Bill Cotterell: Book explores ‘Swamp Monsters’ clash

Florida has never produced a presidential nominee, or even a running mate, and now our state has not one but two contenders for the Republican nomination.

And what a pair they are.

NBC political reporter Matt Dixon captures the essential weirdness of the Donald Trump-Ron DeSantis struggle in an entertaining, detailed book going on sale this week.

“Swamp Monsters,” subtitled “Trump vs. DeSantis — the greatest show on earth (or at least in Florida),” is a fairly brief, lively account of how history’s most controversial (to put it nicely) ex-president wound up in such a brawl with the nation’s most coldly calculating governor.

If this were a novel, nobody would print it. There’ll be no movie rights for this tale, we’ll see the real thing.

“Florida Man” is sort of a headline cliche — like “Philadelphia lawyer” or “Chicago alderman” — but the Trump-DeSantis race is weird even for Florida.

Where else could a twice-impeached former president turn a virtual unknown into a national political figure, only to have this political Pygmalion ungratefully turn on him? Well, OK, Florida once saw Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio butt heads for the GOP presidential nomination, but Bush hadn’t made Rubio’s career and Trump quickly stomped both of them anyway.

And never has a primary race changed the party itself.

“All the while, the Republican Party’s mascot has of course remained the elephant,” Dixon writes, “But the new party could just as easily be represented by a shirtless man from Florida wearing Mickey Mouse ears while riding an alligator through the Everglades, a Pub Sub in one hand, a cafecito in the other, and a half-smoked cigar clenched between his teeth. It is now the party of the Florida Man.”

While no one wants to envision the governor or 45th president shirtless, nor is it known if they like Publix subs or Cuban coffee, either DeSantis or Trump will emerge from their strange struggle as the Florida Man of the modern GOP.

Right now, it looks like DeSantis will fade in Iowa and New Hampshire this month, so the release of Dixon’s book is timely.

If DeSantis scores a David-and-Goliath upset in either state, he’ll be like Jimmy Carter in 1976 — the fresh new face of American politics. But if the polls are correct and Trump’s 50-point lead over everybody holds up, Dixon’s book will still be the best entertainment in the discount bargain bin.

Everybody already knows how Trump got there. Dixon, one of the best-plugged-in reporters of a very good Tallahassee press corps, exhaustively details DeSantis’ rise from congressman to short-lived U.S. Senate candidate in 2016, underdog gubernatorial prospect in 2018 and now master of Florida government. DeSantis’ 2022 re-election by a margin of nearly 20 percentage points marked both his own emergence as a national political force and the utter demise of the Florida Democratic Party.

If Trump had been re-elected in 2020, or if he’d just remained a fake-reality TV star and left politics alone eight years ago, DeSantis would probably be where Ronald Reagan was in 1980, the runaway favorite for the GOP nomination.

But if there had been no Donald Trump, there’d have been no Ron DeSantis.

Relying on insiders who can’t be named, for their own career survival, Dixon recounts how DeSantis cultivated Fox News and Trump’s support to win the 2018 Republican primary for governor. DeSantis even made campaign commercials showing himself playing with one of his children, building a wall with blocks and reading about the joys of saying, “You’re fired” — the tag line of Trump’s TV show.

With Trump losing in 2020 and DeSantis resoundingly getting re-elected in 2022, their collision course was locked in.

Dixon details how the governor asserted leadership in the COVID-19 pandemic, reopening the tourism economy and gradually building credibility with the anti-vaxxers of the conservative movement. And he skillfully waged the cultural wars to make himself a national figure on the right — grabbing TV time and “owning the Libs” — and familiarizing Americans with a younger, less abrasive alternative to Trump.

Dixon depicts several similarities in the brawling campaign styles of Trump and DeSantis. Readers sometimes must re-read a few lines to make sure which man he’s writing about.

Try to guess which man’s campaign style this passage is about:

“(He) is intrinsically incapable of not being in attack mode, a brash arrogance that does not give his detractors an opportunity to be contrite or acknowledge when he is right. On the contrary, he does not apologize and never admits to wrongdoing, instead taking every opportunity to point out others’ mistakes — even when they don’t exist.”

In a race like this, that could be either Swamp Monster.

Bill Cotterell is a retired Capitol reporter for United Press International and the Tallahassee Democrat. He writes a weekly column for The News Service of Florida and City & State Florida. He can be reached at bcotterell@cityandstatefl.com.

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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Bill Cotterell: Book explores ‘Swamp Monsters’ clash