It’s little surprise that serial fabulist George Santos was elected to Congress as a Republican. Republicans have basically been living in a Michele Bachmann bath salts hallucination for the past seven years now. Indeed, when they made Donald Trump their presidential nominee, they cut their last gossamer tether to consensus reality, opting instead for flights of fancy that would make even the most otherworldly absinthe fairy green(er) with envy.
But as fun as it is to watch the media pile on—and to see Republicans scurry away from freshman congressmen like Matt Gaetz after bumping into three-sixteenths of his mistresses at the Pensacola Hot Topic—it hardly seems fair that Donald Trump, the high suzerain of barmy bullshit, is being overlooked in favor of this callow upstart.
Why isn’t Trump getting more credit for his decades of clumsy denials and silly fabrications? Well, he was “president,” you see, and the legacy media appear uncomfortable acknowledging that we could have found a better commander in chief by spot-checking random Arby’s bathroom stalls for fake billionaires. It’s like how Classmates.com keeps sending me emails trying to get me to subscribe to—checks notes—Classmates.com. I won’t do it, okay? If I want a chloroform rag full of quiet desperation, I’ll drive down to the river and spend the afternoon watching other men my age attempt to mount Jet-Skis. Similarly, I’ll never, ever buy the assertion that Donald Trump was a real “president,” other than by the narrowest definition of the word.
Indeed, for every outrageous Santos lie or scandal, you can find at least one Trump greatest hit that’s just as bad or worse.
Don’t believe me? Let’s give this a whirl, shall we?
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Santos Shot: George Santos allegedly scammed a homeless veteran out of $3,000 he’d solicited from goodhearted people to pay for lifesaving surgery for the veteran’s service dog, whom the veteran credited with saving him from suicide “at least two times.” The dog never got the surgery and later died.
Trump Chaser: Trump once took revenge on members of his own family by cutting off his gravely ill nephew’s health insurance.
Mother Jones:
When Fred Sr. died, Freddy’s children [Mary Trump and Fred Trump III] sued, claiming that [Fred Sr.’s] will “had been ‘procured by fraud and undue influence’ by Donald and the other surviving siblings,” according to [author David Cay] Johnston.
Johnston writes that medical insurance had consistently been provided to the family through Fred Sr.’s company. This coverage was crucial for Freddy’s grandson (Donald’s grandnephew), who suffered from seizures and later developed cerebral palsy. So crucial, in fact, that a letter sent from a Trump lawyer to the insurer after the patriarch’s death in 1999 said that “all costs” for the sick child’s care should be covered, regardless of caps on the plan or medical necessity, according to Johnston. That didn’t last long.
A week after the lawsuit was filed in court, Freddy’s son (Donald’s nephew) received a letter informing him that the health insurance would be discontinued, meaning his ill son would be left without coverage. Donald openly admitted to the New York Daily News that he and his siblings took this action out of revenge.
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Santos Shot: The congressman claimed he graduated from Baruch College, but the school has no record of him attending, much less graduating.
Trump Chaser: Our sudoriferous sack of ex-POTUS not only allegedly cheated his way into college by having a smart kid take his SAT test, he also apparently conned thousands of victims out of millions of dollars by pretending to run a genuinely fake real estate university. He later settled a class action lawsuit filed by students of the fake school after insisting he never, ever settles cases.
Center for American Progress:
Today, it’s clear that Trump University was far from charitable. In fact, Trump University’s real estate seminars often didn’t provide that much education; at some seminars, it seemed like the instructors aimed to do little more than bilk money from people who dreamed of successful real estate careers. As one person who attended the program wrote on a feedback form examined by the authors, “Requesting we raise our credit limits on our credit cards at lunch Friday seemed a little transparent.”
Lawyers eventually filed three separate lawsuits from 2010 to 2013 against Trump University for, among other claims, “deceptive practices.” Donald Trump has agreed to pay a $25 million settlement to the people who attended Trump University in 2007, 2008, 2009, or 2010.
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Santos Shot: Rep. Santos once claimed he was either Jewish or Jew-ish (he’s neither) and also claimed his mother was in the World Trade Center on 9/11 (she wasn’t).
