Teodora Choolfaian met George Santos in the fall of 2021 at a cocktail party at Westbury Manor, home to gazebos and garden acres and other expensive backdrops for wedding pictures. They were on their way out together, hitting the fragrant air in formal dress, chatting about Vladimir Putin.
It was the lead-up to the Russia-Ukraine war, and Choolfaian, a Bulgarian immigrant, noted that the Russian autocrat was a cold-blooded, conniving figure, not somebody to be provoked. Santos tried to follow along.
“Oh, Vladimir Putin, this little man, this little unhappy, unsatisfied, man,” he said, leeringly. “Why can’t anyone satisfy him?”
It had a sexual edge to it somehow, and clearly Santos thought it was a good joke. He was laughing.
It was not the insight of the sharpest geopolitical mind, but Choolfaian, a naturalized citizen, chalked it up to the usual American naivete and also the fact that to be fair, Santos did not seem invested in the actual particulars of their conversation. Mostly, he was just interested in pleasing her.
It was not a foregone conclusion that Santos would be trying to flatter and curry favor with this civilian, this busy mom of three. It was equally unlikely that either of them would be at this glitzy GOP event, if you rolled the clock back a few years. But their intersection was a sign of the tailwind social and political forces that would soon boost Santos, even if he didn’t know it.
Both had been city people who were not exactly habitual voters. They swam in the business of New York, which is business, and only occasionally brushed up against politics. Choolfaian had even been a Democrat, and the political talk she tended to encounter was typical for that side of the aisle—environmentalism, immigration, the sense that Republicans were old-fashioned and out of touch. Where she and Santos diverged for a period was in Choolfaian taking a time-honored path: she started to have children. You go into a snug little den then where everything about the outside world is outside. You go looking for a bigger place to live. You move to Long Island.
In Nassau County, the newcomer will find backyards and cul-de-sacs and beautiful seascapes and old-money mansions, and also a world of local politics like a hardened web of tree roots, gnarled and only sometimes poking aboveground but underlying everything—your taxes, your garbage pickup, the little speeches before certain concerts at Jones Beach. But it was easy to step around the roots or not notice them much, unless it came about that you tripped.
The tripping came for Choolfaian with COVID. At first, she thought the government was doing the right thing with the pandemic restrictions. In the beginning, the masks and all made sense. She got the Pfizer vaccine, because she thought it was going to stop the madness. But as the chaos of 2020 turned to the monotony of 2021, and once Delta was over and spring made its butter-melt into summer, she expected things would be different when her three children went back to school. They had already endured months of closures or restrictions to their desks. The six-foot diameters. The haphazardly worn masks. Surely that had to end in September.
But she was wrong. And she became angry.
She was a parent. She was deeply invested in her children’s lives, yes. She sometimes felt that she was a secretary for playdates. So she could not avoid thinking about the lives of her kids and the other schoolchildren, masks rubbing their noses raw, sweating and uncomfortable, told to stay separate from other students when that is the most unnatural thing for a child. So knows any parent who has been on a playdate. Taxes are high in Nassau County, and this means that taxpayers—parents—want some ownership over their product.
This was how Choolfaian found herself in front of the Port Washington train station one day, holding a homemade sign, protesting the COVID measures. It was striking; it was new. She says she had not really done something like this before. But there was a tactile thrill to it. She was poking the world. She began going to school board meetings, being theatrical. Crying, ripping off her mask. She organized a meeting of parents with an assemblywoman to ask about “the long-term consequences of wearing face coverings for children in early childhood education settings.” She held more signs: UNMASK THE KIDS. THIS IS CHILD ABUSE. She began to realize a strange thing: people were listening to her.
All around there were troops willing to be rallied to her cause. Everywhere she went in town, there was another person who could be convinced of the craziness of all (waves hands) this. She could be relentless, really; it’s true that some people said this. But here her relentlessness was sowed on a fertile field, her organizing capacity reaping something larger than playdates. Such as the protest by the Greenvale T. J. Maxx in January when piles of snow on the ground did not deter people coming out and making their argument—about unmasking kids and letting them “breathe”—to the passing cars and the odd camera phone. These people were angry. And so was George Santos, when he showed up to that unmasking protest at the beginning of his second campaign, poised to take flight.1
He was there right with her, in the snow, wearing tight jeans, shouting into a megaphone. Because Choolfaian could offer something he wanted—door-knocking, phone-banking, grassroots activism. She was good at it. And that could be useful for him. And he knew that there were so many more angry, engaged people like her.
