His dramatic exit — the first of its kind — followed months of journalist exposés, and a recent House Ethics Committee report which concluded he “stole from his own campaign”, “deceived donors”, and “sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit”. Other colourful allegations on the books include the suggestion that he spent campaign funds on Botox and holidays, once worked as a drag queen, and swindled a disabled veteran who was seeking to fund life-saving surgery for a dog called Patch. The disgraced representative now faces criminal charges including conspiracy, falsification of records, identity theft and credit card fraud.

Even by the low standards of public life, the creative nature of Santos’s deceptions and their titanic scale put him in a different league from your average CV-massager or expense-fiddler. A lot of the lies are weirdly specific. Only this October, he insisted that his five-year-old niece had been kidnapped from a playground in New York at the behest of the Chinese government, in retaliation for criticisms he had made about the Communist Party. In 2020, he claimed on radio that he had been forced to get both of his knees replaced after time spent as a college volleyball star — though later admitted he had never attended college at all.

Like Kevin Spacey’s character “Verbal” Kint in The Usual Suspects, there’s a sense that Santos tends to find creative inspiration in the things he sees immediately around him. In particular, he seems drawn to placing himself at the heart of dramatic world events. He has poignantly related how his mother died in the South Tower in 9/11, despite it later emerging she was alive and kicking and living in Brazil at the time. He frequently asserts that he is a Jewish-Ukrainian descendant of Holocaust survivors, making out that his attempts to prove this have been stymied by the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. At various times he has said that he was one of the earliest sufferers of Covid-19, though the supposed date of his illness tends to shift. And he has also told of how he “lost four employees” in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida in 2016, later altering this under pressure to the more modest suggestion he had lost “four people that were going to be coming to work for the company that I was starting up in Orlando”. Not only were investigators unable to identify any such employees, they couldn’t find any such business.

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Tracing the contours of Santos’s fictional universe has become a full-time job for some; his Wikipedia page alone is one of the longest I’ve ever seen. Perhaps not surprisingly, writers and filmmakers are now also circling, with HBO anticipating the “Gatsby-esque journey of a man from nowhere who exploited the system, waged war on truth and swindled one of the wealthiest districts in the country to achieve his American Dream”.

Yet tempting as it is to picture a Botox-enhanced Santos crammed into elegant white flannels, champagne flute in hand and staring mournfully at Daisy Buchanan’s place across the bay, this comparison seems off. In fact, Santos is more like Gatsby’s shadow-side. While the inventions of Fitzgerald’s most famous character are relatively deliberate and a means to an end, Santos appears chaotic in his confabulation: like a child, wholly immersed in making up a gripping story for himself, and not quite sure where its edges are. Gatsby is a tragic figure, heroically attempting to muscle an unbiddable world into satisfying his deepest longings. Santos appears more of a clown, stuck in a quasi-hypnagogic state between dreaming and waking and apparently often unable to distinguish between the two. His biographer has said that several acquaintances of Santos’s reported to him that his subject “believed the lies he was telling”. And when Piers Morgan once asked “Did you not think you’d be caught?”, the answer came back, apparently accurately for once: “You know, I just went with it… I mean, if you make up a lie, are you thinking at all?”.

According to one study, whereas most of us tell one falsehood per day, a pathological liar tells seven — a round number that has a slight whiff of invention about it. Whether or not that’s true, the chances are that you, too, have a mythomane somewhere in your life. I’m vaguely acquainted with one, and I’m often struck by how reluctant listeners are to challenge the suspiciously tall tales emerging from this person. Socially, to accuse someone of lying is a nuclear option, putting paid to friendly relations afterwards and risking your own reputation if you’re then proved wrong. It’s probably only worth doing if you’re personally invested. Since that doesn’t apply to most of us, even when their fibs are blindingly obvious, pathological liars can operate uninterrupted for a surprisingly long time.

Compulsive liars such as Santos may look as if they fit into the well-worn archetype of the self-invented American man, but I’m not so sure. In her fascinating book, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians, Tara Isabella Burton argues that, as both God and Nature receded as explanatory forces in Western societies, and predestined social hierarchies could no longer be justified in precisely those terms, the importance of self-invention emerged to fill the gap. Specifically, she understands this as the metaphysical notion that “who we are – deep down, at our most fundamental level – is who we want to be”. She continues: “We have turned our backs on the idea of a creator-God, out there, and instead placed God within us — more specifically, within the numinous force of our own desires.” Her examples of self-made men and the occasional woman are mostly characters who transgress fairly consciously, pursuing their sexual or aesthetic preferences counter to the existing social grain, and merging self-definition with “artful self-expression” to construct whatever sort of story they want people to believe.

