BTRTN: Hey, House Republicans... You Expelled George Santos for Doing Exactly What Trump Does

It’s great that the House voted to expel George Santos. But it’s the height of hypocrisy for the 105 Republicans who voted to expel Santos for essentially doing the exact same things that Donald Trump does in his campaigns. Republicans can't see that George Santos is simply a Trump Mini-me: all artificial, no intelligence.

 

The Late Night comedy party is over: Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver won’t have George Santos to kick around anymore.

Today, George Santos became only the sixth person to be expelled from the United States House of Representatives in history, because 105 Republicans joined 206 Democrats to exceed the two-thirds super majority required to show good King Weasel to the door.

Huh? 105 Republicans in the House decided to expel George Santos because he lied about his credentials to get elected, brazenly took advantage of his donors, and is alleged to have repeatedly broken Federal laws? 

Hmmm… isn’t that pretty much an exact description of the guy who has been their nominee for President the last two elections, and likely to be their candidate in 2024?

George Santos is just so much penny ante Donald Trump. Like Trump, lying is the default setting on his vocal cords. But Santos isn't very good at it, and didn't do it big enough and with enough conviction to get away with it. He's Trump Mini-me.

Did George Santos exaggerate his credentials to get elected? Sure! He lied about everything, from where he went to high school to where he went to college, from claiming he started a charity for animals to claiming his ancestors were holocaust survivors to claiming that his mother died in the 9/11 attacks.

While all that is an impressive collection of deceits, it is just so much chump change when compared to the lies authored by Donald Trump in his numerous campaigns to become President of the United States.

Let’s begin with the fabrication that got Donald Trump elected in 2016. It has already been settled in a New York Court that Donald Trump committed massive business fraud to build the fortune that he would then cite as proof of his claims of business and managerial acumen -- a reputation that would, in turn, be the core rationale for his campaign for the Presidency.  That he committed fraud is a settled matter... the trial that is currently taking place simply determines the appropriate penalty for the fraud that has already been established.

The extent of business fraud that Donald Trump is accused of is so massive that New York State Attorney General is seeking fines of two hundred and fifty million dollars and could effectively ban Trump’s company from doing business in the state of New York. Trump cloaked a parade of bankruptcies, paid little in taxes, padded his net worth, and repeatedly refused to release his tax returns because he claimed they were "under audit." Say what you will about George Santos, but his Botox and Only Fans bills did not add up to a quarter of a billion dollars.

Trump had to lie profusely, aggressively, and comprehensively, because the entire rationale for his presidential campaign was that the nation needed the tough, shrewd, deal-making skills of a successful businessman. If his competence in business was revealed to be nothing but the serial cheating of a two-bit scam artist, the very credentials he presented for office would have been shattered. Yeah, kinda like George Santos.

Now, as Trump seeks his party’s nomination for the presidency in 2024, he continues to push the biggest lie in the history of American politics – that the election of 2020 was rigged, and that Trump actually won. Trump is now campaigning for President in 2024 based on the completely unfounded, utterly unproven, thoroughly discredited allegation that massive voter fraud denied Trump his rightful re-election.

Want to talk about lying about your credentials for office? What better credential can Trump offer in his bid for the White House than claiming that he was the rightful winner of the last election?

Don’t even try to count the ironies in this fire. The vast majority of Republicans in Washington sit on their hands, doing nothing and saying nothing as Trump serves up this “stolen election” garbage, but they expel George Santos for claiming he was a volleyball star at a college he never attended.

The real issue here is that George Santos was too stupid to invoke the very argument that might have saved his Congressional seat: “Hey, I was just doing exactly what Donald Trump taught us to do!” C’mon, George – you could have gone on FOX and told the MAGA faithful that you were simply following the GOP playbook for campaigning established the party’s undisputed leader.

Frankly, George, your mistake was that your lies were not big enough.

