George Santos was expelled from Congress on a Friday in December. The next business day, he announced a new role: as a sort of clown for hire on Cameo, an app and website where he offered his services to record personalized videos for fans. At first he charged the messages for $75 each, but soon he was charging $200, then $400, and finally $500 per person. But last week the market contracted. The videos dropped to $350 each.
Going through Santos' cameo work — there's a TikTok account, @georgiescameos, that collects clips — is a miserable exercise. In a typical offering, he sits in a drab apartment or a darkened SUV. His face looks glassy from Botox, his eyes search for the script. He expresses his condolences and congratulations. He says “kill, girl”, he says “kill it”, he says “diva down”. Sometimes he refers with a wink to the fraud allegations made against him. He says goodbye with an air kiss. Mwah. Cha ching.
Watching the videos made me sick – not because they enriched a fabulist, but because they are so boring and monotonous. There was once a transgressive appeal to the Santos personality. As he strolled erratically through the halls of Congress, his deceptions damaged the confident reputation of the American government. It was the inappropriateness of his high status that made him amusing. Now that he's been pushed to the depths, viral fame no longer provides excitement for a Santos character. There is nothing transgressive about a scammer on Cameo.
Santos rightly suspects that his political downfall had some sort of entertainment value. Bowen Yang took on his form repeatedly on “Saturday Night Live” last year, playing him as a lazy and pathological goblin. There was a Mad Libs-like quality to Santos' claims, a dizzying randomness that seemed attuned to social media. He said he had family trauma from 9/11 and the Holocaust; that he had worked at Goldman Sachs and on “Hannah Montana”; that he played competitive volleyball and rescued puppies. (None of this was true). As reporters pursued him, his erratic on-camera appearances — stumbling over the door to his office or inexplicably holding a baby — shined through the hardwood interiors of Congress.
To Santos' audience, who were not real fans, his misdeeds seemed both absurd and understandable. Even when he was formally charged with serious crimes (including conspiracy, wire fraud, credit card fraud and identity theft, all of which he denies), the details were deliciously petty. The House ethics report released in November reported on campaign funds spent on Botox injections, OnlyFans subscriptions and Sephora products. Trump turned politics into a camp, and now there was a real “Drag Race” fan in Congress who was well-versed in the genre's tropes and seemed to live for messy drama.
When his colleagues voted to remove him from office, making him only the sixth member in history to be expelled from the House of Representatives, the phrase “DIVA DOWN” was trending on Twitter. Compared to the power that actual functioning legislatures can wield over our lives, his crimes were considered small, almost cute. A millennial in his flop era.
Now Santos hopes to turn his political scandal into some kind of influencer role. But like a comic book villain, he has landed in a new dimension and finds that his superpowers have disappeared. He continues to insist that he is an “icon,” but his actions are not seen outside the political arena. His story was compelling not because he had any special charisma, but because the reporters worked so persistently on his case, exposing his lies with such breathtaking speed, that he appeared to be a more dynamic character than he actually was.
Even as trolls (including Jimmy Kimmel) try to prank Santos and submit increasingly ridiculous requests for his cameo videos, the results prove frustratingly dull. A one-minute video in which he congratulates a mutilated woman for transferring her dead husband's spirit into a mannequin – “I look forward to you enjoying all these new memories now with your new friend Jacob in his new ship.” to wake up, bye! ” – just proves he’ll say anything.
In his defense, a cameo is rarely interesting in terms of content. A video of a famous person has meta value; There is satisfaction in drawing an untouchable person close to you. Using a celebrity as a ventriloquist's dummy for a minute or two can feel like a form of power. The exercise has a certain humiliation for both sides. But Santos is hardly untouchable and seems immune to embarrassment.
Two weeks after his expulsion from Congress, Santos conducted an interview with comedian Ziwe for her YouTube channel. Some complained that it was ill-advised for them to further promote Santos, but the accusation feels like a blame game: Our standards were low enough to promote him to Congress, but YouTube is the point where do we draw the line? In this segment, Ziwe was as sharp as Santos was sloppy: “What advice do you have for young, diverse people with personality disorders considering a career in politics?” she asked — but it was so shady they couldn't quite place it could.
When Ziwe asked, “What can we do to make you go away?” He had one answer: “Stop inviting me to your performances.” Then he added quietly, “But you can’t. Because people want the content.”
There it was, a moment of truth from George Santos. But the value of his content is decreasing and he has expensive taste.
Comments are closed.