Mother Jones illustration; Photos courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf and Elena Siebert
In June, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced plans to build an immigrant detention center on an unused airstrip in the Everglades. “There’s not much waiting for them except alligators and pythons,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said in a video on social media, suggesting that the detention center’s location in the middle of a swamp was a key selling point for the Trump administration. “Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.” He dubbed the facility “Alligator Alcatraz,” and soon started selling alligator-themed merch on his reelection campaign site.
A week or so later, Florida residents turned out in droves to protest the facility as a threat to the environment and human rights. One held up a sign that asked, “Is this a Carl Hiaasen novel?” A photo of the sign made its way to the Instagram account of the famous Florida author, who responded, “Thanks for the shout-out, but even I’m not warped enough to dream up Alligator Alcatraz.”
The exchange said a lot about the Era of Trump. It also said a lot about how difficult Hiaasen’s job as Florida’s premiere political satirist has become. After all, even the most brilliant novelist would be challenged to imagine storylines more preposterous than those generated by President Donald Trump in his second administration. The Fox News host with a booze problem running the Pentagon; the former heroin addict Kennedy scion with a brain worm overseeing the CDC; an ex-professional wrestling promoter turned Education Secretary; or the 19-year-old DOGE staffer formerly known online as “Big Balls” charged with improving the Social Security Administration? The entire federal government, it seems, has become a Hiaasen novel—though much less funny.
For those not familiar with his oeuvre, Hiaasen is a former longtime Miami Herald columnist who has written more than a dozen novels set in his home state of Florida, plus a handful of young adult and nonfiction works. One novel—Strip Tease—became a 1996 movie featuring Demi Moore, and last year, Apple TV turned Bad Monkey into a TV show starring Vince Vaughn.
Hiaasen’s novels defy easy categorization—they’re often lumped in with “crime fiction.” Generally speaking, they take the weirdness of Florida and its corruption, mix in a heavy dose of environmental consciousness, and turn it all into something resembling a comic thriller.
Over his long career, Hiaasen has created several memorable characters, most notably, his legendary anti-hero “Skink,” who first appeared in Double Whammy in 1987. Seven books later, Skink is now so iconic in Florida that Hiaasen’s friend, the late Jimmy Buffett, even put him in a song.
Née Clinton Tyree, Skink is a former Florida governor who had waged a quixotic battle against overdevelopment and fought to protect the environment. At one point, he tried to impose heavy fines or jail time on any boater who killed a manatee, which the boater would be required to personally bury in a public event.
Fed up with the corruption, Skink eventually disappears to live as a hermit in the Everglades, surviving on roadkill and fresh fish. He periodically resurfaces in Hiaasen’s books to save endangered panthers or to assist his other protagonists in various monkey-wrenching activities. After Hiaasen responded to the “Alligator Alcatraz” Instagram post, one of his fans replied, “Where is Skink when you need him?”
Hiaasen’s latest book, Fever Beach, came out in May. As a huge fan, I bought it without even reading the reviews, so I was a little shocked when I realized who had inspired it. “Holy shit this is about Matt Gaetz!” I told my husband after reading a few pages.
If there were ever a political figure who might be both deserving of and difficult to parody, it’s the former Republican representative from Florida. Gaetz had leveraged his father’s money and political ties to launch himself out of the Panhandle into national prominence, becoming one of the youngest members ever elected to the House in 2016. In November, he resigned after Trump nominated him to be US Attorney General. But then a House ethics report found credible evidence that he’d paid a 17-year-old for sex and abused illegal drugs while in office, which even among the Trump-loving GOP lawmakers, was a bridge too far. Trump dumped him.
Gaetz has since been reduced to hawking ivermectin on OANN, but he was clearly the model for Fever Beach’s Clure Boyette. A nepo-baby Florida congressman with a drug habit, Boyette has a fondness for underage escorts, and teeth that “looked like dentures for a Clydesdale.” His solidly red constituents are growing weary of him, so he hatches an outlandish reelection scheme that involves an assist from the Strokerz for Liberty, a white supremacist group founded as a competitor to the Proud Boys.
“The Strokers, we ain’t like the Proud Boys. You can jerk off all you want at home,” Stroker founder Dale Figgo promises a new recruit, referencing a real-life Proud Boys membership rule restricting self-gratification. (Hiaasen had to put a note in the book indicating that he did not, in fact, make this up.)
