George Santos, the former New York congressman expelled from the House in December 2023, sat down with Bill Maher for a new episode of the Club Random podcast and delivered a blunt appraisal of how Congress operates — one his interviewer, a longtime Santos critic, largely let stand, according to The Gateway Pundit.
Santos framed much of what the public sees from Capitol Hill as performance, describing a chamber where high-profile votes function as messaging exercises and where the real decisions happen elsewhere.
“They’re all full of absolute sh*t,” Santos said, after Maher invited him to speak candidly about Washington.
An ‘all theater’ warning attributed to Zinke
Santos recalled a conversation he said took place shortly after he arrived in Washington with Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana. According to Santos, Zinke gestured at the city around them and told him, “It’s all theater. Just remember this, you have one of the best seats in the country.”
Santos said the remark reshaped how he viewed the institution. He described Zinke as someone he had looked up to as a statesman, which made the comment land harder.
From there, Santos said, he began recognizing the pattern on the floor himself. “I witnessed it vote after vote,” he said, describing members as routinely forced to choose between two options they disliked, since voting “present” amounts to giving up their vote entirely.
“You gotta pick a side on an issue. Yes, no,” Santos said. “So you pick a side, right? The less of the two evils.”
He then argued that a large share of the votes he participated in were not substantive. “If I tell you the amount of times that the votes were just bullsh*t messaging bills—” he began, before Maher interjected to note that Sen. John Fetterman has made similar complaints.
According to the Gateway Pundit account, Maher let Santos continue without pushing back, a notable posture given Maher’s history of mocking him.
‘At the end of the day, it ends in pizza’
Santos’s sharpest passage concerned what he said happens after the public combat. “At the end of the day, it ends in pizza,” he told Maher. “Do you know what that means?”
His answer: lawmakers air their grievances on the floor, then leadership from both parties gathers privately to settle matters. “Nobody cares because they will end whatever their mishegas is on the floor, go and do their backroom deals,” he said.
He named specific leadership pairings he claimed take part in those conversations — Hakeem Jeffries with Mike Johnson, Jeffries with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi with previous Republican leaders.
“They get together, they smoke cigars, drink scotch or whatever the f*ck it is that they enjoy,” Santos said.
Once leadership has reached an understanding, Santos claimed, the rank and file are informed rather than consulted. “And then they ram it down the conference and the caucus’s throat and say, ‘This is what we’re doing!'” he said.
Most members, in his telling, comply. “We go there: ‘Yes, this is what leadership told us to do,'” Santos said. “Every now and then you’ll get a rogue. I happen to be one of those rogues who would kind of go against the grain… Oh, the scolding.”
Santos’s expulsion and the audience he says Washington ignores
Santos arrived in the House in 2023 and was gone within a year. In December 2023, 105 Republicans joined Democrats to expel him — a vote The Gateway Pundit characterized at the time as a purge carried out by a freshman with a 100 percent conservative voting record, while scandals involving Democrats it considered more serious never reached the floor.
The outlet also noted that Steve Bannon described that expulsion as “100% McCarthy,” referring to the same leadership class Santos now accuses of striking deals behind closed doors. The Gateway Pundit presented that as an echo of the (at the time) incoming congressman’s complaints about a system where outcomes are decided before members vote.
After the interview, Santos restated a theme he has repeated since leaving office. He told The Gateway Pundit there is “no Fiscal conservative Party left in Washington, DC” and that the Republican Party is “no different than the Democrat Party.” He has described himself as a “TRUMPlican.”
The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hᴏft framed the interview as elevating Santos’s diagnosis of Congress from campaign rhetoric to something closer to firsthand testimony.
Whether viewers take the account at face value is another matter. Santos is a polarizing figure who has been accused of fabricating large portions of his biography, and the Zinke anecdote rests solely on his recollection; Zinke has not publicly confirmed it.
Still, the interview lands in a familiar groove. Complaints that Congress stages votes it knows will fail, and that the real work happens in leadership offices rather than on C-SPAN, are staples of anti-establishment rhetoric from both parties. What is unusual is hearing them delivered to Maher, who has spent years mocking Santos, in a format where the host mostly let him talk.
Source: www.thegatewaypundit.com — https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/09/former-congressman-george-santos-just-torched-uniparty-theyre/