Opinion | More Republicans seem to have lied about their resumes. Who’s surprised?

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It keeps happening. Republicans are no longer just lying about the world around them — about climate change or vaccines or voter fraud — they’re increasingly lying about themselves. So far, nobody beats Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) when it comes to fictitious resumes. He seems to have lied about virtually his entire life experience — from his volleyball career to his college education to his mother’s death on 9/11 to his family’s flight from the Holocaust. He appears to have played fast and loose with finances as well. He now faces criminal inquiries about whether he conducted scams (even one about service dogs!) and misrepresented information on his campaign disclosure forms. (Santos, though he has admitted to fabricating his background, has consistently denied claims of wrongdoing.)

But Santos is hardly alone. The Post reported on the many questions about biographical claims from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.). She has told conflicting stories as to whether she is Jewish. She claimed to have been raised as a “Messianic Jew,” but relatives say her father was Catholic. (In fact, her grandfather fought for Nazi Germany.) She changed her last name from Mayerhofer to Luna, and The Post found no evidence for her claims that her father was incarcerated for long periods. Other claims that she was traumatized by a home invasion in 2010 did not check out, either.

Luna has disputed the accusations and responded to The Post’s reporting with a statement that “anyone who is a conservative minority is a threat to Leftist control. They can try to discredit me, but unfortunately for them the facts completely blow their story out of the water.”

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Then there’s Rep. Andrew Ogles (R-Tenn.), who, contrary to claims he made in his election campaign, is not an economist. Tennessee’s NewsChannel 5 reports that Ogles has no degree in economics and was never employed as one. Moreover, his claim that he was a “trained police officer and international sex crimes expert” was reminiscent of failed Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker’s wild exaggerations about working for law enforcement; in reality, Ogles was a volunteer reserve deputy.

A spokeswoman for Ogles’s office said via email: “This is another attempt by the liberal media to make something out of nothing. It’s a simple case of condensing a resume for the sake of brevity on the campaign trail, and partisan hacks are trying to turn it into a headline for clicks.” However, her explanations suggest, at the very least, that Ogles exaggerated his experience.

Despite Ogles’s claim to be an economist, his spokeswoman would merely say that he “is proud of the time he spent developing his experience in economic and tax policies with well-known economist Dr. Arthur Laffer and Americans for Prosperity.” (They were the economists.) Her rendition of his law enforcement experience was also more modest: “He was honored to serve as a reserve deputy for the Williamson County Sheriff’s Department and as the Chief Operating Officer for Abolition International, which provided resources and operational support to anti-human trafficking efforts worldwide.” That sounds quite different from the way he described himself to voters.

Clearly, biographical fiction is a trend among Republicans. Walker compulsively lied during his campaign about everything from his education to his business background to the number of kids he had. And even before his election, former president Donald Trump had his share of personal fabrications, including his insistence that he was Michigan “Man of the Year” (an award that doesn’t exist) and his apparent exaggerations about his wealth.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Republicans have long abandoned the notion that politics is about problem solving or “public service.” When politics becomes performance art, the more extravagant the claims they make — whether they are about themselves or the world — the better. Moreover, Trump and right-wing media (including the Fox News anchors who privately disparaged viewers and conceded that Trump was lying about the election) have proved that a large segment of Republican voters will buy anything.

So it makes sense that so many Republicans apparently believe they too can fool the masses. These characters certainly know that GOP leaders will exact no punishment for scamming voters. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) is so desperate to keep his job that he has sacrificed critical powers and returned extreme characters such as Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) to House committees. He isn’t about to eject members for making up degrees or phony heroic details about their past.

When a party decides to peddle in lies and propaganda, they can expect liars and propagandists to fill their ranks. When the incentive to mislead voters is greater than any incentive to tell the truth, you wind up with a party of charlatans. In other word’s, today’s GOP.