George, why didn’t you go big when you had the chance? Why didn’t you tell your constituents that you were going to build a wall across the Southern border and force Mexico to pay for it? Why didn’t you extort a leader of a sovereign nation to force him to open a bogus criminal inquiry about your political adversary, and then tell your constituents that it was a “perfect phone call?”  

C’mon, George, why didn’t you incite all the raging Proud Boy militia wing-nuts you can find to wage an insurrection against Congress right before they took the vote to expel you?

Ah, but those House Republicans will change the subject and tell you they voted to expel George Santos because he abused his donors by taking their money and using it for personal expenses. Yes, financial abuses with campaign funds is serious business indeed.

Santos stole money from his donors, some of which he used for Botox treatments… perhaps so he would look good before election day. Compare that to Trump paying $130,000 to a porn star to keep her from revealing an illicit tryst that would have looked very, very bad before election day.

Santos committed identity theft and stole some donors’ credit card numbers. What Santos may or many not have done does not even measure on the same Richter Scale with Trump’s campaign fund abuses. In 2020, Trump tricked his supporters into unintentionally turning their one-time campaign donations into weekly commitments that drained the bank accounts of octogenarians. As reported in The New York Times:

Trailing in the polls and facing a cash crunch last September, Mr. Trump’s political operation began opting online donors into automatic recurring contributions by prechecking a box on its digital donation forms to take a withdrawal every week. Donors would have to notice the box and uncheck it to opt out of the donation. A second prechecked box took out another donation, known as a “money bomb.”

In 2021, Donald Trump’s campaign had to return $12.8 million dollars in campaign donations that had been made through this deceptive scheme. Twelve million dollars worth of campaign donations gained by pulling a slick trick on his supporters. 

 And yet it is George Santos who Republicans spank for violating the trust of donors. 

Oh, there's more. One of the rationales the House Ethics Committee used to base its recommendation to expel Santos was that he had broken a number of Federal laws.

George Santos made fraudulent claims to receive unemployment insurance benefits. His campaign finance reports to the Federal Election Commission were riddled with falsehoods. The Ethics Committee expressed outrage that George Santos did not cooperate with their investigation, and that he actually – get this – “evaded” their requests for further information.

Hey, Republicans in the House, have you noticed that your presumptive nominee for President has actually been indicted for Federal crimes? “Evading requests for information?” Have you noticed that he stands accused of obstructing justice in his failure to “cooperate” in the Mar-a-Lago documents case?

Have you noticed that he has been indicted for attempting to undue a free and fair election, even as he accuses his enemies of “rigging” his own defeat?

Ah, hypocrisy, thy name is MAGA.

Sure, it’s great that some Republicans voted to expel the oily, smarmy, greasy jellyfish of amorality and greed that New Yorkers were misled to elect to Congress in 2022. George Santos is a repulsive, compulsive liar, an empty shell of a man utterly devoid of character, conscience, and intelligence. He is so dumb that he is terrible at the only thing he tries hard at: lying.  George Santos is an inverted AI nightmare… all artificial, no intelligence. 

Some will surely say that the 105 Republicans who voted to expel Santos have a smidgen of moral stature above the 112 who voted to keep Santos in the House. Aside from the fact that you'd struggle to find a lower bar, you are left to debate the moral rectitude of overt hypocrites relative to those who hold positions that are at least consistent in their heinousness.

But please, all of you Republicans who voted to expel him… do not go on FOX News and tell us that your vote represented some high-minded moral stance.

In today’s Republicanism, the measure of whether lying is acceptable is not whether it is right or wrong, it is whether you can pull it off.  George Santos is a lousy liar, so he gets expelled from Congress. Donald Trump is an effective liar, so he is nominated for President of the United States.

George Santos was only doing what he observed Donald Trump to be doing at a far more prodigious scale.

The only difference is that Trump gained power over Republicans, but Santos did not.

In its inconsistency, the GOP is proving that it has no ethical grounding at all… only a blind, weak, cowardly submission to power.

What do we call people like that?

Ah, yes. Republicans.

 

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