One way to think about George Santos’s second run for elected office is that this time around he wasn’t the raw-material novice offered up as tribute in an unwinnable race. Instead, he was a coattail candidate, the happy recipient of a lot of accidental forces of history that he did not create but deftly rode. The coat he was clinging to was less a garment and more a kite: Nassau County and Long Island in general had become a seething hurricane of angry and annoyed citizens primed to vote red no matter whose name was on the ballot line.
First on the list of grievances was COVID-19, and the reaction to that pandemic two years into it. New York was ground zero for this international disaster, served by three metro-area international airports, some of the nation’s first confirmed cases, and over eighty thousand deaths. At first, many New Yorkers were like Choolfaian, vocal about their solidarity with essential workers, and willing to mask up and social distance to #StopTheSpread. The virus’s danger, as it rampaged visibly across the state, was too real to act otherwise. And though Manhattan offered the nation its visuals of an empty Times Square and people banging pots and pans, Long Island was just as central to the COVID story. It was host to the powerful Northwell hospital network, whose leader, Michael Dowling, became a sort of unelected COVID czar in New York. Long Island also was home to huge percentages of the first responders, from police to fire to EMTs, who were suddenly getting plaudits for their service on this new and invisible front line. The first nurse to get the official vaccine in the whole United States, at least according to Northwell, was a Northwell employee and Long Islander, Sandra Lindsay, a Jamaican immigrant who herself lost an aunt and uncle to the virus. She lived alone, and once made a pact with a health care friend of hers that if one of them caught it bad, the other one would come over, move to the basement, and quarantine. Lindsay hoped the jab, as she called it, would be the beginning of the end.2
But as the vaccines rolled out across the region, a restiveness took hold. The shots were amazing and practically without side effects, and it was supposed to be a summer of fun. Then people started to get sick anyway. It was all still happening. And the messaging from the highest levels was neither consistent nor airtight.
There was, for example, Andrew M. Cuomo, the prickly and man-of-action governor of New York. Though he was slow in the crucial early days to shut down the state in the face of the health threat, he soon did an about-face and became the nation’s reigning governmental pandemic fighter, turning his daily COVID briefings into must-see (and sometimes hammy) TV as he auditioned for the presidency or at least a great book deal. He charmed the MSNBC voter and sold posters featuring his cute pandemic catchphrases, urging New Yorkers all the while to stay the course. This message remained firm and insistent even as some of his constituents began to tire of the disruptions. They did not like the limits on how many people could be in their own homes; the requirements to mask up everywhere; the constant push toward vaccines; and all this while Cuomo was fighting the charge that his administration’s early policies on nursing homes had resulted in thousands more avoidable deaths.
The rebellion percolated on Long Island. In May of that first pandemic summer, cops gathered in Southold without masks for the retirement celebration of a town police sergeant, and there was an outcry about the hypocrisy, then an outcry about the outcry in return. This cycle repeated weekly. So-called patriot groups began to hold wildly successful political meetings when they tailored the subject to annoyance at masking. It helped that there was not much else to do. Might as well grab a case of beer and head to the protest in Commack and see all your friends, Cuomo be damned.
Looking around at the state of things and grinning was the antivax movement, alive and well on Long Island. That movement has flexed its power periodically in history, not least in 1904 Rio de Janeiro about a hundred years before Santos got there, when people angry about compulsory smallpox vaccination, instituted by a devotee of Louis Pasteur, decided to wreck and burn the city for days.3 In New York, the movement got a foothold in 2019 by rallying behind the religious exemption that allowed broad swathes of people to skip childhood vaccines. Democrats, who had just taken over the state senate for the first time in a decade, got rid of the exemption. This was in response to the country’s biggest measles outbreak in twenty-seven years, one centered in New York’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, where the religious exemption had been heavily exploited.4
The closed loophole did not mandate forced vaccination. It just required shots for kids to attend school. Fears of childhood vaccines causing autism or other serious problems have been long studied and discredited. But a warning sign of the misinformation-filled craziness to come was visible at the state capitol during the exemption fight, when antivax protesters carried signs and chanted about illnesses like measles, mumps, and chickenpox being good actually because they “keep you healthy” and “fight cancer.”5
Still, for the next few years the antivaccine push was mostly relegated to the unproofread corners of the internet and social media, pushed by single-issue ideologues and a tragic cohort of parents whose kids developed autism around the same time they got their vaccinations.