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In the picture offered by Burton, the self-made human is largely in charge of his desires and what he does about them — and indeed in charge of reality about himself, to some extent at least. If he flies parallel to the ground now and again, it is in the service of a deliberate plan, and he is at pains not to leave the planet entirely. A frequently used adjective is “godlike”, although Burton also makes the implied hubris clear.

But there are other ways of picturing the relation between a self and its appetites, and they are perhaps better exemplified by Santos. Along with Immanuel Kant, you might think that desire is not a part of the true self at all; that it assaults the self from a position “outside” of it, pulling you this way and that unless you enlist the will to tame them. Alternatively, along with David Hume, you might think of desires (or “passions”) as really in the driving seat of the self, harnessing dull instrumental reasoning to do their bidding. Either way, such visions alert one to the danger that appetites, impulses, and inclinations may come to rule or vanquish the real self. While you believe you are positively (re)creating yourself, you may only be taking dictation.

Pushed into perpetual lying by (I assume) his overriding desires for attention, fame, stimulation and validation, Santos stands as a warning, then: not so much a self-made man as an eventually unselfed one, made to look ridiculous to the world through the machinations of his own psyche. Though, of course, he is an extreme case, other supposedly self-created types should probably take note. There is sometimes a short distance between bold self-reinvention and starting to look slightly bonkers as the deep-seated fantasies take charge. And you probably shouldn’t rely on those around you to tell you the difference.

In the 1979 film Being There (based on the 1970 novel by Jerzy Kosiński), Chauncey Gardiner — memorably played by Peter Sellers — is an illiterate, mentally stunted, middle-aged man. Owing to his lifelong isolation in the townhouse of an elderly patron, he knows only two things: gardening and television. He dresses in Thirties-style double-breasted suits and speaks with an upper-class accent. But when his patron dies, Chauncey is unleashed in the streets of Washington DC and by a series of accidents soon rises to the heights of power, his mundane gardening commentary eagerly interpreted as sage advice by politicians and the press. Released in the year before the election of actor-president Ronald Reagan, the film has been seen as a harbinger of the postmodern turn in US politics, given expression by the likes of Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan: when appearance came to subsume substance in seemingly new and radical ways. Santos makes sense when viewed as a product of this distinctly late 20th-century, media-driven descent toward a fetish for the fake and superficial.

Meditations on the centrality of image in politics, however, also have a much older pedigree, stretching back to Machiavelli and the classical histories he drew upon. In contemplating what it took to hold power in a corrupt world, the Italian famously wrote in the passage on “the lion and the fox” that “the prince must be a great simulator and dissimulator”. Indeed, the same events in the story interpreted differently (“What if Chauncey was not the dumb beast of burden we were led to believe but was conscious of what was happening?”) would make Being There the ultimate tale of Machiavellian cunning and Chauncey Gardiner the ideal prince.

Santos, of course, knew what he was doing when he, for instance, claimed to have developed new carbon capture technologies or to have been the victim of an assassination plot. Taking the view of him as a calculating con-man would seem to confirm another comparison made of the legislator with a fictional character: Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. But even this is off, for there is nothing of Ripley’s grace, nothing of the subtle or the suave, about Santos. And it is in any event hard to imagine Matt Damon (or a young Alain Delon) playing him in a film. More likely, it is this very tension between the possibility of his being either a Chauncey or a Ripley — a moron or a Machiavel — that makes George Santos such a frustratingly opaque and therefore fascinating figure. That he was found out so soon and so spectacularly suggests the former, but the fact that he is now a national figure who is set to gain more influence (thanks to Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s gift of two plum committee assignments) hints at the latter.

Yet for all his mysterious airs, Santos did not materialise in a vacuum. And as easy as it would be to single him out for ridicule, there can be no full accounting of the man and what he represents without acknowledging the context that made his ascent possible. Just as Chauncey could not have risen without the many cues of encouragement and support, unwitting or otherwise, given by his elite benefactors, so too should Santos’s career be seen as rooted in the broader culture and example set by the political class to which he now belongs. While Santos may still shock by the sheer volume and brazenness of his deceptions, he essentially broke no new ground. The content and pattern of his lies closely tracks those made by his predecessors in the political arena. And while Santos’s false claims are evidently more flagrant — and admittedly distant from the artful manipulation recommended by Machiavelli — they are only the more exaggerated renditions of the exact same narrative material provided by others.

