Jon Stewart says Americans are making same Trump mistake with George Santos

Jon Stewart has cautioned Americans against mistakenly treating US Representative George Santos in the same way they did former US President Donald Trump.

The newly elected congressman from New York’s Long Island has been at the centre of recent controversy for telling several lies, with many home state Republicans and Democrats calling for his resignation.

“Everything about him just screams of mediocrity,” Stewart said of Santos on the latest episode of his podcast, The Problem with Jon Stewart.

Trying to understand why “nobody really cares” about Santos’s mounting scandals, the former Daily Show host reasoned: “He’s not obese, he’s not skinny, he’s everything in the middle.”

Stewart compared the disgraced Santos to a “fresh meat” inmate who can’t decide between joining the “Aryan gang” or the “Spanish gang”.

He and his co-hosts and writers Henrik Blix and Maria Randazzo continued making jokes about Santos, before Stewart stopped himself.

“The thing we have to be careful of, and I always caution myself on this and I ran into this trouble with Trump,” the host said, “is we cannot mistake absurdity for lack of danger. Because it takes people with no shame to do shameful things.”

He then drew parallels between Trump and controversial former Brazil president Jair Bolsonaro saying: “You could say, this is absurd! But absurdity is where the real danger always is.

“Absurdity always makes you think something is more benign than it is,” Stewart added. “I misjudged Trump because he was so ridiculous.”

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Following a December New York Times investigation, which blew the lid off Santos’s list of lies, the New York Representative has been met with criticism not only from across party lines but from other New York Republicans as well, who are calling on him to resign.

Santos, however, has met these calls with defiance, matter-of-factly stating that he “will NOT resign” in a recent interview.

Some of his biggest lies include his claims of knowing victims of the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting, that his mother died twice, and that he’s of Jewish heritage and that his grandparents fled the Holocaust, among many more.