Long Islander John Gilmore was right there with them. He is the executive director of the Autism Action Network, one of the groups most committed to promoting the—again—discredited idea that vaccines cause autism. He says the group has a mighty 100,000-member email list, including some 30,000 or 35,000 from New York. But at base, he’s the father of a child in his twenties who needs assistance in most aspects of daily life, who can’t be left alone, and who has been that way, Gilmore says, since his first round of childhood vaccines. No amount of scientific evidence will convince Gilmore that this truly despair-inducing situation is not the result of needles. And so he has become a warrior for a deeply personal cause that has led him to distrust numbers, established information sources, and mainstream leadership.
Many allies and sympathizers approach the antivax orbit in the same way—even Santos. Gilmore says he met the political hopeful at an event for the Whitestone Republican Club, ahead of his first campaign. Santos was open, friendly, happy to chat, and familiar with vaccine issues. “He said he had a niece who has autism,” Gilmore says. Santos once said the same on social media.
For a long time, it was a lonely road for families who sought to connect their experience with autism to vaccines. But when COVID hit and authorities started pushing these new, still-emergency-authorized shots, the antivaccine forces found a new audience. Especially in New York, where government leaders were strenuously promoting the jab, including by making it hard or at least annoying to live without one. During a significant stretch of months, particularly in New York City, you’d have to flash your vaccine card or a picture of it to get into a much-anticipated restaurant or music venue. It all came on top of the intense legal rules and new social norms about the size of gatherings and mask usage, which lingered even during pandemic lulls.
The masking, and then the vaccine mandates for workers across the economic spectrum, functioned as a sort of gateway drug to the wider antivax movement: the pot that led to heroin, as Gilmore puts it. He saw the annoyance at pandemic restrictions as a reaction to governmental overreach. And he was happy to collect email addresses.
He also noticed something geographically interesting about the provenance of his emails. If you mapped them, the patterns would look like suburban donuts around big cities in blue states. In his own backyard, he thinks, a major ingredient in that donut is the prototype of the Long Island mom, who is “sort of notorious” for looking out for her kids and not being deferential to authority, Gilmore says.
It is a well-trodden path, one worn into existence years before Choolfaian and other parents began complaining about masks in schools. Long Island parents had already been at the heart of the opt-out movement, in which thousands of mothers and fathers pulled their kids out of school in the 2010s rather than have them sit for statewide exams. One of the national leaders of that effort was Jeanette Deutermann, a Nassau County mom of a fourth grader, who got angry about Obama-era moves to standardize school curriculums and tie teacher evaluations to tests.
The bureaucracy of it all raised hackles for parents like Deutermann, who remembers her elementary schooler coming home in 2013 with a notice that he’d been “selected” for “Sunrise Academy.” Students who had been both high- and low-achieving on the recent benchmark tests got the call, and it meant the kids had to come in at seven thirty a.m. twice a week for test prep. That was how Deutermann came to found a Long Island Opt Out Facebook group, which soon drew thousands of members. The movement, percolating in other suburban areas too, spread around New York and beyond.6 And it has remained potent through the present, with large swathes of Long Island students continuing to skip mandated standardized tests.7
Some of Long Island’s penchant for middle-aged activism like this can be explained by the comfortable socioeconomic status of many of its residents, who have time for the kind of nonoccupational labor it takes to rally peers for a cause. The giant land mass features merely the population of the single borough of Queens, but its residents are represented by scores of units of local government, including more than one hundred hotly contested school boards, providing many open slots for civic input. And the region’s proximity to the media capital of the world keeps it close to the national conversation: see the ink spilled in 2021 over Smithtown, a vast majority-white place where the school board became a culture war battleground after such indignities as a Broadway actress invited to read for a literacy night having in the past tweeted critically about cops.
But the litany of controversies and fights can sometimes make it feel like there really is something in the water on Long Island, and not just its nerve-racking pollutants. That possibility struck Congressman Steve Israel not long before he began serving as the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In June 2009, he got a call from a neighboring Democratic congressman who had faced a shockingly escalatory protest about health care the night before at an expected-to-be-sleepy Setauket town hall. The congressman had to be escorted to his car by police officers. Israel hadn’t heard that from any of his colleagues around the country—yet.
It turned out that Long Island was not an outlier but an early landing spot for the Tea Party movement about to sweep the nation.
“There’s something about Long Island’s culture,” Israel mused years later, in the wake of Santos’s victory and the local red wave around it. There is, for example, the list of local traumas. When terrorists struck the Twin Towers in 2001, everybody on Long Island knew somebody who was affected, whether they were a police officer, a firefighter, or trader with Cantor Fitzgerald. A few years later, as the 2008 economic meltdown exploded, everyone in this region of overextended homeowners knew someone whose house was in foreclosure. It made Nassau and Suffolk counties “fertile for the politics of anger and resentment,” says Israel, who represented much of the territory Santos would later win.
