Mark Chiusano of Newsday knows George Santos better than anyone else, having covered Santos’ political career from its start to its recent ignominious end. His new book The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos documents the full rise and fall of our country’s most infamous lying legislator. Chiusano recently joined Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson to explain how it came to be that, in a country as committed to honesty and fairness as the United States, someone who lies shamelessly could make it into a position of power. The lessons of the Santos saga may tell us as much about who we are as a nation as they do about the House of Representatives’ most infamous grifter.

The transcript has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

Nathan J. Robinson 

Before we dive in deep, could you remind us, for those who just need a refresher, on what the general pattern of “lying, hustling, grifting, and stealing” by George Santos is? Could you remind us of some of the more egregious things that he was ultimately found to have done that have made him such a notorious figure in American public life?

Mark Chiusano 

Totally. You have to separate it into two categories. One is the lying, and he has a wild amount of crazy, lurid lies about his biography. He’s said in various ways that he’s Jewish, or Jew-“ish”—he does not appear to be that type of religion in any sense of the word. He has said that he had a career on Wall Street and worked at certain banks that he didn’t work at. He said he went to colleges that he didn’t go to, and to a fancy private school, Horace Mann, that he never attended. He said he was a producer on Spider-Man on Broadway, which he was not. (It’s also a hilarious play to pick because it’s kind of a bad play and closed pretty quickly.)

All these things—anything you could think of—he’s made up about his background. He said he was a championship volleyball player in college—he was never on the team of the school he didn’t go to. It’s a double lie.

So, these are all the lies. And then he, of course, was grifting the whole time. And this has been a pattern in his life, that he was hustling for cash. In the beginning, it was kind of low-level stuff. He was stealing from family, friends, roommates. Later on, reporters turned up bigger things. He had this fake pet nonprofit that was supposed to help people who needed help for their pets, and he was pocketing cash from that, including for a Navy veteran who was homeless at one point—a really sad story.

And then in the political world, he’s doing all sorts of grifting. He was using campaign money for all sorts of inappropriate things. At the low level, it was just going out to dinners that you’re not really supposed to, to the truly insane stuff like literally stealing donors’ credit card information to pocket money and put it into his own bank account, or using it to pay for things like Botox.

These are truly wild things, and many politicians get caught for one little thing on that front, like maybe an inappropriate use of funds, but he really runs the gamut. 

Robinson 

It’s quite staggering. Your book is full of these jaw-dropping, egregious, shameless, brazen lies and bits of petty theft. This is the kind of guy who will drop lies as casually as you and I might just speak any ordinary sentence. At one point, I seem to remember him talking to his campaign treasurer saying he has brain cancer and is getting treated for it… and then he never brought it up again.

Chiusano 

Yes, and it’s a really sad one, too, because with that treasurer, her husband died from cancer. And so, he has a way of taking details from people and then spinning them back onto himself.

The funny thing is, obviously, the book is chock-full of all these lies and grifts, but I’ve continued to collect them, even when the book was done. Someone called me just a day or two ago, saying that they once were associated and worked with him a little bit, and took him over to the house for dinner one night and met this person’s wife, and Santos claims that he knows this woman’s boss. She works at a kind of medical facility, and he claims that he knows the boss. There’s no way that he knows the boss. It’s a random person and there’s no reason for him to know them. He sticks to the story and gets aggravated. “Of course, I’m not lying. I really know this person.” He just can’t help himself. 

Robinson 

It’s very strange. He will just do things like, for example, meet someone in Boston and say that he’s starting a PhD at Harvard, and then never mentions it again. If you bring it up, he’ll say something like, I left the program. The lies are so bizarre and unnecessary! Like you mentioned in the book about the volleyball team lie: he’s talking to people who know something about volleyball because their daughters play volleyball. He just embellishes it to the point where you want to ask, why are you pushing a volleyball lie right now with this audience? There’s no strategy. It’s not like this person won’t catch on because they won’t know enough. Instead, it’s like this person will definitely know enough to know you’re lying!

