Santos really strikes me as the living version of this: “I’m like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn’t know what to do if I caught one, you know, I just do... things.”
Looks like he was doing fine as a small-time con artist and criminal. Stealing puppies and stiffing landlords and skimming cards and selling ponzi shares is a living, of a sort. Maybe he intended to run for Congress and lose? Then nobody would be asking about his finances, and he'd have a whole new set of suckers to exploit. But winning has been very inconvenient for him.
One can think of narcissists as people who create and perform a false self that is more impressive, more compelling than their real one. But it's not like an actor who can turn a role on and off. They live the lie. I'm sure Santos doesn't think of himself as a criminal. He spins from circumstance to circumstance, trying out things to say and ways to say them until he finds something that works, at least for a while.
So I think Santos just gradually lied himself into it. A hill-climbing social algorithm.
To me the unfathomable part is not that somebody would try, it's that he would make it to be a major party's candidate for one of the most important elected positions in country. Politics has to be attractive to grifters and frauds of all sorts. I have to wonder how he made it that far without anybody noticing.
Looks like he was doing fine as a small-time con artist and criminal. Stealing puppies and stiffing landlords and skimming cards and selling ponzi shares is a living, of a sort. Maybe he intended to run for Congress and lose? Then nobody would be asking about his finances, and he'd have a whole new set of suckers to exploit. But winning has been very inconvenient for him.