The Great George Santos

The Parallels Between George Santos and Jay Gatsby

On the heels of a damning House Ethics report—one which offered such prurient details as his use of campaign funds for OnlyFans accounts—George Santos was expelled from Congress. The drama occurred two weeks ago on Friday, when 105 Republicans joined almost all of the Democrats to expel Santos in a 311-114 vote, a number that suggests bipartisan outrage, and a number that is north of the necessary 2/3 majority to expel a congressman. The proceedings capped a strange and ignoble stint in public office. Santos's career as a congressman defied reason, and it followed the mad and nebulous logic of a cologne or perfume commercial.

Santos now has the dubious distinction of being only the sixth member of Congress in the history of the country to suffer expulsion, with three of the five previous instances of expulsion occurring during the Civil War and with those expelled being Confederate soldiers. The other two congressmen were expelled following convictions on bribery-related charges.

Santos, who faces a 23-count federal indictment, protested his expulsion, saying that his removal before being tried in court would set a dangerous precedent. Some analysts have agreed with his argument, observing that notwithstanding the foregone conclusion of Santos’s guilt, he should have been convicted of his crimes before being expelled. An earlier attempt to remove Santos was derailed by just such concerns.

Some of the most ardent critics of Santos—those who made full-throated calls for his removal—were members of the GOP from his own and neighboring congressional districts.

Santos’s departure shrinks the GOP’s majority in the lower house to 221-213, a slim margin that will require a fractious Republican Party to work almost in lockstep to accomplish their legislative agenda. Kevin McCarthy, who was ousted as House Speaker this October, recently announced that he would be resigning from Congress at the end of the year. As things now stand, the GOP can only afford three Republican defections on any legislation that splits along party-lines.

Until George Santos is convicted of his crimes, he retains certain congressional privileges, as per House rules. These privileges include access to the gym, dining room, and House floor, a fact which serves to highlight the unfortunate truth of Santos’s exit: he might be finished as a congressman, but his spirit will haunt Congress for years to come.

         Who—or better yet, what—George Santos is still isn’t clear. Shrouded in a web of lies, hypocrisy, and fraud, the congressman and his biography resist normal analysis. We can’t look to the events in Santos’s past for clarification because many of these events, if not straight fabrications, are at least marred with untruth. Because of this factual ambiguity, Santos has an almost fictional quality to him. It’s as if he exists somewhere on the boundary between fantasy and reality, a dialectical synthesis of the real and the illusory, a man with flesh and blood and bones but a cartoon soul. To understand George Santos, to understand George Santos truly, we must compare Santos not only with historical figures but also with fictional figures. In the following essay, I try to get at the truth of George Santos by contrasting him with another great liar, Jay Gatsby.

George Santos once referred to himself as the “embodiment of the American Dream.” Anyone who hears the phrase “American Dream” and has taken a high school English class has likely written a paper on the death of that same dream in The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald finished writing The Great Gatsby in 1925, at a time when corruption and deceit were penetrating every pocket of American life. The country was five years into prohibition, a kind of national lie epitomized by the proliferation of speakeasies—by 1925 there were already 30,000 to 100,000 speakeasies operating in New York alone. And only three years earlier, the country had suffered its biggest political scandal to date when the Secretary of the Interior let large oil companies tap the Navy’s oil reserves in exchange for land and money. It would come to be known as the Teapot Dome scandal, and it would serve as the high water mark for government corruption until Watergate some 50 years later.

The Great Gatsby is often hailed as the great American novel—that ever-elusive title bestowed on books deemed to contain within their pages something quintessential about the American experience. There is a case to be made that the novel’s titular character, Jay Gatsby, is the great character of American fiction. For all of Gatsby’s fame, though, and for all of his charm and rosy romanticism, for all of his “incorruptible dream,” he is a corrupt person. He is a liar. He is a fraud. Because F. Scott Fitzgerald was so meticulous in his depiction of a fraud, the novel, and Gatsby’s character in particular, can throw a light on frauds everywhere. It can help us begin to understand the personality of George Santos.

Gatsby and Santos bear more than a passing resemblance. For starters, the two men rose to fame in the same place: New York. Great Neck, the small Long Island village on the North Shore, served as the inspiration for Fitzgerald’s West Egg, where Gatsby and the rest of the nouveau riche live. That same Great Neck is a part of New York’s third district, the district that Santos represented. New York’s third district is one of the wealthiest in the country, and it is a district that has traditionally voted Democrat. Santos’s win flipped the district red and was one of the brighter moments in a lackluster midterm performance by the GOP. 