Chiusano 

Totally. There’s another crazy one that I write about in the book, where he’s in a debate with his Democratic opponent in 2022. They’re asked a softball question, something like, “What do you and your family do for holiday traditions?” And the Democrat says some boring thing like, “I’m in my sweatpants and I have Häagen-Dazs with my family.” And then, the interviewer returns to Santos and he says, “I just love gathering with my family and eating Häagen-Dazs.” And the Democrat looked at him and said, I just said that. Why would you do that? It seems to be something that clicks in his head, and he can’t help it.

Robinson 

We are presented with a number of mysteries in this book. One of the mysteries, of course, is: why would any person do this? You’re a journalist, not a psychoanalyst, so I don’t know that you can get us to the bottom of that mystery. There’s another mystery, however, which is: how does a person who does this end up in the United States House of Representatives? That is a mystery that I feel you, as a journalist, are equipped to help us understand a bit better.

Chiusano 

That’s right. And I do think with the first mystery, I enjoyed tracing all the details and trying to give people a sense of what might be going on in his head. With the second one, I think that it’s a real structural, institutional question. There are many kinds of structures that someone hits up on in their run towards Congress, and at many moments, various institutions could have blocked him but didn’t. I don’t think it’s a failure of one in particular, but many, many failures all together. It’s a little bit of what I call a “perfect storm election” with him.

So many things went right for him. One thing was that the political parties didn’t find out his full story, the college thing in particular. That’s a very easy thing to check, and the vetters didn’t do that on the political level. The crazy thing, though, is that they found a lot of stuff. The Democratic campaign arm that does these sorts of reports found dozens of pages of sketchy things that he’d done, including past work history and financial stuff.

Same thing with the journalistic side—there were other reporters, and I was one of them, who were poking small holes in his story, raising questions about weird things he was doing, but none of us connected all the dots and said, everything is weird and fake about this guy, not just five or six things. I don’t know whether our system is perfectly equipped to find a fabulist like that at the first moment.

Robinson 

Another thing is that George Santos is running as a MAGA Republican and is a big fan of Donald Trump. To do that, to be that person, you are telling a bunch of crazy exaggerated falsehoods all the time, nonstop, and distinguishing those from outright fraud is not necessarily easy. You mentioned that one of the things that was a little weird was he had a big fundraiser where everyone was unmasked, but that’s kind of par for the course for today’s Republican Party. They’re all Covid deniers—that’s a red flag by normal standards, but not by 2020 Republican standards.

Chiusano 

I’ll toss up two more red flags that I wrote about during the campaign. He was retweeting QAnon slogans. QAnon, obviously, is this kind of crazy conspiracy theory that now a couple of members of Congress have brushed up on and spread themselves, Marjorie Taylor Greene being one of them. And so, I both had to explain to readers what QAnon is and what is the problem with it is, and then that George Santos was part of that or at least spread it a bit. He claimed he didn’t know what it was.

So, that’s one. And then another was, of course, the election denying stuff. Santos was really big on that front, really following Trump’s footsteps. He actually showed up on January 5 at that big rally the day before the whole Capitol thing, saying his election was stolen, just like Trump. And so, people wrote about that. Again, it’s inappropriate, crazy behavior. That’s also what the Democrat who was running against him in 2022 chose to highlight: this guy is an election denier. That was the message that worked all around the country for Democrats, but didn’t work in New York for a whole bunch of reasons. 

Robinson 

But, it’s interesting because the message was already that George Santos is a liar—just that he was lying about politics. Obviously, the election wasn’t stolen. How do you say, oh, he’s worse than a huge Trumpian liar, he’s actually a huge liar?

Chiusano 

It’s funny what people gravitate towards, what tells the story. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if any one of these institutions had gotten, for example, the college story, or the Brazil check fraud case. I think those are things that kind of paint the picture better and say that this is different and not just a run-of-the-mill crazy politician who lies. 

Robinson 

Obviously, he’s both, but if I had to pick one set of lies, I would actually rather have members of Congress who lie that they’ve gone to college when they haven’t, than members of Congress who delegitimize our democracy through lies about substantive issues. It’s those sets of liars who are the kind of “legitimate” Republican liars. But it’s George Santos who was doing the “bad” lies, lying about their personal history.

