George Santos gets one thing right about Republicans: Their expulsion vote is "theater"

Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y. is probably not winning that Oscar, but it's not for a lack of trying. With the enthusiasm of a drag queen channeling Joan Crawford, the embattled GOP congressman has given us three over-the-top performances of outrage over the possibility that he could become the sixth person ever to be expelled from Congress. Last week, facing growing pressure from Republicans after his 23 felony indictments for fraud, Santos refused to resign in a 3-hour diatribe on X-Spaces. Insisting that Congress has "felons galore" who get "drunk every night," Santos argued that he is being unfairly singled out and compared himself to Mary Magdalene. Then on Thursday morning, he held a self-pitying press conference, accusing his colleagues of "bullying" him by planning to hold a vote on whether to expel him, likely on Friday. 

"It's all theater," he raved. 

Then during the House's floor debate over his expulsion late Thursday, Santos called out a Republican colleague as "a woman beater," pointing to past allegations of alleged abuse, to complain of GOP hypocrisy. 

Santos is almost certainly faking his umbrage. He's well aware that, in addition to the federal charges against him, the House investigation found "substantial evidence" that he stole campaign donations and spent them on designer clothes, Botox injections, and OnlyFans. Plus, he has a history of using the tactic of wildly exaggerated rage to intimidate people out of asking questions about his alleged fraud. In the case where Santos is accused of using a sick dog to raise money, only to abscond with the cash, the dog's owner claims Santos blew up at him when asked about the promised veterinary care. Basically, Santos screamed at the guy until his alleged victim gave up. Wielding fake anger like a weapon is unlikely to work in this case, though what do I know? Donald Trump uses the same move to keep Republicans in line quite effectively. 

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But as silly as this display was, in one small sense, Santos is right: If Republicans do move to expel him, it's nothing more than theater. Republicans don't care if one of their own is a fraud or a criminal. The most obvious example is Trump, whose indictment count sits at 91 charges across four jurisdictions, making Santos look like a piker. And that's not even counting the financial crimes Trump has committed. Trump is currently in a civil trial regarding his decades of fraud. The judge has already ruled that he's guilty in that case, and the only real question left is how serious the penalties will be. 

And, as far as I know, no one has shown Santos to be responsible for sexual assault in a court of law. The same cannot be said of the GOP frontrunner. 

Nor is Trump an outlier. The entire GOP is flush with charlatans all working variations of the same grift as Santos, though most of them are smart enough to structure their schemes in a way that is technically legal. As I've written about before, there's an endless number of Republican politicians, pundits, and influencers who bombard their followers with emails hawking snake oil "cures" and shady "investment opportunities." Republican voters tend to have more money and less sense than other Americans, making them the perfect target for an endless stream of pitches selling them garbage, from multi-level marketing schemes to useless products like "survivalist" kits. 

Zooming out a little, the entire right-wing media infrastructure is a game of three-card monte. For decades, the Republican elite have manipulated their voters through well-funded propaganda feeding their audiences a steady stream of lies: Climate change is a hoax, "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, "welfare queens" and "Obamaphones," Barack Obama's "birth certificate," whatever the hell "Benghazi" was supposed to be, the "Clinton body count," "supply-side economics," creationism, and so on. Even though Fox News lost nearly $800 million in a lawsuit because they kept hyping Trump's false accusations that the 2020 election was "stolen" by President Joe Biden, they haven't slowed down the disinformation train. Just last week, the network reported for hours that a car explosion on the Canadian border over the holiday was a terrorist attack. It was just a car accident, likely due to speeding. 

It's all variations of a scheme that the Securities and Exchange Commission calls "affinity fraud," where the fraudsters "are (or pretend to be) members of the group they are trying to defraud." This shared identity is used to build trust, such as someone who recruits people into a Ponzi scheme from their church. Due to the intense tribalism of Republicans, this kind of bamboozling goes on all day, every day within the conservative community. 

Once you learn about this, you really can see how it's everywhere in the GOP world. For instance, the "hit" right-wing movie "Sound of Freedom" that shocked entertainment reporters with its robust box office? Well, those numbers don't reflect how many people actually went to the theater to see it. The producers artificially drove up their box office numbers by convincing their evangelical and QAnon-loyal audiences to buy multiple tickets at once as "donations" that went straight into the studio's bottom line. It's not illegal, but it uses the same principle as affinity fraud: Pressuring their audiences to prove their conservative bona fides by buying more tickets, often exponentially more tickets, than they are actually going to use. As with Santos, what people were led to believe was a "donation" was actually profit. 

Or this recent report from Politico about Joseph Ladapo, Florida's surgeon general who was appointed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. Ladapo is being accused by his colleagues at the University of Florida of drawing $262,000 from his tenure-track position while doing little to no work as his ostensible job. As many commentators were swift to point out, this was no surprise. It's been evident since he was hired that Ladapo is a quack. He's willing to sell out by falsely declaring COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous and telling high-risk people to avoid the shot. Santos is alleged to have stolen people's money, but hey, at least he never tried to profit off giving fake "advice" to senior citizens that could kill them. 

Not that anyone should feel pity for Santos, but his alleged fraud isn't all that different from how the rest of the GOP treats their donors. Due to campaign finance deregulation, the Republican Party is rife with "leadership PACs," groups that raise money with promises to spend it on getting people the donors would like elected. In many cases, however, the vast majority of the donated money goes to funding luxury travel and other benefits for the leaders, under the guise of "operating expenses." For instance, former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin ran a PAC that only spent $25,000 in the first half of 2015 on Republican campaigns — compared to $82,000 on Palin and her entourage's travel expenses. 

Trump, as one can imagine, is especially shameless in this regard. He's long directed the GOP to spend its money on events hosted at his various properties, so he can pocket donor money. Right now, his donors, many of whom donated only small amounts, are footing his legal bills through campaign coffers. To squeeze his followers for even more cash, Trump's campaign tricked people who thought they were donating once into signing up for recurring monthly payments. The only difference between Trump and Santos is that Santos wasn't as smart about using accounting tricks to make his alleged cash siphoning technically legal.

That, and Santos kept his alleged frauds relatively small. The numbers cited in his indictments stick to the thousands and his expenditures were on relatively small-time luxuries like Botox and clothes. Trump, on the other hand, has redirected millions of donor dollars away from legitimate campaign spending into paying bills that he doesn't want to pay out of pocket. Including over $20 million for his lawyers. By Republican standards, the biggest failure of George Santos' is one of imagination.