Last November, a thirty-four-year-old Republican from Queens who currently identifies himself as George Santos was elected to represent New York’s third congressional district. Beyond these somewhat rudimentary facts, however, the objective reality of “George Santos” has become increasingly difficult to discern. Indeed, the millennial human being — who has also gone by the monikers Anthony Santos, George Devolder, Anthony Zabrovsky, and George Anthony Santos-Devolder — appears to have premised his entire public-facing identity on a series of falsehoods and fabrications so brazen and audacious that they make even a seasoned bullshit artist like Donald Trump look like Jim Carrey in Liar, Liar.

To even call Santos a liar, in fact, risks understating the case. Politicians lie all the time, but their rhetorical contrivances usually have to do with things like the size of the federal deficit or how they once voted on a bill that no one remembers. What Santos does belongs to an entirely different, and altogether more postmodern, order of dishonesty and is less about stretching or bending the truth than pulling it straight from the ether.

During his failed 2019 bid for Congress, his official bio claimed he had attended the Horace Mann School, a bougie preparatory academy in the Bronx but had to drop out his senior year because his “parents fell on hard times, which was something that would later become known as the depression of 2008.” Staff at the school can find no record of his attendance, nor can Baruch College — from which he initially said he had obtained a degree in economics and finance some thirteen years ago.