Chiusano 

In some ways, the biographical lies are more understandable to us. I wrote about this, too. When he was in Congress—both before and after—he was always floating these crazy conspiracy theories about vaccines. He proposed the Nicki Minaj Vaccine Bill—trying to spread a bit of Covid misinformation, just like Minaj did. He also said on Twitter Spaces after the Hamas attack on Israel that we should go into a full “police state” in the U.S., that we should go door-to-door—he was very vague on what the point was. I guess it was to prevent terrorism. But these are truly dangerous things for an elected official to say, and different from just saying, I did or did not dress in drag. 

Robinson 

This gets us to another mystery of George Santos, which is how does a gay (not Jewish) man, a child of Brazilian immigrants who apparently has performed in drag in his life, become a hardcore, right-wing MAGA QAnon Republican?

Chiusano 

There’s an irony there, obviously, in that it goes counter to some of the stuff that he would say later in terms of his policy positions, and that the party itself promulgated, but actually, I think that was exactly why he was picked. The Nassau GOP, to give it credit, is this storied political machine—it’s very, very strong. Ronald Reagan supposedly said that when a Republican dies and goes to heaven, it looks a lot like Nassau County. This is how strong the GOP is in this part of the country.

And yet, they understood that Long Island is diversifying—new groups are coming in, and they have to find candidates for these different communities. And so, George Santos was exactly who they were looking for to counter some of the Democratic focus on identity, etc. So, he probably would not have gotten this nod at this time without his particular identity.

Robinson 

Ironic.

Chiusano 

Truly. It was identity politics, yes.

Robinson 

He must also be quite charismatic. Obviously, I’ve never met the man, but you’ve spoken with him. You write about his early life when he was doing a legitimate job for a short period of time when he was a call center worker, and he was very good at that because this is a guy with the gift of gab, it seems.

Chiusano 

Exactly. He can spin a story. In that call center job, he convinced everyone around him that even though he’s working for $12 or $13 an hour, actually he has a trust fund and vacations in Dubai and all these kinds of wild things. And he made people believe it. He’s very charismatic. He’s very tall, by the way. People don’t really realize that about him.

And he’s quick on his feet. There was a moment on the campaign trail where his opponent had been painting him as this true extremist, which in most ways he is. And his very shrewd response to that was something like, I’m not extreme, I’m just your wife’s gay best friend—a very clever and disarming way to prevent that attack. These are the kinds of things that helped him.

Robinson 

Also, I have to say, there is something kind of likable about him. I hate to use that word. I’ve talked to plenty of people who find him hard to hate. He’s a horrible, horrible person. He might be worse than Trump. Trump never killed a veteran’s dog.

Chiusano 

He has a real trail of victims behind him. He hurt people. He stole money from poor people. There’s a woman who’s living in a favela right now in no small part because of the money Santos stole from her. So, it’s not a joke.

Robinson 

No, no, no. Seriously, he’s a horrible, horrible human being.

Chiusano 

But I think you’re totally right, that there is something very likable about him. There’s also something very understandable about him. He is very of his generation. He is very funny and bumbling in the ways that I am sometimes, or like many people I know that are my age in terms of how we talk, trip over our words, or fix things later. He’s very relatable. And I think, again, that helped him, and will, even more so, in his post-prison life.

Robinson 

Yes, his Cameo videos are already so successful. He has increased the price because people want the Cameo videos. 

Chiusano 

They’re very good. They’re very funny.

Robinson 

They’re funny! It’s extraordinary. When we look back, I don’t know that he will make it into the history books. It’s a minor episode in American politics in one way, but it’s a very illuminating episode in another way. There are parallels with Boris Johnson and Donald Trump himself, who also have this kind of roguishness—I think you use the word “antihero” as well, which is that there is something about us that likes a bad guy.

Chiusano 

Well, he’s entertaining. And yes, he’s kind of sticking it to the elites. He couldn’t go to college, so he made it up, and there is something very appealing about that. We’re all searching for the American Dream, but it doesn’t really exist in the form that is commonly accepted, and so, George Santos shows another way to get it. Also, he himself is fascinated with entertainment and celebrity culture and gossip. I went through all these old social media posts of his before he got interested in politics. He was super into the Real Housewives, Miley Cyrus—this is his world. It’s what he’s made of and interested in. It’s no surprise that America, which is interested in all that, too, would kind of gravitate towards him.

