We all presumably get one life, and it’s hard to imagine a worse use of it than voluntarily serving as Rep. George Santos’ press secretary. If you ask IBM’s latest cutting-edge quantum computer who’s got the worst job in politics, it eventually spits out two answers: Santos’ paid flack and the Secret Service intern who’s forced to spray Donald Trump in the face with a water bottle when he won’t stop growling or biting his stitches.
As we all know by now, Santos likes to embroider the truth—which is a polite way of saying he’s been busy crafting a sprawling Ed Gein memory quilt out of baldfaced lies and patent nonsense. He lies so much, in fact, a recent poll of his constituents found that 78% of them—including 71% of Republicans—want him to resign from Congress.
But he’s not gonna do it, and so the poor 24-year-old waif who currently serves as his press secretary is doing what she can to survive her plight.
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In fact, Business Insider was curious about what life was like for Gabrielle Lipsky, Santos’ beleaguered press secretary, and so they decided to investigate. It sounds like she’s managing as best she can.
Although it's often constituents or journalists calling the office, she said she's regularly on the receiving end of a barrage of furious calls from people across the US, many relaying their anger that Santos is yet to resign.
"It's a lot," she said. "They curse us out, they threaten us. There are so many times when people ask me: 'How could you work for somebody like that?'"
When asked how she does respond to that question, Lipsky chooses her words carefully. She explains that she is primarily serving the constituents of NY-3, which happens to involve working for Santos.
"At the end of the day, the congressman has a job to do and he needs people to help him do that," she said. "Someone's got to do it."
Okay, so she’s just doing her job. Following orders. Noted.
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While it’s not difficult to summon a modicum of sympathy for Lipsky—she’s kind of like the new Exxon hire who’s told, on her first day, that she needs to scrub the oil off every duck in Prince William Sound by sundown—she is doing this voluntarily. If she wanted to get screamed at by disappointed Republicans all day, she could just work at the Ark Encounter. But she’s going out of her way to try to make a brazen liar and fabulist more palatable to regular humans.
And since Santos refuses to step down—likely noticing that his party regularly lionizes even the most shameless liars on the planet—she’s likely to face far more questions about her boss’ flights of fancy.
One of Lipsky’s duties involves assembling press clippings for her boss—including reports about his many lies and other alleged shady dealings. “It’s a matter of just being very matter-of-fact,” she says of that task.
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That said, it may be tougher to keep an even keel when it comes to being a pariah in Washington social circles: "I see the looks we get in the hallway, the selfies being taken in front of the office, and I know people think that the staff is radioactive," she said.
But there are lies, and then there are really offensive lies—like falsely claiming Jewish ancestry. Indeed, Lipsky, whose grandmother is an Auschwitz survivor whom Santos mentioned personally in an International Holocaust Remembrance Day speech on the House floor in January, did find his lies about being Jewish and/or “Jew-ish” kind of weird.
"When the speculation started, of course, I raised an eyebrow. I was like, 'Okay, well that's odd,'" she said. "At the same time, if it was the case, they were actual stories told by his family—he's not going to question it. I wouldn't question it. Who would?"
Okay! Good to know!
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Then again, what is the press secretary of an embattled congressman supposed to say about her boss when contacted by the media? She’s not going to trash him. Not if she wants to keep her job, anyway. (Which she probably shouldn’t want to do, to be fair.) That said, she appeared to go above and beyond when she described Santos to Business Insider as a “borderline genius.”
Yeah, he’s borderline something. Genius, though? I guess you could say the same about Lex Luthor or the Joker. Or any random employee at an Apple Store. Doesn’t mean any of them should be in Congress, and it certainly doesn’t mean you have to amplify their lies.
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