As a congressman, George Santos received a salary of $174,000 a year. But just days after becoming the first person to be expelled from Congress in 20 years, he has already discovered a more lucrative calling: Cameo superstar.
Cameo is a video platform that allows customers to pay celebrities of varying levels of notoriety to craft personalized video messages for friends. According to Semafor, Santos “initially underpriced his videos at a mere $75, a mistake he has since remedied.” Even after raising his fee to between $200 and $300 per video, requests continued to pour in. Santos, reports Semafor, is already on track to make money that “dwarfs” his congressional salary. Cameo’s CEO says the former congressman looks like he’s going to be an “absolute whale” on a platform where celebrities sometimes make millions of dollars.
Santos ought to be held to account by being ignored, not being paid to be a clown.
That the scandal-plagued Santos is already thriving financially within a week of his expulsion is sort of funny, but mostly it’s a sad comment about our society. Outside the legal process, Santos ought to be held to account by being ignored, not being paid to be a clown.
A good deal of the money flowing toward Santos right now — maybe almost all of it — is ironic in intention. Left-of-center people are prompting Santos to send warm messages of comfort to their friends, delighting in the opportunity to poke fun at the second-most-brazen fabulist of the Trump era, topped only by Trump himself. And it also permits people to briefly revel in the nihilistic undercurrents of our political moment. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., paid over $300 (using campaign funds) for a Santos video to troll Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., over his bribery charges: “You stand your ground, sir, and don’t get bogged down by all the haters out there.” (Santos later said he didn’t know the video was for Menendez.) A liberal voting rights activist paid Santos to…
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