Former Rep. George Santos had many viral moments during his 328-day-long stint in Congress.
There was the time he said he didn’t know what OnlyFans was on Fox News, only for it to be revealed that Santos used campaign funds to subscribe to creators on the site.
Or, when he—a gay man—supported anti-LGBTQ laws and a freelance journalist exposed him for doing drag in the past.
Or, when Santos randomly put out store-bought cupcakes for the swath of reporters waiting outside his Capitol Hill office, which had become a stakeout spot as scandals around him grew.
But no viral moment captured the internet more than when Santos showed up to Congress with a baby.
The former congressman has always been an enigma. He was unknown when he ran for a vacated seat in Congress, but shortly after he was elected in November 2022, national news outlets reported that he lied about many of his accomplishments and life experiences. The story was first broken by a Long Island outlet in Santos’ district, the North Shore Leader, while he was still running for office, then exploded as more people began looking at him.
According to the New York Times, Santos lied about attending Baruch College in New York, working at CitiBank and Goldman Sachs, and running a pet charity.
Despite all of his lies coming to light, Santos still took his seat in the House.
George Santos Baby
Even though people were prepped for anything surrounding Santos, reporters and online observers were still thoroughly confused when, in October 2023, Santos carried a baby around the hallways of the Longworth House Office.
Reporters asked if the baby was his, to which Santos replied ominously “not yet.”
The baby was in Congress at a fraught time, when in the week after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack, pro-Palestine protesters roamed the halls.
When approached by someone asking him about the conflict, Santos raised a hand and said “Excuse me, do not record this baby,” while holding his hand to the camera.
After the child disappeared, Santos got into a screaming match with protesters who confronted him about his support for Israel.
Santos’ staunch support of Israel was confounding at the time. While he previously claimed to be Jewish, he then clarified that he thinks he’s “Jew-ish”—saying his mother is of Jewish heritage. He also said his mother’s parents fled the Holocaust, but that the war in Ukraine was preventing him from being able to prove his heritage.
Santos is Catholic.
Some online speculated that holding the baby was part of Santos’s strategy to ward protesters off.
But ultimately, everyone was dumbfounded and a little worried about the baby, too.
After Santos was expelled from Congress in December 2023—which he called “bullying” after a House Ethics Committee report found that he misused campaign funds for personal purchases—he said in an interview with Ziwe Fumudoh that the baby was a staffer’s.
Also in the interview, he clarified that “not yet” was in reference to the fact that he is not yet a parent.
“It was a staffer’s baby,” he said, and he “was taking the baby to introduce him to another member of Congress.”
He denied using the baby as a prop.
As for his own potential parenthood, Santos shared with Fumudoh that he hopes his child is “better” than he is.
“I will have a child and I will accept my kid in any way shape or form they come,” he told Fumudoh. “And the best I can do is teach my child to be better than me.”
While that’s his takeaway from the whole debacle, journalist Molly Jong-Fast put it better in an October 2023 tweet.
“Please don’t give George Santos your baby,” she wrote.
The internet is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here to get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.