The Republican Party of the Sunshine State, the NBC News reporter Matt Dixon writes in SWAMP MONSTERS: Trump vs. DeSantis — The Greatest Show on Earth (or at Least in Florida) (Little, Brown, 323 pp., $30), is now “the party of Florida Man,” the mythic entity that wears “Mickey Mouse ears while riding an alligator through the Everglades.” It’s an important advent in a place that has become a laboratory for the national culture wars with Gov. Ron DeSantis as its chief scientist. DeSantis has outdone many of his more extreme colleagues in the G.O.P. He has restricted sex education in Florida schools — topics from homosexuality to menstruation are now taboo — and picked a fight with Disney over the company’s supposedly “woke” values. He has also lowered the number of jurors required to recommend the death penalty.
“Swamp Monsters” is driven by the warm and cold relationship between Governor DeSantis and one of his state’s residents, Donald J. Trump. As a relatively anonymous member of Congress in 2017, DeSantis nimbly endured the president’s erratic moods and loyalty tests. A year later, he had managed to become a Trump protégé and was elected governor.
But nothing gold can stay. Last year, as the presidential contest loomed, DeSantis surged in the polls against Trump and the Republican primary was billed as an epic face-off. Dixon’s book is an enjoyable, if horrifying, soap opera of the political and personal fallout that led us there. We learn that Trump felt hurt, in 2018, when he heard that DeSantis had laughed churlishly on the set of a pro-Trump ad in which the aspiring governor guided his young daughter in stacking toy blocks to “build the wall.” Trump also grouses when DeSantis fails to corroborate a lower death toll after a hurricane in Puerto Rico. By 2020, Trump tells a cheering crowd that he’s going to “fire him somehow.”
Dixon finished his book late enough to see DeSantis’s poll numbers flag. Some have insisted that the Florida governor’s precipitous decline and ultimate defeat are evidence that “anti-woke” antics don’t work on the broader electorate, but “Swamp Monsters” suggests that American conservatives are not done with them yet. “Florida,” one lobbyist tells Dixon, “is the new pinnacle for freedom. The pinnacle of the Republican movement. No state is more important in post-MAGA Republican politics.”
Joshua Green, a Bloomberg Businessweek journalist known for his popular book “Devil’s Bargain,” which told the story of the uneasy political alliance between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump, has a skill for writing political sagas that spin baroque policy maneuverings into feelings and hopes.
He opens his new book, THE REBELS: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics (Penguin Press, 339 pp., $30), by looking back to Jimmy Carter’s mostly failed attempt, in the late 1970s, to reform the tax code and put workers on a more equal footing with their bosses.
In Green’s telling, this unrealized opportunity inaugurated a Democratic slide away “from the labor-centered liberalism that had prevailed since World War II” and toward corporate-friendly deregulation, which ultimately led to the Great Recession of 2008 and an identity crisis in the party.
Green connects Democratic retreat in the face of financial power to the rise of anti-establishment dissent across the political spectrum, a tension that left an opening for Green’s three protagonists, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, as well as movements that aimed to steer the party away from market-based solutions.
Green has an excellent eye for compelling details that accumulate into psychologically cogent portraits. Warren comes off with special charm as she takes to YouTube in 2008 — a time when the platform was, according to Entertainment Weekly, largely a “home for piano-playing cats” — to explain the workings of the Congressional Oversight Committee. Soon, she is shaming even minor Barack Obama nominees out of contention for Treasury positions if she finds them to be too close to Wall Street. She also does a “mean impression” of the way Timothy Geithner, then the secretary of the Treasury, “avoids eye contact and mumbles into his shirt collar.”
Even when covering well-trod ground, like the story of A.O.C.’s rise from Manhattan bartender to Oversight Committee leader, Green’s analysis is rich and lively. The result is an exciting foretaste of the tensions that Joe Biden will face among his supporters, detractors and opponents as the presidential race heads toward the fall.
It’s almost a truism to say that, after 2016, the Democratic Party sought to reduce infighting and avoid the humiliation of losing again to Trump. The path toward common ground is the terrain explored by the reporters Hunter Walker and Luppe B. Luppen in THE TRUCE: Progressives, Centrists, and the Future of the Democratic Party (Norton, 306 pp., $29.99), which promises “never-before-told stories from crucial campaigns” and “exclusive interviews with key leaders.” But while the drama is cohesive and the stories are well told, the interviews offer mostly tepid insights into headline events.
More interestingly, and more quietly, they present an old question relevant across the political spectrum — does working from within mainstream parties defeat the soul of the ideal or is it the only real way to forge ahead? Former President Obama recurs frequently in “The Truce,” almost always as a peacemaker between lefty Democrats and their centrist colleagues. Walker and Luppen detail how Sanders and Warren staffers were brought into Biden’s camp to form a series of “unity task forces,” resulting in a 2020 agenda that even staunch progressives, like Representative Ilhan Omar, could praise.
Of course, once the election was over, corporate-backed Democrats such as the senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema acted — functionally and spiritually — as Republicans, creating an opposition that whittled down the party’s would-be priorities. In an interview with the authors, Sanders warns about the dangers of big money in politics. “I tried to have the D.N.C. outlaw super PAC money in Democratic primaries, but without success,” he says.
Walker and Luppen end the book on a cautiously optimistic note, celebrating progressive coalition building and wins since 2016. Alessandra Biaggi, a younger and notably progressive member of the New York State Senate who served through 2022, wonders why Democrats don’t organize more aggressively outside of campaign seasons, too. Before she took office, she accepted a job on Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s staff, which she says gave her a “front-row seat to the worst show on Earth.”
Being on the inside necessarily means compromise. Still, Biaggi feels that being inside the party was her “best bet of helping.” She is also, notably, the granddaughter of former Representative Mario Biaggi. She could hardly be an outsider, even if she tried.