Robinson 

You have a point in the book where you write about how some small-time hustler approaches you and tries to sell you something, as happens in the streets of New York, where a guy comes up to you with a story and it’s obviously a fraud. Most of these types of guys end up doing that, like selling fake watches on the street. But George Santos does not. He wins his election, and he wins by quite a few points. 

Chiusano 

It’s wild. And then, by the way, just to extend that story, if there was a world where he doesn’t even get seated, or he gets seated and gets kicked out immediately, that did not happen. He lasted almost a year in office.

Robinson 

He was a congressman. He will always have been one.

Chiusano 

One of 11,000, or whatever it is, in history. It’s fascinating. To me, that’s what’s emblematic of the story. He traced all those normal grifter paths and dabbled in different hustles. But the one he chooses, ultimately, is politics. And politics is available for that hustle. He shined a light on a lot of the ways that you can hustle in politics. It’s like a leaky ship.

Also, it’s at the center of American culture right now in a way that other businesses or pastimes were in the past. Maybe it’s fading a little bit, but for the past at least five years or so, politics has been right at the throbbing heart of the American conversation. And so, I think that’s what drew him there, and it’s also what makes him interesting as a figure in American history.

Robinson 

He might spend a few years in federal prison, but I feel like he’s going to land on his feet.

Chiusano 

I kind of agree. He says, anyway, that he’s made plenty of money from Cameo, and it does seem like the receipts are there. 

Robinson 

I bet he has!

Chiusano 

So, I think that he’s not going to go quietly. That’s just not been his ethos for the last few years. 

Robinson 

He’ll slap his name on stuff, and people will buy it because of the irony factor. 

Chiusano 

You mentioned Trump and Boris Johnson. What’s both appealing and scary about someone like Santos is that, on the appealing side, he doesn’t have access to the nuclear codes. But the scary part is that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, love them or hate them, have real resources behind them. It’s not surprising that an entertainment mogul would be able to win the presidency. Or Boris Johnson. Or that this … talented man would be able to turn the dark arts towards his own benefits. Santos has no money, no power. He has to lie about all the things that he says he has. And yet, that lying and scheming has allowed him to rise to the highest levels. So, will it just be easier for people like that to continue scheming their way in the future?

Robinson 

He could have been legitimate, though. He has the talent. This is a strange thing. He came from a working-class immigrant background, not from any of the things he said he had. So in a way, as you say, he is an American Dream story. But it also does seem that if he scaled back some of his most egregious pathological tendencies, he might have made it to Congress without this stuff. 

Chiusano 

Absolutely. Because, like I was saying before, the Republican Party was looking for a person from a different generation and community. It needed someone like that who still held the Republican policy line and views. So, he easily could have gotten that. Recently, there was actually a Republican candidate from Nassau County who did not complete college. So, it’s not as if the college thing were all that important or needed to be a litmus test for the party. He could have claimed that story in a really excellent way. I don’t wish him to be in Congress for various reasons, but it would have been fascinating to see him run in the spring in a primary if he had stayed. 

Robinson 

He would have done it. 

Chiusano 

He would have done it, and it would have been before his trial date. It would have been fascinating to see how that vote shook out and how many people just said, knowing everything they knew about him, that they still like his policy positions and like him—he’s funny, so why not?

Robinson 

Why the hell not? Trust in and respect for Congress is so low. “Honest grifter” is an oxymoron, but Trump has this quality, too, where it’s almost like he barely pretends to be telling the truth, so you almost trust him more.

Chiusano 

There is some weird double-crossing going there. But there is a way that he fits everyone’s stereotype of politician anyway, and he just adds on a little bit of fun stuff on top.

Robinson 

You’ve mentioned at some point in the book the “fork in the road.” There was a point at which George Santos could have stayed legitimate, and there was a point where he just became an outright grifter, paying people with fake checks for their dogs with a fake pet charity—again, heartbreaking stories, a horrible person. Did you find George Santos’s first lie? 