Santos himself was attracted to the Tea Party–style rhetoric that has been a potent weapon for challengers in recent years. One of very few authors he has referenced publicly is KrisAnne Hall, a fringe antigovernment activist and self-described constitutional attorney who, Santos said on a podcast, helped him gain “clarity” on the Constitution, which he said was written in “very elaborate and quite obsessively formal language.”8 Hall’s books, one of which aims to “refute the notion that the Constitution is a living, breathing document which must be interpreted and reinterpreted according to the changing needs of society,” often rail against government overreach and executive orders. She calls Obama “kingly” and argues for the primacy of state power. The intellectual framework is one of reembracing American exceptionalism and resisting the federal government—a mood that continues to percolate for some voters on Long Island.
Modern Long Island is neither firmly red nor firmly blue, but rather acts as a kind of swinging bellwether and microcosm of national political currents. The local ebb and flow of the anger and resentment reached a high point in 2016 with Trump, who won the island on Election Day, and soon stoked the national flames with another charged Long Island issue: the gruesome violence perpetrated by MS-13, a gang with roots in El Salvador and Los Angeles. The string of killings the gang committed on Long Island horrified residents, but also became part of Trump’s anti-immigrant arsenal due to the gang’s membership being Hispanic (as well as its victims). Anger about criminals morphed into nativist sentiment, even in a metropolitan area where newcomers were all around, working at Dish Network or restaurants or office parks next door.
Israel, a longtime incumbent, could feel the shift in the last years of his congressional tenure. People in Huntington diners used to smile and want to shake hands when he walked in. “Now they’re staring grumpily at their menus, they didn’t want to make eye contact,” he said.
It is this kind of environment, he suggests, in which someone like Santos could thrive.
There was another cultural issue that took hold of the minds and popular imaginations of Long Islanders in the years leading up to Santos’s win, one that fertilized the soil of the GOP political root system perhaps more than any other. This was the set of changes to New York’s criminal justice system that came to be called “bail reform.”
In 2019, Democrats in Albany finally tackled what they saw as an unacceptable and enduring unfairness: that many New Yorkers accused of minor offenses were able to get out of jail and prepare for trial at home only if they had thousands of dollars to pay bail. Those who didn’t—often Black or Hispanic residents—were stuck behind bars without having been convicted of a crime. The reforms eliminated the use of cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent crimes, using less onerous means to ensure a return to court. It was a sea change to the New York legal system, and it went into effect in January 2020. Within months, American society would be rocked by the pandemic and a racial reckoning after a Minneapolis police officer killed a father and sometime security guard named George Floyd.
That is the context for the great debate over bail that dominated the next three years. Republicans leapt at some increases in New York crime statistics, even though they were generally on par with jumps in other jurisdictions that made no changes to bail. Democratic infighting meant the bail changes were done in a messy patchwork way that resulted in some glaring loopholes, but the legislators’ repeated tweaks to the legislation and entreaties to wait for more data didn’t make the GOP howl any less. And a wave of exaggerated political advertisements swept through the Empire State like the second coming of Willie Horton. A test case came in the open 2021 race for Nassau district attorney, where one of the Democratic state senators who helped negotiate bail reform was going up against Anne Donnelly, who would later become one of the people investigating Representative Santos. A mild-mannered career prosecutor who had worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations, Donnelly ran grimly on bail. One of her ads included a picture of a dreadlocked Black man below ominous red lettering: “Is your family safer with this thug released back on the street?” (He was incarcerated when the ad ran.)
Another featured a testimonial from the victim of an alleged antisemitic assault in Manhattan—a heinous attack, but one that had only a pretty tenuous link to the bail changes, which allowed those accused of less serious crimes to get out pretrial without posting bail. These attackers, in contrast, had bail set for them as usual after the incident.9 That didn’t stop the victim from saying the bail changes were setting “thugs” free on the street.
This was the gist of the antireformers’ strategy, focusing on harrowing anecdotes while tying all sorts of mayhem to bail. Candidate after candidate took the same tack, and it worked in race after race in 2021: painting the state as a dangerous and apocalyptic place, using examples helpfully provided by the front page of the conservative tabloid New York Post. Often, as with the antisemitic assault ad, those examples of violence were pulled from the streets and subways of New York City. And helping to push this issue was the Nassau GOP.
It was not a new position. The suburban wing of the Republican party had been using its neighbor as a foil for generations, long before Santos came on the scene to run in his city-and-suburbia-straddling district.
