Ziwe has found her latest iconic guest: George Santos.
After teasing a collab with the expelled congressman, comedian and celebrity interviewer Ziwe released her sit-down interview with Santos on YouTube on Monday morning.
Ziwe’s “ZNN” interview, a CNN spoof with her own Ziwe News Network, began with onscreen text saying “No congressman were paid in the making of this interview even though George asked three times.” She then listed civil rights icons and asked Santos to say what they meant to him. The list included Marsha P. Johnson, James Baldwin, Harvey Milk and Bowen Yang’s “SNL” impression of Santos — which he said deserves an EGOT.
When asked if he would want Yang to play him in HBO’s movie about him, Santos said “that movie is not ever going to happen. That book has no perspective of me or anybody close to me. It’s fucking fiction,” referring to Mark Chiusano’s novel “The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos.”
Santos, the Republican representative who was removed from office Dec. 1 after an ethics report accused him of breaking federal law, joined Ziwe after she wrote to him on X that he would “be an iconic guest.”
The scandal-ridden congressman from New York had 13 criminal charges leveraged against him by the federal government, including wire fraud, theft of public funds, money laundering and making false statements to Congress. He was caught using campaign money for personal expenses — including on car payments, OnlyFans, makeup and designer clothing — and accused of misleading Congress about his financial circumstances on official disclosure statements.
When asked how he’s paid for his designer clothes and Botox, Santos said, “I’ve always worked, Ziwe, so yeah, my own money. Like everything else I own.”
Santos, the sixth member of the House ever to be expelled, was under intense public scrutiny before he even took office due to his penchant for lying about his identity. He lied about where he went to high school and college, and where he worked before getting elected. He even lied about being Jewish, telling the New York Post after he was exposed: “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background, I said I was ‘Jew-ish.'”
He took shots at other politicians, saying “they’re all frauds. If you were to put them all under the same scrutiny I was under, you’d fucking vacate the whole goddamn building.” He listed Kevin McCarthy, Lindsay Graham, Bob “Gold Bar” Menendez and Dan Goldman as fellow alleged fraudsters.
Santos made several other cringe-inducing claims in Ziwe’s interview, like how he doesn’t “see color,” how “Gen Z loves Trump; he’s an icon” and that he will “outlive each and every member of Congress.” He also weighed in on the likelihood of him joining “Dancing With the Stars” in the future — “I’ll pass.”
And would another political run be in Santos’ future? “I’m not ruling it out,” he said, but he might pivot from Republican to Independent because “the country needs more independent thinkers.” He also denied even being a “politician,” rather an “elected public servant for 11 months, proud of it, never caved to the establishment of politics.”
Ziwe, who climbed the comedy ladder at The Onion and “The Rundown With Robin Thede,” created a YouTube interview series titled “Baited With Ziwe,” in which she humorously “baited” her white friends into saying racial or otherwise politically incorrect faux pas. The show moved to Instagram Live and then landed at Showtime in the form of her variety series “Ziwe,” which lasted two seasons and featured guests including Phoebe Bridgers, Bowen Yang, Fran Lebowitz, Julian Castro, Stacey Abrams, Chet Hanks, Emily Ratajkowski, Julia Fox, Michael Che and Drew Barrymore.
Santos ended his interview by saying he couldn’t define “empathy.”
“I don’t understand it. People accuse me of having no empathy. Maybe I can’t define ’empathy.’ I believe I’m empathetic to causes, to people, to situations,” he said, followed by Ziwe asking a “below-the-belt” question about if he’s excited to go to prison.
Watch Ziwe’s interview below.
