How George Santos (and Trump) Played Voters for Fools

A good con man (or woman) can take the measure of their targeted victims and then play to the prejudices and bigotries and their perceived view of reality.  In the case of Donald Trump, he played to the white supremacists within the GOP base, pandered to evangelicals and Christofascists who falsely see themselves as persecuted even though they themselve are the ones persecuting others, and, of course the greed of many wealthy voters who place paying lower anounts in taxes over basic morality.  Trump knew and still knows how to play his targets. In his Democrat leaning district, George Santos likewise knew how to play his targets and in addition to recycling Trump's ploys added outright lies of his own to peel off independent and low knowledge voters by playing to certain sympathies correctly gaging that low information voters would never take the time to ferret out his lies which ranged from false claims about his education, past employment, racial background and religious descent.   All was false yet in combination duped enough voters to allow Santos to win.  With the Republican leadership worried more about power than anything else it will likely fall to state and federal prosecutors - investigating where Santos who claimed no assets in 2020 found $700,000 to "loan" to his campaign - to take Santos down.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Santos' con job.  Here are column excerpts:

Outrageous, contemptible and — let’s face it — endlessly fascinating, the lies of Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) are also instructive, about both human psychology and American culture.

Like all astute con men (and women), Santos did not fabricate randomly. He supplied his various audiences with a preexisting narrative they were accustomed to believing, modified by the insertion of himself into the story line.

As psychiatrist Charles V. Ford explained in “Lies!, Lies!!, Lies!!!: The Psychology of Deceit” — a 1996 book that seems destined for perpetual relevance — phonies like Santos exploit people’s tendency to treat familiar stories less skeptically than original ones. “The con artist convinces the victim of the former’s version of reality,” Ford wrote, “by playing on the latter’s stereotyped expectations of reality.”

In other words, grifters work with the grain of popular culture, or its component subcultures.

Accordingly, Santos offered GOP base voters an even Bigger Lie about the 2020 election, in which not only former president Donald Trump but also Santos — who lost a House race to then-incumbent Democrat Tom Suozzi by 12.4 percentage points — was defrauded.

Running in 2022 in a redrawn congressional district whose electorate favored Joe Biden by nine points in 2020, Santos recalibrated his far-right pitch, weaving themes into his campaign biography that might make him more acceptable to swing voters.

Not only did he play against type as a gay Republican, Santos also held himself out as a grandson of Ukrainian Jewish Holocaust survivors. He claimed 9/11 victim status, saying at various times that his mother had died in the attacks or that both of his parents survived the ordeal. . The stories dovetailed with his assertion, during the 2020 campaign, that he was biracial (“Caucasian and Black,” he tweeted).

Fact-checkers have so far been unable to confirm or debunk the last of these; given the intermingling of races in his ancestral Brazil, it could even contain a trace element of truth. The others, though, seem to be baloney.

And Santos would hardly be the first person to lay illegitimate claim to these particular victim identities, and hence to the moral authority our culture, for valid historical reasons, has assigned them.

His brazen ruses might have benefited him politically, at least at the margins; Santos’s eight-point victory last fall in an otherwise Democratic-leaning Long Island district implies that numerous Biden 2020 voters backed him over Democrat Robert Zimmerman.

Some are blaming Santos’s election win on insufficient local media coverage or opposition research. Maybe — but both the North Shore Leader, a newspaper based on Long Island, and a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee report documented multiple red flags in Santos’s biography well before Election Day.

Santos skeptics would have had to prove a negative — multiple negatives, actually. They would also have had to overcome another aspect of human nature that, according to Ford, renders us vulnerable to deceit: Quite simply, he noted, “people are reluctant to challenge another person’s honesty openly.”

The good news, according to Ford, is that con artists’ success at duping others tends to make them overconfident, so they “often engage in self-defeating behavior that ultimately trips them up.”

With prosecutors and the media — belatedly — bearing down on him, George Santos seems to have reached that precarious stage.

Santos’s best hope is that the badly divided House Republicans will be more interested in salvaging their slender majority, or pursuing internal quarrels, than purging their ranks of an apparent charlatan. Don’t count him out yet.

Sadly, Santos is the embodiment of today's GOP where lies and falsehoods are the party's stock in trade.