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Former Rep. George Santos is calling on voters to be “more selective” ahead of this year’s contentious midterm elections.
“I think that we should be more selective of who we send to office. We are sending a lot of great candidates for reality TV into Washington, and perhaps we should redirect them to TV instead of D.C.,” the politician-turned-reality TV star, 38, exclusively told Us on Friday, October 2.
Santos was infamously expelled from Congress on December 1, 2023, after a damning House Ethic Committee Report detailed the former representative’s campaign fund misuse. He was later sentenced to 87 months in prison after he admitting to lying about his background — including where he went to school, his family’s Jewish and Holocaust heritage and where his mother was during the deadly 9/11 terrorist attacks — and committing multiple counts of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. (President Donald Trump commuted Santos’ sentence in October 2025.)
After Santos served roughly three months of his seven-year sentence, he joined season 5 of FOX’s hit reality competition series Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test.
“I’m not here to judge, because people ask me who I [would] nominate for season 6 for something like this,” Santos continued to Us on Friday and while considering any current or former politicians who would fare better on reality TV. “I can’t help but say Marjorie Taylor Greene, because she likes CrossFi [and] I think she’d probably scream at the DS [the Directing Staff]. That would be interesting to watch.” (Green, 52, left office on January 5, 2026, after a very public fallout with President Trump over the botched release of the so-called Epstein files.)
Former Rep. George Santos (R-NY) Getty Images
Santos continued of reality TV stars running for office, “But I don’t want to say no because I’d be a hypocrite. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Look, this is America. We’re a great experiment. We’re a great melting pot. We have politicians who have become celebrities. We have celebrities who have become politicians. Spanning from Sonny Bono to Ronald Reagan to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Donald Trump and many more. So I think there’s an intersectionality. The thing that I always joked about was [that] D.C. is Hollywood for ugly people.”
With political life in the rearview, Santos has been taken aback by the positive fan reaction he received during his time on Special Forces. (Spoiler: Santos reached his physical limit on the show and voluntarily withdrew on the Thursday, October 1, episode of the hit series.)
Former politician George Santos has defended his participation on the upcoming season of Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test. “To all the haters talking about me being fat or @BrandiGlanville’s skin and wishing ill on @candacecbure amongst the other mean horrible things in the comment section, you could not walk a day in any of our shoes,” […]
“I’m used to a very different reaction, so it’s so humbling that people got to see me and they have this reaction,” Santos told Us. “It’s really humbling. It’s healing in a way, because it’s all I wanted — was to be seen outside of headlines … and at least people get to see a little bit of who I am in a real organic way, not in a controlled studio where I show up to an interview and people laugh and then walk away.”
He continued, “It’s like, ‘Yeah, but he’s still George Santos.’ No, people got to see me, like, legit snore. So it’s emotional for me, because I’ve had a rough go for the last few years of, you know, [the] consequences of my own actions. To see that I can pass through that and fight through that and keep fighting to at least reclaim some sort of space is very heartwarming for me. I’m forever grateful to the audience and Special Forces and beyond for the love and the support and the memes. Like, you know how amazing [it is and] how honored I am to be a living meme at this point?”
Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test season 5 airs on Fox Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET.
