“Hey, Luke,” former Representative George Santos says from what appears to be the passenger seat of a parked car. “I just wanted to stop by to wish you a super happy birthday.” His inflection rises over the last three words. “And a happy new year. Holy [expletive], you’re gonna be 23. And, Jesus, so young. And you’re studying for the LSAT, so I know you’re gonna crush it.” Santos raises his eyebrows and passes on regards from Luke’s brother, who wanted Santos to send these birthday wishes because “what better than an icon to icon?” He blows a kiss before telling Luke to “crush the LSAT” and every single goal after that. “The sky is the limit,” he says, and signs off.
The sky once seemed to be the limit for Santos himself, but that was before he found himself expelled from Congress, accused of concocting bizarre stories and facing prison time, having pleaded guilty to stealing others’ identities, making unauthorized charges to donors’ credit cards and lying to the Federal Election Commission. All that is, in some sense, how he got here: onto the self-facing camera screen, filming a birthday video in a car.
This is the weird world of Cameo, a platform selling “personalized videos from your favorite stars” to people like Luke’s brother. Cameo offers videos from all kinds of celebrities, especially if we take that word to mean anyone who has ever been on TV. Chuck Norris, David Arquette, Antonio Brown, Fabrizio Romano, supporting actors from the “Harry Potter” films — all are available to wish your loved ones well on command. The price can be steep for better-known talent; Caitlyn Jenner’s videos cost $2,500 and up (to benefit her foundation), and Mariano Rivera’s start at $750. Niche stars might charge under $100 or as little as $15. There are Instagram-famous comedians and TikTok ventriloquists; an array of Real Housewives and 90-Day Fiancés; a guy named Rob Franzese who makes videos because he resembles the cartoon character Peter Griffin from “Family Guy.” Even zoos have gotten into the mix: I once bought my younger brother a happy-birthday video from Dunkin the two-toed sloth at the Staten Island Zoo.
Cameo has also become a haven for disgraced or out-of-office political figures, offering a direct pipeline to monetizing whatever notoriety they maintain. Santos, for instance, is a highly rated user whose videos normally cost $400 (but were on sale over the holidays). His video for Luke, which appears as a sample, contains the hallmarks of any decent Cameo: The videos are specific and generic in almost equal measure. Santos includes details from his customers’ requests, like the note about Luke’s LSAT or the 16th-annual Christmas Eve party that someone named Andrew is missing. But much else follows a predictable script. Many of the samples use the same phrases: Santos is often “stopping by” and saying hi to another “icon.” He blows kisses and calls people “darling.” You can easily see the rudimentary cut-and-paste of faux personalization.
Gaetz is, for the moment, just some guy staring into a camera, making $250.
Time, perhaps, to scroll on to another political figure. There are plenty, including a lot of names from the orbit of the last Trump administration, many of them now mired in legal troubles. There’s Roger Stone, often in suspenders and a bow tie, greeting fellow patriots. There’s Michael Cohen, who in a 10-minute sample tries to negotiate a “truce” between a Kamala Harris supporter and his MAGA relative. There are Nigel Farage and Donald Trump Jr. (who is now on hiatus); for a throwback, you can book Sarah Palin. And there is Matt Gaetz, who — having resigned from his congressional seat and then learned he would not become Trump’s attorney general — quickly joined Cameo. In one sample “roast” video to commemorate a couple’s engagement, he addresses the camera, smiling: “The election didn’t go well for you. Like, you were out there hoping that — what? That Joe Biden was going to make it to the finish line?” He offers some gibes at Harris and then a reminder: “It was MAGA that reigned supreme, OK?”
Cameo feels like the end product of an ever-more-intense fan culture, one in which the country grows more and more parasocially connected to the athletes and actors and influencers who turn their cameras toward themselves and talk, talk, talk, seemingly to us, all day long. Self-facing video is clearly the medium of our time. Nowhere has this development felt stranger than in politics, where we can now expect the awkwardness of someone like Elizabeth Warren “going live” from her kitchen. Everyone knows the drill: Traditional media are less relevant when people can film themselves, communicating directly with audiences consisting mostly of their own superfans — and so everyone tries, with varying degrees of success.
Over the last decade, this kind of devotion has attached especially to conservative figures, who have embraced it wholesale. There is a fan-culture element in so much MAGA-adjacent politics, one that is effective both politically and as a cash grab. For sale: Trump earrings, Trump beer koozies, Trump-shaped mobile speakers and, during the campaign, $59.99 Trump Bibles.
On Cameo, the product is a short video that you can save to your phone as a kind of artifact — like merch, the natural economic endpoint of fan culture. It feels less like the meet-and-greets that political figures have always done and more like an autographed movie poster, a lightly personalized item that’s cherished for its association with celebrity. You know your Cameo is most likely one of dozens Santos has recorded recently, but the personal touches don’t quite lose their sparkle. It’s still addressed to you; he’s still talking about your LSAT, or Luke’s.
Yes, there is an obvious whiff of sadness about Cameos, the air of watching a once-promising actor consigned to soap-opera roles. For politicians, some level of falling from grace is implicit in the form, and sometimes it’s explicit. Gaetz’s bio says: “Trump nominated me to be US Attorney General (That didn’t work out).” He is, for the moment, just some guy staring into a camera, making $250 by wishing happy birthday to someone he doesn’t even know. But if you watch enough of these videos, something else emerges: A lot of these guys seem to be having fun. Cohen looks as if he’s enjoying giving his advice; Santos appears to like blowing kisses and chatting briskly with other “icons.” This pleasure might be staged, but it isn’t so hard to imagine that these men — many of whom rose to power talking loudly to cameras and microphones — get a kick out of knowing that people are still listening. Gaetz even recommends the platform: He recently suggested that it might be a good option for Luigi Mangione.
How serious are the people who buy these videos for friends? I would posit: not very. The Gaetz and Cohen sample videos each include conservatives yanking the chains of liberal relatives. And while someone like Trump Jr. might have a base of Americans who admire him, it’s harder to pin down who Santos’s authentic “fans” would be. (He is clearly angling to remake himself as a kind of campy gay icon, a campaign that has progressed just far enough for headlines to offer admonishments like “George Santos Is Not a Gay Icon.”) A birthday party I attended once featured a Santos Cameo, and I can say with some certainty that no one there was a superfan, but I can also say that the whole room was laughing.
Cameos are coated in a thick layer of the internet-adjacent humor. That kind of humor is becoming harder and harder to separate from American politics as a whole, where jokes keep folding in on themselves and becoming realities, until the question of what’s serious and what isn’t becomes both impossible to answer and, ultimately, irrelevant. A government-efficiency committee named DOGE, after a cryptocurrency that was itself started as kind of a joke, built on a previous joke about a picture of a quizzical Shiba Inu? Ha, ha! Why not? America seems to keep asking. Why not?
Sophie Haigney is a writer currently working on a book about our obsession with collecting. She is also the web editor at The Paris Review.
Source photographs for illustration above: Screenshots from Cameo.
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