This “truth is stranger than fiction” detail left me wondering whether MAGA world might have bested Hiaasen. After I finished Fever Beach, I was curious about how he managed still to find satire in the age of Trump, so I called him up. He gracefully fielded all my questions, including the first burning one: “Have you heard from Matt Gaetz?” He had not. “I don’t know that Matt’s much of a reader,” he suggested.
“At some point these headlines drop and your heart sinks, not just for the country, for the state of Florida, but for the craft of satire. How do you get ahead of it?”
He confirmed that current events had made his job much more challenging. He pointed to Moms for Liberty, the book-banning group founded in Florida. “How do you improve on the facts that the Moms for Liberty were involved in a big sex scandal in Sarasota—threesomes!— involving the head of the Republican Party in the state of Florida?” he said in amazement. “At some point these headlines drop and your heart sinks, not just for the country, for the state of Florida, but for the craft of satire. How do you get ahead of it?”
He gave it a shot. In Fever Beach, the moms become “Wives Against Filth.” Much of the inspiration for Fever Beach, however, came from the January 6th assault on the US Capitol. Hiaasen said he couldn’t shake the idea that several people who broke into the Capitol decided when they got inside to “just take a shit.”
“I mean, that’s the most creative thing they could come up with?” he marveled. “I’m going to make a political statement by taking a shit in the Capitol?”
The episode left him curious about who those people were, and what their lives were like. That’s how he got into the character of Dale Figgo, who had been at the Capitol but, Hiaasen says, “shit on the wrong statue.” His defilement of the statue of a Confederate war veteran and rabid secessionist gets Dale kicked out of the Proud Boys and prompts him to start his own group.
While most of Hiaasen’s work has centered on Florida, it was probably inevitable that he would have to tackle the Trump administration, if only because so many people in the administration now hail from Florida. “We have a bottomless pool of mediocre public figures that we can keep supplying the Trump administration with,” Hiaasen says. On book tour, he says, he has tried to apologize for former Florida attorney general and now US Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “I wish they were just characters in a novel,” he says, “but they’re actually real.”
Rubio, the Cuban-American former Florida senator who once espoused a George W. Bush-inflected “compassionate conservatism,” really gets under the writer’s skin. “To see the transformation of Marco Rubio,” he marvels. “I mean, his testicles are in a jar on Donald Trump’s desk. To see him now leaning on Ukraine when the whole Cuban immigrant experience was precipitated by Fidel Castro’s alliance with Moscow. Just how much of a wimp do you have to be to work for Donald Trump?”
In 2018, Hiaasen’s brother was murdered in a mass shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, along with four of his colleagues. A former Baltimore Sun reporter, Rob Hiaasen was working as an editor at the Gazette at the time of his death. Hiaasen was devastated. He told me that after the shooting, he took a few months off from his Herald column, which he’d never done before, as he wrestled with the grief.
“He was a much different kind of writer than I was,” Hiaasen said of his brother. “He was, gentle, funny. He didn’t have the sharp edges that I had. He was really so good at what he did.” Eventually, he went back to work, concluding that Rob “would have been really pissed off if I had stopped writing,” he told me. “He would have wanted me to not only keep writing but keep writing the kind of stuff I did.”
Squeeze Me, Hiaasen’s first book after the shooting, came out in 2020 during the pandemic. It marked the first time President Trump, his tanning bed, and the Mar-a-Lago crowd came in for the Hiaasen treatment. (Skink returns with a cameo.) While I might have been projecting, I thought it wasn’t quite as funny as his previous books and wondered if his brother’s death might have been responsible. But Hiaasen—who hopes I’m wrong about the quality of the humor—says it was not just grief, but the state of the country that has made his work harder.
He fully recognizes that the same politics he lampoons often harms real people. He has to ration his news diet “because it can weigh you down to the point where you can’t squeeze out a sentence that is even mildly funny.” Much of his writing, he says, is “obviously me trying to cope in my own way. I’ve been lucky that so many people seem to get it, and judging from their reactions, it gives them some relief in times like these.”
Hiaasen came out of journalism school in the middle of the Watergate scandals. “The Vietnam war was still dragging on. We thought democracy was over,” he told me. That experience gives him some perspective on the current state of affairs. “I think you always want to cling to some hope that there are some good people out there who are going to rise up and stop this.”
Democrats, he said, will probably not save democracy from Trump. He recently told a friend, “This country can’t afford to sit around and wait for the Democrats to get their shit together. It’s going to be sensible, moderate, brave Republicans who stand up, just as they did during Watergate, and say, enough is enough.” In the meantime, he’ll keep working, and it’s hard to imagine that Alligator Alcatraz won’t appear in a future Carl Hiaasen novel.
