When We Caught George Santos Fibbing Before It Became a National Scandal
Back in 2021, our various elected representatives and aspiring representatives were fulfilling their duties as public servants and aspiring public servants by obsessively tweeting about gas prices. One of these tweets, from an absolutely bizarre little guy, George Santos, caught my eye.
What Car Should You Buy: Simplify and Then Buy a Minivan
He’s since deleted it, but it’s still here:
My full gas tank is $83 and I fuel on average 3 times a week.
83×3=249
249×52=12,948
Last year my gas tank was $54.
54×3=162
162×52=8,424
Joe Biden’s policies made my expenses go up $4,524.00 and that America is only on gas!
America can’t afford Joe and his socialist agenda.
— George Santos (@Santos4Congress) December 11, 2021
That seemed like a lot of gas to use in a week, so I started going through his other Tweets, and also cyberbullying him, trying to figure out what he was driving, or why he was driving so much. He followed up:
By now, Jason had come to share my interest in George’s fabulous tales. He got the slide rule out and cooked up this post, excerpted below:
Dude treats his car to the rich, creamy premium stuff, so he’s paying between 3.90 and 4.10 per gallon. On the low end of the per-gallon price, that would mean he has a gas tank of about 21 gallons, which is pretty damn big. On the high end, it’d be about 20 gallons.
There are plenty of full-sized SUVs with 20 gallon plus tanks, but I have not been able to find a current car with a tank in the range of 20-21 gallons that also gets around 13-15 MPG. Full-size trucks and SUVs tend to have somewhat larger tanks and remember, he’s claiming that a full tank costs him $83. But, maybe he drives an Audi A8, which is capable of delivering the fuel economy he claims and has a tank with a 21.7 gallon capacity.
He also claims that he fills up three times a week! And, if he gets the 13 to 15 mpg he claims, that’s let’s see, on the low side, 260 miles per tank, three times a week, for a total of 780 miles per week.
At 15 mpg, that’s a nice round 300 miles per tank, for 900 miles per week.
Let’s just go in the middle for an average of 840 miles per week of driving. That comes to 43,680 miles per year.
Holy shit, that’s a lot of driving. Also, it’s not like this guy lives in Wyoming or something, where there’s vast ribbons of highway stretching out beyond the horizon—he lives in New York, and he says he travels into Manhattan daily and drives all over Long Island.
Jason kind of gave George the benefit of the doubt at the end of the post, after we learned that the guy was driving a Nissan Pathfinder, which at least kind of explained his MPG claim.
But in the intervening years, we’ve come to learn that George is a huge liar, even by congressional standards. And now, he’s facing a whole pile of charges relating to his many hilarious fibs.
Again, voters, it didn’t have to come to this. The signs were all here, on Jalopnik. They always are…