The very creation of Nassau County was in some sense an early reaction to the Big Apple. “During the consolidation of the five counties in and around Manhattan into the new municipality that became the City of New York, local residents on Long Island lobbied the state legislature to establish a new county independent from the city,” writes Nassau native and GOP political guru Michael Kaplan in an unpublished manuscript detailing the local party’s prehistory. “Albany lawmakers acceded to their demands and on January 1, 1899, Nassau County was created.”
For the next hundred years, the county would be reliably Republican, particularly in local elections, instinctively positioning itself against the behemoth next door. The mantra changed over the generations—sometimes it was “protecting the suburban character of Nassau County,” as GOP chair Joseph Margiotta said in the 1980s, years after he fought the construction of affordable high-rise apartments.10 Sometimes the “sixth borough” was invoked, as in, residents wouldn’t want Nassau to become that. Or, in the early twentieth century, the prayer to “keep the Tammany tiger out of Nassau,” referring to the tightly controlled party boss system that had thrived in the city for decades.
The irony was that the Nassau GOP was pioneering something of a Tammany system of its own out in the suburbs, where patronage was the way of the world and locals knew to talk to partisan leaders for even seemingly civic problems. The system’s initial architect, J. Russell Sprague, was so tightly controlling that he is known for his somewhat-legendary instruction, “Always know how a meeting is coming out before you call it.” Sprague’s great coup was assimilating the newcomers who flocked to Long Island as the suburban age of America dawned. Levittown, and its government-subsidized cookie-cutter houses, was the center of that story. The newcomers were often white ethnic Democrats, notes Marjorie Freeman Harrison in a 2005 thesis on Nassau politics. But the Republicans were relentless: “GOP representatives were tipped off by letter carriers when a new family arrived, and the party, in the person of a friendly neighbor, arrived at the doorstep to assist with the details like making sure garbage was picked up and broken sidewalks fixed.”11
This partisan centrality to daily life had its legal pitfalls when political leaders overstepped—say, with the kickback scheme that ensnared party chair Margiotta in the early 1980s. But even a seriously shocking scandal or six wasn’t enough to shake up the strong GOP machine, which at that time was still the place to go whether you wanted to become a top county official or a summer lifeguard.12 Ronald Reagan himself once acknowledged how fertile Nassau’s territory was for the GOP, claiming that when a Republican goes to heaven, it looks a lot like Nassau County.
The party was also rigorous about where it got its candidates (from within) and how it sculpted them (almost to a mold). For some time, there used to be what was called “charm school” for candidates, current GOP chair Joe Cairo told me. Cairo is a happy warrior and sports fan who went to the only out-of-state university New York politicians of a certain type are allowed to attend (Notre Dame). Cairo himself attended charm school in ’75, after he was appointed to fill a death-related vacancy on the Hempstead town council. To get ready to face the voters, he first had to go see an etiquette expert in Manhattan, every Friday afternoon for around ten weeks. There were moments of culture clash in the expert’s doorman building overlooking Central Park. Cairo didn’t like her advice about overpronouncing words: “Thursday,” say, with a nearly r-less flourish. You’d get laughed outta town back home for talking like that. But there were useful lessons about decorum, and how to be taken seriously. To this day he still wears over-the-calf socks on the off chance that he crosses his legs at a meeting and the suit pants ride up. And he learned how to address a crowd, how to fight through nervousness—pick out one person, just one person in the room. And speak to them.
The political situation in Nassau County is different than it used to be in the charm school days. Former US senator Al D’Amato, who jumped from town office in Nassau to the Capitol in 1981 and stayed there for eighteen years, is now a pot lobbyist and name on a federal courthouse, as well as the last Republican to win a US Senate seat in New York. Locally, Democrats have made inroads, so much so that they now outnumber Republicans by party registration, if not voting inclination. There is no more charm school, and the party’s candidates are less afraid to break the old mold. It used to be said that there was such a thing as “Republican hair”—straight, coiffed, and combed back, probably white, certainly Caucasian. There had never been—or at least Cairo cannot remember—an openly gay member of Congress from the party in Nassau.
Which is where George Santos fits in, at a moment of flux for the party. The machine does a kind of vetting through lifelong knowledge of candidates, being warned if so-and-so drinks too much, has a gambling issue, or a girlfriend or two on the side. But Santos was not a party person, not among the Nassau farm team, Cairo wants to make that very clear. He was not a former baseball coach or town trustee or village mayor before he made the leap to Congress. He was not a committeeman who spent years walking the petitions necessary to get candidates onto the ballot. He was a Queens guy, not even recommended very highly by the Queens party chair at the time, frankly, but in 2020, who else was going to run for what was sure to be a losing race against a longtime Democratic incumbent?
