George Santos is a Trumpzi Frankenstein

Echo opinion published in the Seattle Times, by the New York Times columnist David Brooks:

Donald Trump's political Frankenstein:

George Santos is following the Donald Trump model - do ALL the political harm you can and the corrupt GOP will bring you back to life again. 

The Sad Tale of (Pathetic) George Santos (Maine Writer opinion- Santos is a phony!)

What would it be like to be so ashamed of your life that you felt compelled to invent a new one? (In other word "lie" about who you are and the heritage you inherited.  "Who knew?" 😏😝😡)

Most of us don’t feel compelled to do that. Most of us take the actual events of our lives, including the failures and frailties, and we gradually construct coherent narratives about who we are. Those autobiographical narratives are always being updated as time passes — and, of course, tend to be at least modestly self-flattering. 

Yet, for most of us, the life narrative we tell both the world and ourselves gives us a stable sense of identity. It helps us name what we’ve learned from experience and what meaning our life holds. It helps us make our biggest decisions. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once observed, you can’t know what to do unless you know what story you are a part of.

A reasonably accurate and coherent autobiographical narrative is one of the most important things a person can have. If you don’t have a real story, you don’t have a real self.

George Santos, on the other hand, is a young man who apparently felt compelled to jettison much of his actual life and replace it with fantasy. As Grace Ashford and Michael Gold of The New York Times have been reporting, in his successful run for Congress this year Santos claimed he had a college degree that he does not have. Moreover, ee claimed he held jobs that he did not hold. He claimed he owned properties he apparently does not own. He claims he never committed check fraud, though the Times unearthed court records suggesting he did. He claims he never described himself as Jewish, merely as adjacently “Jew-ish.”  A self-described gay man, he hid a years long heterosexual marriage that ended in 2019. 

George Santos is a fraud, ya' think?

All politicians — perhaps all humans — embellish. But what Santos did goes beyond that. He fabricated a new persona, that of a meritocratic superman. He claims to be a populist who hates the elites, but he wanted you to think he once worked at Goldman Sachs. Imagine how much inadequacy you’d have to feel to go to all that trouble.

I can’t feel much anger toward Santos for his deceptiveness, just a bit of sorrow. ("bit"? of sorrow?~ I don't think so...!)

Maine Writer- I disagree with David Brooks. I do NOT think Santos deserves any sympathy.

Cutting yourself off to that degree from the bedrock of the truth renders your whole life unstable. 

Santos made his own past unreliable, perpetually up for grabs. But when you do that you also eliminate any coherent vision of your future. People may wonder how Santos could have been so dumb. In political life, his fabrications were bound to be discovered. Perhaps it’s because dissemblers often have trouble anticipating the future; they’re stuck in the right now.

In a sense Santos is a sad, farcical version of where President Donald Trump has taken the Republican Party — into the land of unreality, the continent of lies. Trump’s takeover of the GOP was not primarily an ideological takeover, it was a psychological and moral one. I don’t feel sorry for Trump the way I do for Santos, because Trump is so cruel. But he did introduce, on a much larger scale, the same pathetic note into our national psychology.

In his book, “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump,” the eminent personality psychologist Dan McAdams argues that Trump could continually lie to himself because he had no actual sense of himself. There was no real person, inner life or autobiographical narrative to betray. McAdams quotes people who had been close to Trump who reported that being with him wasn’t like being with a conventional person; it was like being with an entity who was playing the role of Donald Trump. And that role had no sense of continuity. He was fully immersed in whatever dominance battle he was fighting at that moment.

McAdams calls Trump an “episodic man,” who experiences life as a series of disjointed moments, not as a coherent narrative flow of consciousness. “He does not look to what may lie ahead, at least not very far ahead,” McAdams writes. “Trump is not introspective, retrospective or prospective. There is no depth; there is no past; there is no future.”

America has always had impostors and people who reinvented their pasts. (If he were real, Jay Gatsby might have lived — estimations of the precise locations of the fictional East and West Egg vary — in what is now Santos’ district.) This feels different. I wonder if the era of the short-attention spans and the online avatars is creating a new character type: the person who doesn’t experience life as an accumulation over decades, but just as a series of disjointed performances in the here and now, with an echo of hollowness inside.

This week Santos tried to do a bit of damage control in a series of interviews, including with WABC radio in New York. The whole conversation had an air of unreality. Santos was rambling, evasive and haphazard, readjusting his stories in a vague, fluid way. The host, John Catsimatidis, wasn’t questioning him the way a journalist might. He was practically coaching Santos on what to say. The troubling question of personal integrity was not on anybody’s radar screen. And then the conversation reached a Tom Wolfe-ian crescendo when former Rep. Anthony Weiner suddenly appeared — and turned out to be the only semi-competent interviewer in the room.

Karl Marx famously said that under the influence of capitalism, all that’s solid melts into air. I wonder if some elixir of Trumpian influence and online modernity can have the same effect on individual personalities.

David Brooks is a regular columnist for The New York Times.

Holding the former guy accountable for the January 6 insurrection

‘If Trump Is Losing … He’s Going to Say They Stole It,” Steve Bannon said before the election: Audio, published in Rolling Stone.

Editorial: Criminal evidence abounds against Trump. He must be held accountable. Echo editorial opinion published in the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

WASHINGTON, D.C.- The final January 6th, insurrection committee hearing on Thursday October 13th presented what, in any other historical context, would have been a series of major bombshells. 

But in this shell-shocked nation, numbed by years of daily Trumpian and "Trumpostian" outrages, the idea of a president and his advisers colluding to organize a violent coup no longer seems to spark the sustained outrage it urgently deserves.

Americans should be outraged because the evidence is clear: Donald Trump worked actively to subvert an election and seize power through a violent attack on Congress. An astonishing number of Americans still don’t grasp why that was such a bad thing, as if it’s OK to take up knives, guns, bear spray, battering rams, and military-style body armor to invade the Capitol simply because an election didn’t yield the desired result.

Trump "the former guy" incited a group of seditious election deniers on January 6, 2020.

Evidence abounds that Trump knew weeks ahead of the November 2020, election that his defeat loomed, and he colluded with outsiders to stay in the White House anyway. 

Contacts were established with right-wing militias to lead a military-style assault on the Capitol. Trump advisers Roger Stone and Steve Bannon helped with coordination.

Bannon, (#fake!) chief White House strategist in 2017, said in an audio recording more than a week before the election: “What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory, right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s the winner. … If Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock at night [on Election Day], it’s going to be even crazier. Because he’s going to sit right there and say, ‘they stole it.’”

Stone, in separate video footage, stated that if the election result was still undecided on election night, “the key thing to do is to claim victory.”

In a subsequent clip, he stated bluntly regarding a Trump loss, “F*** the voting, let’s get right to the violence. We’ll have to start smashing pumpkins, if you know what I mean.”

Indeed, the (Bannon asshole) used a broadcast to warn about January 5: “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. It’s all converging and now we’re on, as they say, the point of attack, right, the point of attack tomorrow.”

Trump consulted with a close adviser, Tom Fitton, about declaring victory before the votes were counted. Fitton told the House committee that preparations for a victory declaration, even if Trump were to lose, began four months before the election.

Obviously, as the videos show, the Trumpzi let insurrection was premeditated, with The Former Guy playing an active role in the planning. The question is whether Attorney General Merrick Garland has the intestinal fortitude to prosecute. The Supreme Court on Thursday indicated in a ruling in another Trump case that it would not intervene to rescue the ex-president.

If Trump isn’t held accountable, he or someone inspired by his wanton display of criminal conduct will almost certainly try it again. What would they have to lose?