George Santos Believes George Santos

Inside my unruly, revealing interview with the ex-congressman who insists he’s honest now — and still sees himself as the hero of his own American saga.

Welcome to The Red Letter.

George Santos logged onto my livestream with one minute to spare, telling me, “I never pull out of interviews,” a line so classically Santos that it almost served as his whole thesis. What unfolded over the next forty minutes was less an interview than an X-ray of a man who genuinely believes he’s both the victim and the protagonist of American politics — a post-truth creature of the Trump era who insists he’s a limited-edition outlier, not a symptom of anything larger. The charming part is how sincerely he seems to believe it. The con-man part is how sincerely he wants you to believe it too.

Fresh out of prison — 84 days, half of it in solitary — Santos toggles effortlessly between martyrdom and defensiveness. He claims he learned deep lessons about responsibility, perspective, and to “stay the fuck away from money,” right before insisting his crimes were “unintentional” and that the DOJ effectively wrote his guilty plea for him. When I pressed him on everything from false financial disclosures to the COVID unemployment scam to donor credit card misuse, he was less interested in talking about specifics. Instead, he pivoted to the “toxicity of the internet” and how the media only focuses on unscrupulous Republicans rather than Democrats, like Congresswoman Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fl) who was charged with stealing $5 million in federal disaster funds to buy a $100,000 yellow diamond necklace. He’s repentant, he says, and angry that people on social media keep calling him a con artist.

Where Santos becomes most revealing is on Trump, the man who commuted his sentence. Asked whether devotion played a role, he bristled: “My devotion is to God,” he snapped, furious at the implication that he worships Trump.

In the same breathe, he acknowledged, “I owe the man a lot of gratitude. That’s for goddamn sure.”

He denies being a loyalist, denies being sycophantic, denies even liking the framing of the question, and yet can’t put his finger on why Trump freed him of all of the people begging for a commutation.

“President Trump has given clemency to so many people, so many people,” he said.

“I don’t recall the Chrisleys having adoration for Donald Trump and they got a pardon. I mean, let’s let’s just call a spade a spade. The man looks at case by case.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene, meanwhile, is his soft spot. He defends her like a loyal golden retriever, furious that the hive mind has turned on her. He admits she’s hurting, he admits she’s under immense pressure, but he still won’t choose when I ask him to pick “Trump or Marjorie.” He’d rather name his future children after both, which he says, dead serious, he plans to do.

The most surprising moments came when the bravado cracked. Santos described the PTSD he’s battling from 41 days in isolation — the nightmares, the panic in small spaces, the inability to walk into his own closet without feeling the walls closing in. It was raw, startlingly human, and the only part of the conversation where he didn’t seem like he was auditioning for a role. Because otherwise, we were sparring over whether he’d ever technically been a “drag performer,” he was defending his Hermès meme, and he was busy constructing a moral universe where dropping off turkeys proved his goodness while Congress remained “a bipartisan joke” full of thieves, grifters, and hypocrites.

In the end, the interview confirmed what Santos really is: not an aberration, but an avatar. A man shaped by, and fluent in, the era of spectacle politics, who survives by leaning into the chaos, reframing the narrative, and insisting that if everyone else is corrupt, then he’s simply honest by comparison. Whether you believe him or not is almost beside the point. The truth is that George Santos believes George Santos. And in 2025, that’s more than enough to make him dangerous, compelling, and relevant.