There are a few things that stuck out to Cairo about his encounters with this newcomer. Of course there was the time Santos came into Cairo’s office at GOP headquarters and launched into his fantastical volleyball story. That he’d been sort of a star at Baruch (where by the way he’d graduated summa), and had actually been a “champion.” That was a word that Cairo did not take lightly. He had all kinds of memorabilia in his office—a picture of him as a high school football official, and a piece signed by the legendary Fighting Irish coach Lou Holtz that sat right in Santos’s eyeline, and it said “Play like a champion today.” Champion. It does make you think.
But mostly, Santos seemed like someone the party could run and basically ignore. The newcomer intimated as much, portraying himself as a wealthy Wall Street type with the ability to tap his network and easily fund his campaign without much help from the party coffers. He once told Cairo offhandedly that he’d been looking at expensive houses on Long Island and had even made an offer in the $2.5 to $3 million range. At one point he confided that he was “handling finances” for Linda McMahon, the former Trump official and wrestling mogul. He said he was going to call her up and get a big check from her (his filings do not show such largesse).
Cairo is no dummy. He must not have hated the fact that wherever the money came from, Santos-affiliated accounts gave over $180,000 to Nassau Republican Party committees alone. (The committees refunded large portions of that money after Santos imploded.) It’s a stretch for him and the Nassau Republicans to mostly blame the Queens GOP for Santos, given that Nassau made up the majority of the Third Congressional District during both of the fabulist’s runs. In 2022, Nassau had nearly 80 percent of the district’s registered voters. Queens certainly wasn’t strong enough to boss around the storied Nassau machine here. Santos would have been an also-ran if Cairo and his party decided to block him.
But there were signs that the kid understood the program, or what the world was like in Nassau, even if he was an outsider with a strange résumé. Coming into the 2020 campaign, Cairo said, Santos shared that he had been using his mother’s name because he had been close to her and his father wasn’t a big part of his life. But he planned to use his father’s name—Santos—now because “politically that might be more advantageous than Devolder.” Cairo’s assumption was that the up-and-comer felt it was more ethnic. If you squinted, it was almost Italian.
In this way, a party that had once forced candidates through the grinder of charm school now shrugged and said “go ahead” to someone unvetted. They didn’t even require years of service and servitude before allowing him to run. New party.
Santos’s success was not, however, a sign that the party machine was dead. Cairo himself had come up through the machine’s heyday, and like other top Nassau politicos he’d experienced a little legal issue in the past, misusing a few hundred thousand dollars in client funds, after which he’d parted ways with his law license for a while.13 Then he came back to keep the system humming. In 2022, the well-oiled machine and its army of committeemen was pumping on all cylinders, fresh off a monster cycle that saw them win big on the county level, not just for district attorney but also triumphing in the race for county executive, a huge focus for the party. It was non-national races like these, plus town races and more, from which the real and low-show jobs flowed, and patronage was still key to the Nassau system. Members of Congress could get their names in the papers, but how much actual employment could they provide—a handful of modestly paid staff salaries? This was not where the Nassau GOP typically focused its attention. Rather, in 2022, the party saw an even bigger opportunity with the governor’s race, in which Republican standard-bearer Lee Zeldin was nipping at the heels of incumbent Kathy Hochul. Governor is where it’s at. There are administration jobs galore, plus all sorts of contracts and funds. New York is a Democratic state, but from time to time a Republican can break through the blue.
That seemed possible in 2022, and so the Nassau GOP threw its significant weight behind Zeldin, a Long Islander from neighboring Suffolk County. The push included door-knocking, funding—hundreds of thousands of dollars directly to Zeldin’s campaign in the fall of 2022—plus mail and social media homing in on the bail situation and the general prognosis of New York City as a crime-ridden place. This message, that the city was full of mayhem, illegal guns, and criminals using them, was amplified by county party regulars as well as the New York Post, whose cover or headlines inevitably seemed to feature someone being pushed into the subway tracks or shot to death. It was a message that was also pushed hard in tight state senate races and was equally good for every Republican, including Santos, the somewhat accidental congressional nominee.
Was this maelstrom of bail and crime a message that danced, just a little, around race? This was the Nassau of Levittown, one of the birthplaces of suburbia, home to restrictive covenants that kept out almost all nonwhites for a generation. The county is becoming more and more diverse, but that doesn’t stop the new generation of newcomers from looking disdainfully over their shoulders. A radio interviewer once told Santos that suburban housewives should be rising up against “radicals” due to the Left’s attempts to install low-income housing in places like his district. “Suburban housewives love me,” Santos said,14 and went on to highlight his fight against using an empty hotel to temporarily house homeless families.15
That particular fight was in the town of Jericho, but the impulse has often been present in other parts of Long Island. The freshly arrived have for decades been escaping something: Crowds. Schools. Poverty. Crime.