Chiusano 

Well, the problem is that I think it came pretty early. His mother used to call them “his stories.” That’s what I was told. She would say, “it’s just Anthony and his stories again”—not lies. But in that, I think you can extrapolate a certain sense of weariness over this occurring for so long. He was also stealing from his family members, like his aunt Alma, an immigrant from Brazil who is—literally, along with his dad— responsible for keeping him out of jail right now. She and his dad are the ones who posted bond for him. They don’t have a ton of money, and they’re the ones that are on the financial line, letting him hang out and do Cameos now, and this is a woman he stole from. He mooched off his grandmother in Brazil, an elderly woman.

So, I think that he has been doing this kind of thing for a long time. To me, what changed is that he decided to go into politics. In politics, you can’t really hide those grifts forever. Eventually, you’re going to get found out. There’s just too much paperwork. And to me, that is the other central mystery of the book and of him: why pick politics?

Robinson 

Where there’s scrutiny. Scrutiny from journalists.

Chiusano 

At least a little scrutiny, and now more and more. I think it’s almost a cry for help on one level, if you want to be an armchair psychoanalyst. But more journalistically, I think that this was the big thing: he was always gravitating towards the most celebrity focused, hottest spotlight, and so there was politics.

Robinson 

Has he ever admitted any of this stuff, like stealing from family members? Is he just a pure sociopath who feels bad about none of it, apologizes for none of it, and just hurts people all his life? Does he make performances of regret?

Chiusano 

He has apologized for some of his lies and some of the misrepresentations, at least to his district, but he always does it with a smile on his face, and he disputes a lot of the monetary things and says it’s not quite the way it is.

Robinson 

It must have been a challenge to report on someone who has woven such a web. Were there things that you or others didn’t know were false until you looked into them?

Chiusano 

One weird one was he said that he was born at 24 weeks gestation, which is very early. I tried my best to prove or disprove it. Family members don’t remember anything about that. You look at the records, and it’s super unlikely—there’s not a great statistical chance that it’s true. So, I both had to figure out the facts, and then figure out why he was telling this lie. What’s the point?

Sometimes I think, like you were saying, it is just random. He just lies for no reason. But sometimes it seemed to me that there was a deeper reason that he reached for this lie, like with the 24 weeks gestation one. I think a bunch of his lies cluster around the number of obstacles he has had to climb, and that he has always overcome things. In some ways, some of those lines can be telling.

Robinson 

How does he explain it? Does he have an explanation for it? Does he just avoid the one about his mom dying on 9/11?

Chiusano 

That’s another one that he’s doubled down on. He says the story he has been told is that she escaped the towers.

Robinson 

I thought he also said that 9/11 claimed his mother’s life? 

Chiusano 

Yes, that’s true. I guess that one he has backed off from. I can’t remember the wording of the tweet—charitably, you could say he misspoke or something. But, that’s another interesting one because as a journalist, you try to be as careful as you can. So, the reason we doubt that the 9/11 story is true is because his mother’s own immigration paperwork says she was in Brazil at the time, yet Santos himself claims that she was there.

So, it’s very difficult. One funny moment I had reporting this was when I was talking to people at the middle school that he went to. He would have been in middle school at the time of 9/11, and turns out that there’s a window from that middle school where you could see the towers coming down, so he certainly was there in middle school at the time. He intersects with all these moments of American history, even though he is a minor figure in the end. But he’s an interesting American legend.

Robinson 

It does strike me that, with all the work you have to do to try and figure out answers to this stuff, the truth is very elusive. It’s a very precious and difficult thing. And as you mentioned, if someone says they went to Horace Mann, how do you prove they didn’t? How do you prove that someone isn’t Jewish? And they say, “I don’t know what happened to the paperwork, but the school is wrong.” What do you do? Can you ever 100 percent prove that someone didn’t attend that school? If no one remembers him at the school, he’ll just come up with some additional explanation for the facts that you’ve uncovered.

Chiusano 

It’s a real flaw in the science of journalism in a way. The more scientific we make it, the more precisely we say exactly what we know, frankly, the more boring it is. You don’t want to hear a long explanation of everything I went through to say whether he went to Horace Mann or not. The reader wants an answer: did he or didn’t he go? And so, when journalists give direct answers, sometimes we make mistakes and that leads to all sorts of problems. I think journalism is in this very difficult moment because good journalists are doing our best to scratch towards truth and explain why we make mistakes, and people are impatient. 

