U.S. Rep. George Santos (R-NY) is breathing new life into an old Eddie Murphy movie tag line: “He’s going to do to congress what congress is doing to you.”
That’s according to Marty Kaplan, the screenwriter who wrote “The Distinguished Gentleman” about a con man who lies his way into congress.
“When I wrote the screenplay, I never imagined anyone could actually pull off a scam like that,” Kaplan writes in his new opinion piece for Politico. “The Distinguished Gentleman may not exactly have been art, but life was all-in on imitating it.”
Released in 1992, “The Distinguished Gentleman” is a post-Reagan era take on “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” that replaces naiveté with narcissism, sincerity with snark, and filibusters with mean-one liners, says Kaplan.
"A small-time con artist, the opposite of Jimmy Stewart’s naif, lies his way to Congress because, as Willie Sutton said about banks, Washington is where the money is," writes Kaplan. "For a hustler, it’s the promised land."
Kaplan says he did a spit-take when, almost exactly 30 years after the movie’s release, he read the New York Times headline suggesting Santos’ resume might be “largely fiction.”
And as Santos’ story, fictional and non, has unfolded, Kaplan keeps finding similarities. Take for instance, the name.
Murphy’s character runs for office on his middle name so that voters will connect him to the dead congress member whose seat he hopes to claim.
Santos too uses different names for different settings, and as the Guardian reported in January, which one is legal remains unclear.
The New York Republican currently faces fraud charges in a federal court in his home state, which Kaplan quips could have been avoided had Santos studied the Disney pic.
“If only he’d had Eddie Murphy to show him the ropes, George Santos’ grift could have been perfectly legal,” quips Kaplan. “The House Republican conference might still be calling the con man from Queens and Long Island ‘the distinguished gentleman from New York.’”
If Santos hasn’t yet viewed “The Distinguished Gentleman,” Kaplan suggests that he should, especially since he faces a possible expulsion vote this week.
“If he doesn’t quit before then, and he gets his moment in the well to explain himself, I hope he considers cribbing from the closing scene of The Distinguished Gentleman,” writes Kaplan.
