It’s a story that is already being turned into a movie by HBO. George Santos, the US politician seemed to have had an amazing life. He had worked on a Broadway show, appeared on the children’s series Hannah Montana, been a star volleyball player, was a noted academic and a successful businessman whose company was worth millions. Now he was in Congress pushing policies such as making the AR-15 rifle the national gun of America.
But as it turned out, many of the stories he told about himself were not just exaggerations, but outright lies. The politician was not even, as he had apparently said, Jewish. Yet, as US reporter Adam Gabbatt explains, surprisingly, this did not mean Santos lost his seat.
When a report from the House ethics committee arrived along with 23 federal criminal charges, Santos’s colleagues finally expelled him. Yet his rise and fall pose worrying questions about the US political system in a post-truth era. Michael Safi asks why voters were not more outraged by Santos’s dishonesty, and how he was allowed to continue his career even after his apparent dishonesty was exposed.
Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
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