Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) new memoir earned a stinging review in The New York Times on Monday.
Jennifer Szalai, the newspaper’s nonfiction book critic, slammed “The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Survival,” released Tuesday, as reading “like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT,” the artificial intelligence chatbot.
“As governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis has been casting himself as a Trump-like pugilist,” Szalai wrote. “But the overall sense you get from reading his new memoir is that of the mechanical try-hard — someone who has expended a lot of effort studying which way the wind is blowing in the Republican Party and is learning how to comport himself accordingly.”
The “culture war Mad Libs can’t distract from the dull coldness at this book’s core,” she added, while the potential 2024 Republican hopeful’s “attempts at soaring rhetoric are mostly too leaden to get off the ground.”
And despite recent attacks from his possible 2024 rival Trump, DeSantis tries “his best to tiptoe around the Trump dragon” in his memoir, said Szalai.
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