“People who want to move to the suburbs, they don’t want to live in the city,” Cairo once told me.
That ancient urge, given new resonance, was ready to boost Santos, too.
Across Long Island, GOP candidates from town council to statewide office had good feelings about the 2022 midterm election to come. Every once in a while, even in a supposedly blue state like New York, the voters decided to throw out the bums, counter the always-present power of the five boroughs for a while. The Long Island Republicans were familiar with this cycle. It had benefited them before. It smelled like it was coming again, that whiff of “don’t tread on me” among the voting body and a little bit of Democratic desperation.
Many candidates began bowing to one or another of these powerful cultural forces. It was sometimes awkward, as when a vaccinated lawmaker would have to argue why actually it wasn’t all that important to get the COVID shot; or a sober and careful GOP lawyer would go tongue tied when asked what changes would actually improve the bail system. This was not a problem for Santos. He could make pivots, even about-face. He could enthusiastically—wholeheartedly—embrace every single cultural impulse percolating on Long Island. A lifetime of lying had prepared him to harness this moment. His tall tales and never-ending stories were now more than a colorful habit; they were a tool.
So it was that the man who took the whole COVID thing so seriously he walked to the hospital in a tightly fitting mask to get tested, also called masks “face diapers” and, elsewhere, lambasted Cuomo’s “tyrannical ruthless thirst for power” for closing restaurants.16 He poked fun at Kamala Harris and Kathy Hochul for wearing masks at a speech and a cemetery;17 he warned about the “cordon” that could descend on the city, keeping everyone in.18 He spoke darkly about what Democrats were doing regarding masking—“I feel like our entire country is stuck in a nightmare and can’t wake up,” he once posted—and people loved it all.19
He knew the buttons to press, the grassroots issues to absolutely run with. He posted about the efforts of Florida governor Ron DeSantis to block classroom talk about sexual orientation, which Santos said had his “full-blown support” and shouldn’t be called the “don’t say gay” bill, actually: “The Left is hell-bent on creating a false narrative because they want to groom our kids.”20 Though he was nowhere close to having a child in any school, let alone in the Half Hollow Hills School District, he also showed up at a school board meeting to decry a pro-mask video he’d seen online, supposedly posted by a district teacher. He did not even do the politician thing of arriving seconds before a speech and cutting the line. No: he waited his turn with other angry members of the public, said his piece, affirmed his name.21
He spoke at a school board training course, where civilians were encouraged to run for that most local of offices. He knew the language—“Refuse to co-parent with the Government!” he posted in March 2022. He knew the stereotype, maybe the truism, that mothers could be a potent political force especially when rallied to the Republican side. The way he put it was that “waking up the mama bears will be the worst thing the Left ever did to themselves.”22 He had spoken to Choolfaian, the Port Washington mom, after all, and he had a sense that he was right. He said he’d “rather battle Antifa than a group of moms protecting their cubs!” He found that this amped-up register suited him. He did not sound as if he were pandering or making things up.
And always, always, there was the threat of bail reform and Black Lives Matter, the movement that had exploded once again around the world after George Floyd was killed. It became a Santos touchstone. He blasted the New York City mayor for painting a BLM mural in front of Trump Tower;23 he claimed the movement—all of it—was an “existential threat to my district” and also Marxist, one of his favorite campaign words, one that worked better when used to slander racial justice protesters. He screamed about looting and disruption, and ungrammatically mixed COVID in with the crime angle: “Good morning to all except Kathy Hochul who fights harder to mask children than our out-of-control crime rates.”24 He ran a campaign ad with the tagline “Safer with Santos” and shared that a poll of his had found public safety and law and order and the “threat of Antifa and Black Lives Matter marching down their suburban area neighborhood” as a top issue in his district. He went on: he sensed a fear among voters who live “very peacefully” out there in the ’burbs, where they allow their kids to play on the front lawn and not be attended.25 He painted a picture of chaos emanating out toward Long Island’s lush pastures.
