The Undoing of George Santos

In the end, it may have been the luxury goods that brought down George Santos.

Not the lies about going to Baruch College and being a volleyball star or working for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Not the claims of being Jewish and having grandparents who were killed in the Holocaust and a mother who died of cancer as result of 9/11. (Not true, it turned out.) Not the fibs about having founded an animal charity or owning substantial real estate assets. None of the falsehoods that have been exposed since Mr. Santos’s election last year. After all, he did survive two previous votes by his peers to expel him from Congress, one back in May, one earlier in November.

At this point, the discussion around lies and politics is so familiar, it has become almost background noise.

But taking $6,000 of his campaign contributions and spending it on personal shopping at Ferragamo? Dropping another couple thousand at Hermès? At Sephora? On Botox?

Those revelations, documented in the House Ethics Committee report released Nov. 16, seemed simply too much. Despite the fact that Mr. Santos had announced that he would not seek re-election, despite the fact that he is still facing a 23-count federal indictment, Representative Michael Guest, the chairman of the House Ethics Committee, introduced a resolution the week before Thanksgiving calling for Mr. Santos’s expulsion from Congress. On Friday, the House voted in favor — 311 to 114, with two voting present — making Mr. Santos only the third representative since the Civil War to be ejected from that legislative body.

As Michael Blake, a professor of philosophy, public policy and governance at the University of Washington, wrote in The Conversation, Mr. Santos’s lies provoked “resentment and outrage, which suggests that they are somehow unlike the usual forms of deceptive practice undertaken during political campaigns.”

It was in part the ties that had done it. The vanity. The unabashed display of greed contained in the silken self-indulgence of a luxury good.

“Material objects are at the heart of this thing,” said Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University. “They expose what is seen as a universal character flaw and make it concrete.”

White collar crime is often abstract and confusing. Tax evasion is not sexy. (Nothing about taxes is sexy.) It may get prosecutors excited, but the general public finds it boring. To be sure, the House Ethics Committee report, all 55 pages of it, went far beyond the juicy details of designer goods (not to mention an OnlyFans expense), but it is those details that have been plastered across the headlines and stick in the imagination. They make the narrative of wrongdoing personal, because one thing almost everyone can relate to is luxury goods.

These days they are everywhere: unboxed on TikTok with all the seductive allure of a striptease; dangling by celebrities on Instagram; glittering from store windows for the holidays. Lusted after and…