As a congressman, George Santos received a salary of $174,000 a year. But just days after becoming the first person to be expelled from Congress in 20 years, he has already discovered a more lucrative calling: Cameo superstar.
Cameo is a video platform that allows customers to pay celebrities of varying levels of notoriety to craft personalized video messages for friends. According to Semafor, Santos “initially underpriced his videos at a mere $75, a mistake he has since remedied.” Even after raising his fee to between $200 and $300 per video, requests continued to pour in. Santos, reports Semafor, is already on track to make money that “dwarfs” his congressional salary. Cameo’s CEO says the former congressman looks like he's going to be an “absolute whale” on a platform where celebrities sometimes make millions of dollars.
Santos ought to be held to account by being ignored, not being paid to be a clown.
That the scandal-plagued Santos is already thriving financially within a week of his expulsion is sort of funny, but mostly it’s a sad comment about our society. Outside the legal process, Santos ought to be held to account by being ignored, not being paid to be a clown.
A good deal of the money flowing toward Santos right now — maybe almost all of it — is ironic in intention. Left-of-center people are prompting Santos to send warm messages of comfort to their friends, delighting in the opportunity to poke fun at the second-most-brazen fabulist of the Trump era, topped only by Trump himself. And it also permits people to briefly revel in the nihilistic undercurrents of our political moment. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., paid over $300 (using campaign funds) for a Santos video to troll Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., over his bribery charges: “You stand your ground, sir, and don’t get bogged down by all the haters out there.” (Santos later said he didn’t know the video was for Menendez.) A liberal voting rights activist paid Santos to riff on a Taylor Swift song and posted it on X. Nebraska state Sen. Megan Hunt posted a Santos Cameo video from a friend that encouraged her to stand by her “convictions.”
It’s not hard to see the temptation of these videos. Santos was an unrepentant huckster, but he was an amusing one. The sheer volume and audacity of his fabrications, coupled with an unwavering refusal to acknowledge wrongdoing, made him an extraordinary spectacle on Capitol Hill. Every absurd new allegation of misconduct generated social media buzz, from reports that he stole money from a possibly nonexistent rescue pet charity to the House Ethics Committee’s findings that he spent campaign funds on Botox, high-end retailers and Only Fans. And unlike his role model Donald Trump, he was too ineffectual to be sinister. While Trump was an influential figurehead of authoritarian white nationalism in the White House, Santos’ only cause seemed to be insisting that he deserved to be somewhere he didn’t, and he got nothing done in Congress except for ludicrous news conferences.
Still, it’s one thing to deride Santos. It’s another thing to pay him to keep the show going. Santos was politically impotent, but that doesn’t mean his misdeeds were trivial or victimless. Even before entering Congress, Santos allegedly cheated innocent people out of thousands of dollars. He defrauded the public by making it into Congress through a heavily fabricated resume and lies about his identity. And he’s now facing 23 felony charges, including identity theft, wire fraud, stealing unemployment benefits, lying to election officials and defrauding donors.
Santos’ Cameo superstardom will help pay this swindler’s legal fees. They also have the effect of rehabilitating his image, making him look like a goofy guy who messed up, and obscuring his true identity as a grifter with nothing but spite for the public interest. That in turn will make it easier for him to pursue another life on reality TV, sign lucrative deals for a book contract, or get picked up as a media commentator.
Santos’ former communications director described him as “someone who was more interested in being a celebrity” than a lawmaker. Right now Santos is getting exactly what he wants. The worst punishment we could give him is simply to ignore him.
