourselves burdened with today. Just a couple of weeks ago, Santos pled guilty before a federal court, admitting to 23 felonies regarding the misappropriation of campaign finances and fraud committed as detailed in the House Ethics report. The former representative admitted to declaring fraudulent loanss to his campaign, artificially inflating his numbers to secure nomination by the Republican committee. Moreover, while he espoused care for the residents of NY-3, Santos funneled money from the campaign into his own private Limited Liability Company, Devolder, in order to pay for luxury goods for himself, complete with OnlyFans subscriptions and botox injections.
Moreover, Santos had sloppily engineered almost every aspect of his character to present a myth far more impressive than the truth: Santos never graduated from NYU or Baruch. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t hold a degree from any higher education institution. The work he claimed to have done for the investment firms on Wall Street was done as the vice president of LinkBridge Investors, in which he did consulting work as a middleman between Goldman Sachs and their clientele. Not only did Santos never own property in New York, but it was revealed that he was living off rent subsidies at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic while live action role-playing as a disgruntled landlord.
Santos’ falsehoods exist in all dimensions of his character: in what he promises, what he does and who he is. One can assume that in the halls of Congress, he saw an opportunity to access the lavish lifestyle he envisioned for himself.
There was a time when Santos was merely an aberration in Long Island politics, making only minor waves in the local Republican scene. He campaigned for the 2020 election using the same playbook of endless posturing and connections to key strategists. Ultimately, he lost to incumbent representative Tom Suozzi, who held a 12-point lead.
Re-emerging onto the election scene in 2022, Santos refined his playbook by taking a page out of former President Donald Trump’s: assuming the role of the everyday man willing to fight for the well-being of Long Islanders. Suozzi, leaving the NY-3 seat up for grabs in his bid for governor, left the fight to Santos and Zimmerman. Santos falsely claimed Jewish heritage, which he did not possess, in a bid to garner support from Persian Jews, while also expressing unwavering support for Israel. His position on women’s abortion rights fluctuated, as he claimed varying degrees of support for a nationwide abortion ban depending on the circumstances.
It’s hard to pinpoint a single key failing that handed the election majority to Santos; NY-3 has been a historically democratically leaning district and it would be a stretch to say that Santos’ rhetoric touched the hearts and minds of left-leaning moderates. However, what the electorate of Long Island could be contending with is that of complacency.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Zimmerman campaign are accountable for the lack of oppositional research done — much less publicized — to discredit Santos’ crucial second run for Congress. Perhaps they believed his second campaign would fizzle like his first,. Maybe they believed that badgering Santos based on his allegiances to former President Trump would speak to the ethos of voters. Regardless, Santos’s missteps should have been meticulously documented and publicized before he could be elected. The outcome of the Republican race shouldn’t have relied on the assumption that reason would triumph over deceit.
Additionally, news of Santos’ false financial disclosures was published by The North Shore Leader, a small publication on Long Island, before the fateful November election. Drowned out by wall-to-wall reporting on the prospective governors of New York, news of Santos’ falsehoods failed to gain the traction it demanded. It’s disheartening to see this trend, where our focus often shifts to the sensational rather than the significant. As a result, we allowed a national embarrassment to slip into the House.
Now, all we can do is apologize after the fact.
In his brief tenure as a representative, Santos managed to accomplish very little, if anything, of what he originally promised. The foundation of his career — countless contradictions, embellishments and lies — is all he will ever be known for. This coming February, he will be sentenced for his vast portfolio of financial fraud. The fact that someone like Santos could manipulate his way into Congress, fueled by contempt for the system and his constituents, reflects poorly on a media cycle willing to overlook the worst in people. If there’s any legacy Santos leaves behind, it’s less about him and more about us.
Correction Statement: A previous edition of this article stated that Zimmerman lost the representative seat by nine points. This has been corrected to state that he lost by 7.6 points.
