There are those who embellish their CVs — and there is George Santos. This is the newly elected Republican representative for New York’s third congressional district, whose account of his family history and personal achievements has belatedly been exposed as entirely fictional. He had declared himself to be a “member of the Jewish community” whose family had “fled the Holocaust”. This went down well in that electoral district. But neither claim was true — nor his assertion that his mother had perished in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. All made up. As were Santos’s boasts to have graduated from a distinguished university, to have worked for Goldman Sachs and to have founded a pet rescue charity.
Last week Santos gave his first interview after these were revealed to be untruths, to Tulsi Gabbard on Fox News. She put it to him: “You have told many lies: Do you have no shame?” Santos responded: “Look at Joe Biden. He has been lying to the American people for 40 years. Democrats resoundly [sic] support him. Do they have no shame?”
This was well-judged to appeal to that network’s audience. It also happens to be true (perhaps a first for Santos). The president of the United States is a man whose improbably long political career has been characterised by self-invention. At one point this seemed to scupper any hope he had of the highest office. That was when, during the Iowa Democratic primary in 1987, he plagiarised a well-known speech by Neil Kinnock. Biden began by telling his audience: “I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to university?” Actually, he — unlike Kinnock — wasn’t.
He went on to adapt the then Labour leader’s passage about his family’s background as Welsh coal miners, declaring that his “ancestors . . . worked the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours”. When asked to produce evidence of said mining forefathers, Biden was unable to do so. His campaign unravelled after The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd revealed that the peroration in Biden’s stump speech had been lifted almost verbatim from Kinnock’s own (true) autobiographical account. It also didn’t help when it emerged he had invented various academic attainments.
But Biden’s egotistical myth-making is more extensive than that, and has continued in the decades afterwards, to no obvious political disadvantage. He has consistently claimed to have been “arrested” by the South African police, on a visit to Nelson Mandela during the time of white rule. He never was. He has also regularly spoken of being arrested on civil rights marches when a student. He never was. Or, as the author of an acclaimed book on the 1988 US presidential race, What It Takes, wrote: “Trouble is, Joe didn’t march. He was in high school, playing football.”
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Much more recently, in 2019, as he campaigned (this time successfully) for the presidency, Biden described how he had travelled to Afghanistan to pin a Silver Star on a navy captain for retrieving the body of a colleague from a deep ravine. He added: “This is the God’s truth, my word as a Biden.” Fact check: it was Barack Obama, not Biden, who awarded the military officer the Presidential Medal of Honour (not a Silver Star). And that ceremony took place at the White House, not in Afghanistan.
The oddest of Biden’s more recent fantasies is also a sad one, involving his late son, Beau. Beau Biden had served in Iraq, and the president has on more than one occasion claimed his son died in that conflict. A few months ago in Colorado, Biden declared that he was speaking “as the father of a man who won the Bronze Star, the Conspicuous Service Medal, and lost his life in Iraq”.
The real Beau Biden died of brain cancer at Walter Reed Medical Centre in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2015. There is no worse loss than that of one’s own child: the president deserves all sympathy for that. But why would he need to add an entirely fictitious adornment to what was already a life of high military achievement? Some critics say it can only be a demonstration of spreading senility that the president would not appear to remember how his own son had died. I am more inclined to see it as consistent with Biden’s conduct throughout his political life.
The man he roundly defeated in 2020 is more generally regarded as a fantasist — including the wicked claim that he “really” won that election. As a general rule, when Donald Trump tells the truth, it should be regarded as a coincidence. In his book The Strange Case of Donald J Trump, the psychologist Dan McAdams reported that those who worked with the man said it was “like being with an entity who was playing the role of Donald Trump”.
In History has Begun, a fascinating volume by Bruno Macaes, the Portuguese former Europe minister tries to explain why this approach — which characterises Biden as well — works in America: “My hypothesis is that American life continuously emphasises its own artificiality in way that reminds participants that, deep down, they are experiencing a story.” This is far from new, in the nation that invented the movie business. My paternal grandmother, who accompanied her husband on business trips to the US in the 1950s, would tell me: “Darling, every American thinks he is playing the starring role in a film about their own life.”
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Tomorrow, ITV begins broadcasting a drama series, Stonehouse, about the former cabinet minister John Stonehouse, who reinvented himself by stealing the identity of a dead constituent, and tried in that guise to start a new life in Australia. But this is quite different from the American political self-invention: Stonehouse’s fraudulent businesses were collapsing, and he did this to disappear, not to promote himself.
I have been trying to think of any highly successful British politicians in the American fabulist style. I’m not sure there are, and it is not the path to power here. There was the former Ukip leader Paul Nuttall, who made up that he held a PhD and had played professional football for Tranmere Rovers. But then Ukip is a sort of community of oddballs.
Some might nominate Boris Johnson. But his tales were not about himself. And his hair is completely honest. I don’t think he could have become prime minister if, like Trump, he had been a brunette and dyed his hair that colour.
We should not entirely deride the American belief that you can be whoever you want. At its best it is a form of optimism that lies behind so much of their economic success.
We could do with some of that, at least.
