It’s not just his grift and vanity that made Santos such a perfect avatar of the MAGA ethos. Even more significant was the defiance he showed as his flagrant wrongdoing was revealed and the way that defiance endeared him to some of Trump’s most avid supporters. In December 2022, after Santos was elected but before he took office, The New York Times reported that he’d lied about his education, purported career in finance, family wealth and charitable endeavors and that he’d been charged in Brazil with using stolen checks. Santos’s response was, as Chiusano writes, to “post through it,” making a great show of shamelessness both online and in real life.
Much of the MAGAverse loved it. Greene became a loyal friend. As New York magazine’s Shawn McCreesh reported in March, at a Manhattan birthday party for the Breitbart editor Emma-Jo Morris, Santos was “the ‘It’ girl. His wrists are bedizened with bling from Hermès and Cartier, and fawning fans line up for selfies.” A month later, The Intercept’s Daniel Boguslaw described Santos being feted at a bar in Washington: “A milieu of young conservatives, operatives and House staffers were assembling to howl in the next-gen model of Donald Trump’s societal wrecking ball, and the name on everybody’s lips was George Santos.” A hard-core MAGA group called Washington, D.C. Young Republicans posted about Santos’s “inspirational remarks” at that event, including his insistence that his enemies will have to “drag my cold, dead body” out of Congress. Gosar chimed in with an admiring response: “Based.”
Adam Serwer famously wrote that, when it comes to Trump, “the cruelty is the point,” but maybe the criminality is as well. Rule breaking is key to Trump’s transgressive appeal; it situates him as above the strictures that govern lesser men while creating a permission structure for his followers to release their own inhibitions. That’s a big part of the reason his multiple indictments appeared to only solidify his Republican support. Sure, some of his backers probably identified with his epic persecution complex, but that alone doesn’t explain the worshipful enthusiasm among some of his fans for his mug shot. (“He looks hard,” gushed the Fox News host Jesse Watters.) Rather, many people on the right thrill to displays of impunity from people who share their politics. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the left-wing counterculture lionized outlaws like the Hells Angels for their rebellion against a hated establishment. Today, as Santos’s rise to iconic status demonstrates, a similar antinomianism has taken hold among alienated conservatives.
Of course, the devotion of part of the right-wing demimonde was not, in the end, enough to save Santos. More than half of the House Republican caucus, and most of its leaders, stood by the disgraced swindler, and Greene called his expulsion “shameful,” but unlike Trump, Santos never amassed nearly enough power to force Republican institutionalists to swallow their disgust with him. Besides, as the Tennessee Republican Tim Burchett — who voted against expulsion — said of voters in his district, “People don’t like the fact he’s gay.”