Both Gatsby and Santos changed their names. Born James Gatz, the character renames himself Jay Gatsby as a young man in the hopes of creating a new life, one vastly different from the life of hardscrabble Midwestern poverty he experienced when a boy. Santos has used many different aliases in the past. He has gone by Anthony Zabrovsky, Kitara Ravache, George Devolder, and Anthony Devolder. Santos’s rationale for changing his name could stem from a similar desire to forge a new identity, one which heralded the wealth and fame that seemed so out of reach to him as a poor kid in Queens.

They lied about their education. Gatsby’s fabrication is at least rooted in the truth. He tells people that he graduated from Oxford, while he in fact only spent five restless months there after being discharged from the army. Gatsby’s education helps him rise in New York’s underworld. Meyer Wolfhseim, Gatsby’s seamy future business partner who wears human molars for cufflinks and fixed the 1919 world series, is impressed with Gatsby’s Oxford background. Wolfsheim says, “when [Gatsby] told me he was an Oggsford I knew I could use him good.” Wolfsheim understood that an elite education enhances a person’s marketability. He knew that if Gatsby postured himself as a polished Oxford graduate, people would be more likely to trust Gatsby and the schemes that Gatsby and Wolfsheim proposed—people’s preoccupation with alma maters also worked to MIT-graduate Sam Bankman Fried’s advantage. Like Gatsby, Santos understood the power of education, not to open minds, but to open doors. He lied about his high school, college, and post-college education. By bolstering his bona fides with a Horace Mann education and a NYU MBA, Santos was able to promote the image of himself as a New York City sophisticate and as a person thoroughly schooled in the subject of business. Santos also lied about being a collegiate volleyball player.

There is the mystery surrounding their finances. Rumors about the origin of Gatsby’s wealth abound. Early on in the novel, a character suggests that Gatsby might be a cousin or a nephew of the Kaiser, and that this relation is the source of his fortune. Gatsby would later claim that he inherited all of his money when his parents died. Santos has similarly amassed an inexplicable fortune, if the figures he’s claimed on his financial disclosure form, a net-worth of between $2.5 and $11 million dollars, are to be trusted. This is after he claimed a net-worth of $5,000 only two years earlier when completing the same form.

Santos and Gatsby share something deeper than superficial similarities, though. At the heart of both men lies an outsized ego, an unrealistic and romantic conception of themselves. Gatsby, like Santos, was born poor, and in spite of his limited circumstances, he comes to view himself as a man of consequence. He chafes under the world’s indifference to “the drums of his destiny,” and quits his job as a janitor at St. Olaf’s college after two weeks, feeling that the work is beneath him. Santos may have felt a similar disdain for his work when he was employed as a customer-service representative at a Dish Network in Queens Point, Queens. When he was working there, Santos reportedly told colleagues that he came from a wealthy family with vast real-estate holdings in America and Brazil. It seems that a false narrative was already unfurling itself before Santos. It might have been a similar sense of destiny—maybe he heard the same drums beating that Gatsby once had—that made Santos quit Dish and become involved in all sorts of seedy business activities—fake charities, Ponzi schemes, and Congress.   

         The Great Gatsby’s climax occurs in the parlor of a suite in the Plaza Hotel. The heat is oppressive. The characters overhear the joyous tumult of a wedding happening in the ballroom downstairs. They chat. Then it happens. Tom Buchanan reveals Gatsby to be a fraud. Gatsby’s fortune is derived from the illegal distribution and sale of liquor. And just like that, Gatsby’s mystique is gone. His courtship of Daisy is over.

         Santos didn’t work for the distinguished banks he listed on his resume. He worked for Harbor City Capital in Florida, a company the SEC has called “a classic Ponzi scheme.” On March 10, Santos was charged with fraud, money-laundering, theft of public funds, and lying to Congress on financial forms. He’s alleged to have embezzled money from campaign contributions and to have used it for personal expenditures. He’s also alleged to have illegally received unemployment benefits while still employed at Harbor City Capital.

         The man a grief-stricken George Wilson kills is not Jay Gatsby. Jay Gatsby, the romantic ideal, the fantastic creation of that young, penniless North Dakotan dreamer, was killed the moment Tom Buchanan revealed him to be a fraud. The man George Wilson murders is James Gatz.

         Earlier this year, Santos was exposed as a fraud. He didn’t disappear like Gatsby. He was named to two committees. Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy even depended on Santos and his support. Santos endorsed McCarthy in each of the fifteen rounds of voting that McCarthy endured to clinch the speakership. Santos then opposed the Matt-Gaetz-orchestrated effort to remove McCarthy from power. McCarthy, for his part, refused to call on Santos to resign.

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby held up a mirror to society and showed a broken country, with broken laws, broken people, and a broken government. Santos is a carnival-glass reflection of our society. Congress appears distorted. Congressmen and congresswomen like Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert have heads that are ten feet wide. Their bodies are three feet tall. Frauds and politicians are indistinguishable. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel was a product of its time. George Santos is a product of ours.