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In his attempt to inflate (or rather invent) his academic record, Santos carried on where Joe Biden left off in 1987, when the then-first time presidential candidate famously lost his temper after being asked about his grades, challenged the reporter to seeing who had the higher IQ, and bragged of law school honours that could not be verified. (This was also when Biden was caught plagiarising a Neil Kinnock speech.) In his effort to burnish the scarcely existent business career he supposedly had in the top firms of Wall Street, Santos echoed Donald Trump, a flailing businessman with a history of major bankruptcies who parlayed his outsize image into a reality show and then a political career — no less premised on his skills as a huckster. Santos even parroted a signature Trumpian expression when he pointed to his (fictional) experience handling “billions and billions on spreadsheets”. In both instances, Santos played to the most seductive of American myths, meritocracy, beloved by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Santos offended many after he claimed to be descended from Holocaust refugees (in addition to having a mother who died on 9/11), and this was shown to be false; later, he had to revise his identification as Jewish to “Jew-ish”. But his was only an especially crude take on an old trick favoured by American elites — claiming ancestry from an oppressed group to gain admission into a prestigious institution. Senator Elizabeth Warren once pulled it off and so do countless college applicants every year across the country’s best schools. The footage that emerged recently of Santos dressed in drag in is innocuous enough, but running as a conservative Republican at a time when “Drag Queen Story Hour” has become a flashpoint in the culture war makes such a sight more politically compromising than it would otherwise be. And Santos is by no means the first Republican to run on a wholesome, straightlaced image in public only to be revealed as having a far more colourful private life.

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But even more than internalising the elite’s instinct for lying about their ethnic identities or private proclivities, Santos has excelled in adopting their appetite for the oil that greases the wheels of US politics: big money. Asked by another “colourful” Republican, Matt Gaetz, where he got $700,000 in self-donated campaign funds, Santos responded like a pro: he quickly deflected to an attack on partisan enemies and appealed again to his “self-made” credentials. “Well I’ll tell you where it didn’t come from. It didn’t come from China, or Ukraine, or Burisma… I’ve lived an honest life. I’ve never been accused, sued of any bad doings. So it’s the equity of my hardworking self that I invested inside of me.” Among the allegations levelled against Santos, the ones having to do with campaign finance violations are the most serious and could potentially bring him down. But whatever Santos may have done (he has since revised his claims), he would be punished for breaking the rules of a campaign finance system that is already known as among the most nakedly venal and dysfunctional in any major democracy.

Machiavelli scandalised Christendom with his blunt take on the “mirror of princes” genre, in which he aimed to instruct the power-seeker on how to mantenere lo stato (“maintain the state”). Santos appears to be playing a similar role in modelling, perhaps a little too well for anyone’s comfort, the principles and methods by which the rulers of the American state gained and maintained their power. In his lies can be seen reflected back the pathologies of elites at the helm of both parties. To invoke the memory of yet another fictional character who embodied the moral and political zeitgeist of his era, Santos may steal a line from Malcolm Tucker and say to the whole political class: “I am you, and you are me.”

At the very least, then, we may ask: can there be anything of the redemptive or even the heroic in the Santos saga? Does beating the elite at their own hypocritical game and showing them up on their own turf count as a commendable instance of princely virtù in Machiavelli’s book? If the ghostly wraith of the Florentine philosopher wandered the halls of Congress, would it descend upon the New York delegation and give George Anthony Devolder Santos a pat on the back?

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For all his centuries-long reputation as a teacher of amorality, Machiavelli was never a mere cynic or nihilist. He was so unscrupulous with the means precisely because he was so terribly devoted to the ends. As he confessed to a friend, “I love my country more than I love my soul.” He was clear that the object of power was not self-preservation alone but the restoration of good government, not to enlarge the cesspool of vice but to drain it. As he wrote in the Discourses on Livy: “And truly, if a prince seeks the glory of the world, he ought to desire to possess a corrupt city, not to spoil it entirely as did Caesar but to reorder it as did Romulus.”

George Santos will have neither the glory of Romulus nor the infamy of Caesar, nor even the innocence of Chauncey Gardiner. Nevertheless, in his farcical mediocrity, he stands as the symbol of his time.