George Santos, clown and grifter, is the story of 2023 all over

Things can always get worse. If there’s one lesson to take away from this year/this decade/this century/ongoing existence in this capitalist hellscape generally, it’s exactly that: things can always get worse — and next year they probably will.

In the meantime, it’s also important to be grateful for small mercies. And while 2023 may end up being remembered as the relatively delicate amuse-bouche de merde that preceded the arrival of the almighty shit sandwich that a Donald Trump victory in the 2024 US presidential election would constitute… well, for now at least, we can appreciate that this year also offered a measure of comic relief.

Why yes, George Santos, we are talking about you. Step forward, please. What’s that? You’re recording a Cameo? Oh. Well, whenever you’re ready, we can go ahead with the presentation of the inaugural Anthony Devolder Award for Hilarious Grifter of the Year — and, more importantly, the coveted Man of the Year trophy.

I’m hardly the first person to point out that as well as embodying the spirit of 2023, Santos embodies pretty much everything the Republican Party stands for these days, insofar as it stands for anything at all: the relentless grifting, the culture war talking points, the barefaced mendaciousness, the cynicism, the apparent flat-out criminality. And the puppies. The irony of Santos’ brief career is that if anything, he represented all these, um, virtues too well: the whole conservative project works only if it’s accompanied by a measure of plausible deniability, a token attempt to at least say the quiet part without a megaphone.

Santos never quite grasped this, which is perhaps why he elicited such hostility from his own party. (That, and the fact that some of the people he swindled were rich GOP donors, which — as we’ve already pointed out this year — is the one thing you absolutely cannot do in the US.) The year’s defining moment was Republican grandee (and fellow do-er of strange things with dogs) Mitt Romney staring down Santos and then snarling: “You don’t belong here.”

In some ways, Romney was right. Santos is an immigrant (as far as we can tell, anyway), he’s gay, and worst of all, he’s an arriviste. He didn’t fit in, and he didn’t have the money or power to make his congressional colleagues accept him anyway. He was an embarrassment, and that’s really saying something in a political party that counts coach Tommy Tuberville, space laser enthusiast Marjorie Taylor Greene, theatre aficionado Lauren Boebert, and — of course — Trump among its representatives.

However, Romney’s denunciation of Santos also denies the reality of his party. It may once have been the party of the Hamptons, of a moneyed elite who weren’t above dipping into some grubby rhetoric to make sure their needs (low taxes, general impunity to act as they saw fit) were perpetuated in Congress. But as with many other conservative parties all over the world, the GOP is past the “fucking around” phase at this point. It’s deep into the “finding out” process, and what it’s finding out is that once you invite the lunatics into your big fancy house, they rarely prove especially keen to leave.

Santos is hardly a worst-case scenario in this respect. He’s a clown and a grifter, not a fascist. I’m sure he’s less funny if you’re one of the people he’s screwed over financially in his brief flirtation with prominence, but for the rest of us he’s a welcome source of amusement. But sadly, even the joy of laughing at Santos’ evident absurdity is hollow because his fundamental lack of seriousness says something about today’s American political landscape.

So if we’re laughing at Santos, it’s only because his party is laughing at us. Things can always get worse, you know.