In the litany of lies and half-truths told by George Santos in a fanciful journey in which he was first elected to and then expelled from Congress, the one he told about his nascent campaign for a different House seat on Long Island was not exactly a lie.
It just wasn’t true for very long.
Less than seven weeks after announcing he would try to return to the House of Representatives, Mr. Santos, the fabulist ex-congressman from New York who is facing federal charges, said on Tuesday that he would end his latest congressional bid.
In a turn perhaps befitting of Mr. Santos, whose loose association with the truth has been extensively documented, he offered two distinct reasons for his exit from the race.
In a social media post, Mr. Santos said he was worried that he and Representative Nick LaLota, the Republican he was running to unseat, might split conservative votes. “I don’t want to split the ticket and be responsible for handing the House to Dems,” he wrote.
Mr. Santos, who has made questionable claims of Jewish ancestry and invented ties to the Holocaust, said he was particularly concerned given “the rise of antisemitism in our country.”
Minutes after Mr. Santos’s post, the talk show host Dr. Phil McGraw shared a clip of an interview conducted earlier in the day in which Mr. Santos stated more pragmatic reasoning.
“There’s no way for you to be successful with an independent campaign,” said Mr. Santos, no stranger to shifting explanations. (A spokesman said the interview would air in full next month on “Dr. Phil Primetime.”)
Mr. Santos’s decision abruptly ends a long-shot bid to return to Washington; it was never even clear if he intended to mount a serious challenge.
The former congressman lost all standing among local political leaders and most voters, who associate him more with his bold prevarications about his career than with any particular political views.
And Mr. Santos, who has been accused of defrauding donors, was expected to face difficulties raising campaign funds. According to campaign finance reports, the former congressman — who faces charges tied to falsifying campaign finance reports — did not raise any money in the initial sprint after he announced his campaign.
Mr. LaLota, an incumbent running in a right-leaning district, never took the threat of Mr. Santos’s campaign seriously.
Shortly after Mr. Santos said he was ending his bid, Mr. LaLota replied on social media, “Chat GPT translation: He’s taking a plea deal.”
Mr. Santos last year became the sixth member of the House to be expelled in that body’s history. His removal, which came in an overwhelming bipartisan vote, came after a House Ethics Committee report found “substantial evidence” that Mr. Santos had broken federal laws, depicting his time in politics as a grift he had used to get richer.
Mr. Santos is currently facing 23 federal felony charges that include money laundering, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. Prosecutors have accused him of swindling donors, filing false campaign finance documents and collecting unemployment checks while he in fact had a job.
The House Ethics report also found that he had spent campaign funds on Botox, designer goods and a website known for explicit content.
After his expulsion last year, Mr. Santos bitterly vowed he would never come back. Months later, he had gone back on his word, traveling to the Capitol for the State of the Union address and then announcing his intention to return to the House.
Mr. Santos’s criminal trial is scheduled for September. In his social media post, he did not rule out a return to the political arena, saying his decision was limited to “THIS YEAR!”
“It’s only goodbye for now,” Mr. Santos wrote. “I’ll be back.”