Robinson 

Because you’ve covered this from the beginning, at a certain point you must have wished you had uncovered the depth of this earlier, before he got into the United States House of Representatives. And so, you must have thought, “How do we, as journalists, make sure that we find the real story, that we don’t just get a few things and miss the giant thing that should be staring us in the face?”

Chiusano 

Totally. On the journalistic side, time and resources help. It’s a real irony for me that I spent a lot of time making sure that a different Long Island congressional candidate went to the college he said he did because that college was Annapolis. That is something that rings a bell in a journalist’s head: this person is claiming they went to this military academy, and we want to make sure we’re not going to allow him to say this if it’s not true.

So, I filed a records request and followed up and called again—you spend time on this, and he went. That is typically how it goes: you do your checks, and nothing comes of them. That takes time. So sure, if more journalists had more time, that would be great. Some of it is dumb luck.

I actually was working on a story that was another kind of sketchy thing about Santos’s work history that I couldn’t finish because I couldn’t get the quote, and I couldn’t get the person on the record to help me with it. That’s a shame. If I had gotten it, maybe more threads would have been pulled in time.

Robinson 

I have to ask you before we close: what does he think of you? 

Chiusano 

I don’t think he’s a fan. He has said many demeaning things about me to other people, which I always find kind of funny. But he has replied to the book sideways in a couple of funny ways. He has called it a fable, which is really funny because it kind of is a fable—I don’t think in the way he means it—and he has also called it fictitious, which I also find funny. What part is fictitious: his parts or my parts?

Robinson 

But he hasn’t actually refuted what you’ve said, and he has been given ample opportunity to.

Chiusano 

I reached out many, many times offering him the chance to do that, and nothing. And nothing since, either. 

Robinson 

Yes. He has said, stop stalking me or whatever. 

Chiusano 

Yes. He said, stop knocking on the doors of my family members. But that’s what New York City journalists do. We knock on lots of doors.

Robinson 

I haven’t followed the criminal charges closely. So, where do things stand now with this guy?

Chiusano 

He appears to be talking to prosecutors about a plea deal. That’s been happening for a while, so who knows if it’ll actually pan out. He’s lost his real bargaining chip, which was being in office. That’s huge, and now he doesn’t have that anymore. So, he’s in trouble. He has a trial date set for September.

By the way, I think it’s very funny that one of the reasons the trial isn’t going to happen until September is because the judge has some other cases. But she also said in court that people don’t like serving on jury duty in the summer. I think that’s hilarious, and probably true, but that’s pushing it back. So, if he doesn’t take a deal before then, it seems like he’ll be in court in September. It’s a real challenge. It’s a lot of paper that he’s faced with, with some very straightforward charges that will be difficult to refute.

Robinson 

Wait, I just saw the book says “stealing puppies from the Amish.” He did that too? 

Chiusano 

Yes, that’s another fun one. 

Robinson 

The list just goes on and on—stealing puppies from the Amish!

Chiusano 

From an Amish farmer. There’s an incredible televised interview with one of these Amish farmers, and they film the farmer from the back so you can’t tell who it is, but the 19th century garb is clear. It’s beautiful. He went to everyone. He tried everyone.

Robinson 

God, it’s funny! And it’s also sad for our democracy. Your book is fabulously entertaining, but it is also depressing. I thought, we need to fix this. This is a problem. And as I said earlier, it’s easier to focus in on the grifting stuff and the paying for the OnlyFans account with campaign funds and all that. I’m more frightened by the horrible politics. And those people, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, are still in there because she apparently just spends her campaign funds correctly. 

Chiusano 

Right. The Jewish space lasers thing that she’s famous for: how much less of a lie is that than some of the stuff Santos did?

Robinson 

And a more dangerous one, really. 

Chiusano 

And I do think it’s convenient for the Republican Party to toss out Santos and say, he’s the problem, he’s the cancer, without looking at some of these other things.

Robinson 

Yes. “That’s what not having integrity is. The rest of us have integrity.” 

Chiusano 

Exactly. 

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.