WASHINGTON Maybe George Santos real problem is that he aimed too low.

While the newly elected New York congressman is facing calls from some in his own party to step down after revelations that he fabricated much of his life story in his campaign, a fellow New York Republican seven years earlier ran on an even larger raft of lies. Voters made him president.

Donald Trump lied about how much money he had, the size of his airplane, the number of floors in his building, about whether he was still in the mail-order steak business, even his own height.

He was rewarded with the White House, where he set new records for falsehoods, culminating in the big lie about the 2020 election having been stolen from him, which in turn served as the foundation for his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt to remain in power.

So why the fixation on Santos lies now, compared with the relative pass Trump got?

Triage, explained former Republican consultant Mac Stipanovich, who left the party because of Trump. Among the constant outrages that were the stock and trade of Trump, from undisguised and repetitive racism to admission of sexual assault and endemic misogyny to slandering legitimate heroes and attacking their families to you name it, biographical fiction was small beer.

In Santos case, he added, it is the only beer on tap.

It is true that Santos whole-cloth fabrications are extraordinary for an elected politician. He has lied about the colleges he went to, about getting knee replacements after playing competitive volleyball, about having worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs (and having been wildly successful at both), about losing four employees in the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre in Florida and even about being Jewish.

He nevertheless remains in the minor leagues compared with the lie upon lie told by his partys last president about his own life story.

Trump lied about the size of his private jet, claiming it was larger than the 747 that the president normally uses as Air Force One. He lied about having dated model Carla Bruni and having been pursued by Madonna.

He lied about the British royals having expressed interest in buying apartments in his Trump Tower in Manhattan. And he lied about how many floors that building contains, calling it a 68-story high-rise even though it has only 57 (floors 6 through 13 do not exist, and neither do 27 through 29).

He lied about his own identity, calling journalists with made-up names to pass along false news items about Trump. He lied about his height, claiming for decades to be 6 feet, 3 inches, despite photos of him next to 6-foot-3 Jeb Bush and 6-foot-2 Justin Trudeau show that he is shorter, even though he wears shoes with 2-inch lifts.

Then, when he entered political life in 2011 with hints that he would run for president in 2012, he not only became the highest-profile spreader of the racist lie that Democrat Barack Obama was born abroad and was therefore ineligible to be president, he also embellished on it lavishly, claiming he had sent a team of investigators to Hawaii and that they cannot believe what theyre finding.

In fact, as former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen admitted later, there had been no investigators sent to Hawaii (Obamas birthplace) or anywhere else. Trump had simply made it up.