Trump Chaser: This is probably a judgment call. What’s worse? Falsely claiming your mother was a victim of a terrorist attack or claiming that you went down to ground zero to help out in the wake of the attacks when you almost certainly didn’t? (Dark horse candidate: Falsely claiming you now have the tallest building in Manhattan because the World Trade Center just collapsed.) By the way, Trump once claimed—in a book, no less—that his family is Swedish. His father concocted this lie after World War II because he wanted to sell apartments to Jewish buyers—which would have presumably been a lot harder if they’d known he was German. Which, to be clear, he was. Trump also apparently lied about not keeping a book full of Hitler speeches in a bedside cabinet—though he did acknowledge owning a copy of Mein Kampf.
And while Santos appeared to use his mother’s death to score political points (he once tweeted that the 9/11 attacks had claimed his dear mum’s life), Trump once allegedly lied about narrowly avoiding a helicopter crash that killed three of his employees. Oh, and he later appeared to blame his casino company’s massive failures on those conveniently expired ex-executives.
NJ.com:
As problems mounted, Trump blamed the casinos' failures on the decisions of the deceased executives in the press.
[Former Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino COO John] O'Donnell said he pleaded with Trump not to use "the convenient excuse, that he could blame two dead men for his problems with all of his other investments." Trump refused, and O'Donnell said he resigned as a result; Trump said he was fired.
A year after the helicopter crash, the Trump Taj Mahal was nearly $3 billion in debt and went bankrupt in 1991. In 1992, both the Trump Plaza and the Trump Castle declared bankruptcy as well.
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Santos Shot: Santos is wanted in Brazil in connection with check fraud charges. He’s accused of forging two checks to buy $400 of clothes.
Trump Chaser: Even if we put aside for now the hundreds of contractors Trump has stiffed over the years and the stock market investors he saddled with gobs of personal debt, Santos still can’t hold a candle to Mafia Don. Even when it comes to petty cheating of this sort, Trump triumphs.
Take, for instance, the tax evasion scam Trump ran during the ‘80s with New York’s Bulgari Jewelry Store. It went a little like this:
Trump would go into the store with his wife, his girlfriend, his...whatever (to use his vernacular). He would then buy her an expensive necklace or wristwatch. Normally, such a transaction would face the New York city and state sales tax, which would be pretty high on luxury jewelry.
In an illegal attempt to evade the tax, Trump "asked" the store to instead ship the jewelry to an out of state location, where no New York sales tax could be collected. In fact, the store would merely send an empty jewelry box to the location, while Trump and his lady friends walked out the door with the jewelry that very day.
The state and city tax collectors eventually caught onto this scheme, and Trump promptly testified against his erstwhile tax evasion colluding partners at the jewelry store in order to save his own skin.
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Santos Shot: One of the congressman’s aides allegedly impersonated House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s chief of staff in order to solicit donations for Santos’ campaign.
Trump Chaser: After telling the nation he won an election he very clearly lost—a lie that has unequivocally lead to the deaths of innocent Americans—Trump ripped off his gormless orc horde to the tune of $250 million, claiming it would be used for an election defense fund that would stop the supposed “steal.”
It wasn’t. Because the fund was never created.
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol is calling it "the Big Rip Off."
It says the Trump campaign took $250 million in donations from supporters that it said would go to an election defense fund to pay for legal fees to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. But the fund was never actually created, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., one of the committee members, said Monday in the panel's second public hearing.
Instead, the money went to the Save America political action committee, she said, and the money went from there to several pro-Trump organizations which are headed by former officials close to Donald Trump's inner circle.
And while more and more Republicans have now started turning on Santos, even an insurrection against the U.S. government that ended in the deaths of innocent Americans wasn’t enough to loosen their vise-like grip on Dear Leader’s oleaginous neck wattle.
Honestly, though, we could go on all day like this. I’m sure you have your own examples of surpassing Trumpian perfidy.
Feel free to share them in the comments … as I gingerly reach for the Dramamine.
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.