Santos saw that you could say anything on the political stage and they hardly fact-check it. It’s part of the culture. Everyone expects a little exaggeration. He felt right at home. Sometimes he would return to his old habit of taking a pebble of truth for his politically advantageous stories—after Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Santos went back to his familial-root yarn and said his Ukrainian ties were “very vague,” but here he was talking about them anyway. In other times, he verged into unadulterated misinformation. Claiming a vague and not super mathematical “spillage” of city crime into the suburbs26 is one thing, very different from saying (he found himself saying) that Jeffrey Epstein (who he’d “met”) was murdered, and there was something to the theory that Trump, his much-loved Trump, was facing a giant conspiracy of enemies: “They tried to shame him, they tried impeachment, nothing worked,” he said on a podcast. “They tried Russia Ukraine blah blah blah.” Then came the next plan: they “called their best friends China and say, ‘Release the kraken,’ and that’s essentially the coronavirus.”27
In the Trump era, not only was there little penalty for conspiracy-mongering or outright lying—it could actually be a draw. Election misinformation was just part of showing your colors, as Santos had done quite publicly at the pre-January 6 rally in Freedom Plaza when he shouted to the crowd about his election getting stolen.28 It became one of his favorite canards, this habitual liar. There were many flavors. He could be flippant about supposedly almost winning, or he might be very dire, as when he claimed that he beat his 2020 opponent on “election night for fourteen days until the ballots never stopped coming in.” He said it on podcasts and in public. He even touched on it to people posing as Republicans, as when he told an undercover Democratic tracker that yes, he “wrote a nice check for a law firm” to help out some of the “January 6 patriots.”29 Was it real? Who cares. Democrats clutched their pearls, but the right wing loved it. The crazier he talked, the more he aligned himself with MAGA World. And there were supporters to be found there.
He was seen hanging out at a red-white-and-blue-bedecked clubhouse in Ronkonkoma called the America First Warehouse. This event space, which opened in 2019, was like Colonial Williamsburg for Trump diehards, packed with diner-style furniture and depictions of the former president as Thor, glamour shots of his family, and flags screaming TRUMP WON and AUDIT THE VOTE. Being angry with liberal pieties was gospel in this hangar-size room, which featured posters that said ILLEGALS DESERVE NOTHING and I MISS THE GOOD OLD DAYS WHEN EVERYBODY WASN’T AN OVERLY SENSITIVE PUSSY. There was a display of ballot boxes labeled DEAD PEOPLE VOTE HERE and SPONSORED BY G. SOROS. One time at the warehouse I watched a prayer circle join hands in support of outsider Republican candidates. A speaker vowed to make the space “the home of the antiestablishment party,” and that vision occurred—the warehouse opened its doors to school board activists, antivax Long Islanders, and Trump World luminaries. Here at the warehouse, Santos, who once claimed “I am no right-winger,”30 could now cultivate ties with the far-right—including groups like the Long Island Loud Majority, an outfit classed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “antigovernment,” whose leadership has called all-gender bathrooms “disgusting,” who say the nation’s future is “on the line,” who think the election, of course, was stolen, who believe that prominent transgender women are “still men” and that “a Communist was in charge of the CIA,” meaning John Brennan.31 Santos was close with this outfit, which got its start selling T-shirts saying DEPLORABLE and WE THE PEOPLE to people hopping in their vehicles for pro-Trump car parades. Within one political cycle, Loud Majority had established a podcast, a recording studio, and a “Patriot Consultants” corporation, and had scalps to boast in school board elections. Of course, they showed up in force to the January 6 festivities.32 And naturally they opposed COVID mitigation strategies too. One of the group’s active associates—Dave Lipsky—became a Santos donor. His daughter Gabrielle would go on to serve as Santos’s press secretary.
Santos went where the energy was. In 2022, that included seeking out the crypto evangelists. Despite being a party-endorsed candidate and benefiting from their machine operation, he quietly aided some of the loudest primary challengers also running for Congress on Long Island, such as Michelle Bond, the then-head of a cryptocurrency trade group whose partner was Ryan Salame, one of the top executives at FTX. In the months before that ill-fated and lie-boosted crypto exchange imploded, Salame became a Santos donor, too.
The political class paid and got paid. Alliances were struck and abandoned and reforged. And all the while, lies consumed the discourse. Good-faith civilians could turn disillusioned after trying to get involved. Their Facebook groups burned feverish, and then insane. Misinformation swirled on the various social media since nobody trusted—or hell, received—a newspaper anymore. The outlets that did exist were paywalled, woebegone, stodgy, or late to the game. Still people believed what they read, when it was typed up on a cell phone by who can say who. Were there going to be quarantine camps? Did an MS-13 witness get murdered because of criminal justice reform? Nobody saw the no’s. Why was the top issue in a congressional race the entirely state-level battle over bail anyway? Who cares. It was in the water. And Santos was ready for a swim.