Despite his rococo buffoonery, Donald Trump has been a slippery character for novelists to hit. Writing satire about the self-satirized president so often ends up extruding something intolerably mealy, like twice-ground beef. Even the finest writers — including Booker winners Howard Jacobson and Salman Rushdie – have seen their spears glance off the great whale’s gilded blubber.

“Fever Beach,” By Carl Hiaasen. Knopf. 368 pages. $30 Knopf

Curiously, sillier writers have struck deeper, possibly because they have spent years in the absurdist world that the Very Stable Genius has rendered our reality. In July 2020, Christopher Buckley’s “Make Russia Great Again” offered a pastiche of the first Trump White House. Just a few weeks later, Carl Hiaasen published “Squeeze Me,” a funny takedown of the high-society inanity swirling around Mar-a-Lago. As Washington Post reviewer Richard Lipez noted in his review, Hiaasen’s long career lambasting political corruption and moral grotesquerie means that “the Trump era is truly Carl Hiaasen’s moment.” These days, Je suis Florida.

So who can blame the Sunshine State novelist for continuing to tap that swamp?

But with his new novel, “Fever Beach,” Hiaasen has drifted from the golden toilets of the presidential palace to poke around in the human effluence at the bottom of the MAGA septic tank.

As the story opens, we’re riding along with Dale Figgo, a dim-witted bigot out for a day of antisemitic outreach. When he’s not working at Bottom Drawer Novelties — the local sex-toy warehouse — he’s driving through multimillion-dollar neighborhoods tossing slur-filled screeds out the window of his truck.

A loyal foot soldier in the MAGA movement, Figgo is eager to prove — or re-prove — his value to the cause. He proudly stormed the Capitol back on Jan. 6, 2021, and posted a video of himself smearing feces on a statue of Ulysses S. Grant. Alas, it was actually a statue of the racist hero James Zachariah George. For that infelicity, he was disowned by the Proud Boys; even the Oath Keepers turned him away. And so, desperate to win his way back into the fold, Figgo recently founded his own white-supremacist group named the Strokers for Liberty.

By my tally, there are enough self-pleasuring jokes in this novel to make a 15-year-old boy go blind. And even in the pantheon of Hiaasen’s freakish villains, Figgo stands out as a particularly grotesque pustule on the body politic. Too stupid to correctly spell “Holocaust” and too uncoordinated to draw a swastika, this modern-day Mr. Malaprop nevertheless constantly rails against “the rise of the international Zionist cowbell.”

Figgo is a taxidermic creation so stuffed full of hilarious vulgarities and humiliating terrors that he might at any moment rip open along his seams. Against Hiaasen’s satiric assault, he has neither a clue nor a chance. After a particularly nasty bike accident, doctors reconstruct his nose using skin from his scrotum; the procedure is disturbingly successful. One almost feels sorry for him. After all, as Figgo confesses: “I’m a type 2 diabolic.”

Okay, so “Fever Beach” is as subtle as a falling coconut, but so are the times we live in. With accidental insight, Figgo notes, “This comes down from the president himself.”

The conflict arises when the Strokers for Liberty are secretly hired by an unscrupulous congressman named Clure Boyette, who sounds like a creature spun entirely from Matt Gaetz’s excess hair gel. Boyette wants the Strokers to help him get reelected by intimidating voters, a task for which they’re spectacularly unsuited. (Figgo keeps the details of this scheme vague in case his group has been “infellated.”) But the congressman has other schemes in play, too. One involves his teenage girlfriend, whose photos of him wearing only a dog collar could complicate an election that might flip the House. (His conservative base can forgive the adultery but not mocking a dog.) And then there’s Boyette’s charitable foundation – the Wee Hammers – a scam that enlists grade-school kids to build homes a la Habitat for Humanity.

This being Florida — and a Hiaasen novel — you knew there had to be a crooked real estate deal involved. And that, my friends, is what draws the ire of our hero Twilly Spree, the fabulously rich environmental vigilante whom Hiaasen fans will remember from the 2000 novel “Sick Puppy.” Handsome and unflappable — unless his temper is triggered by some passing litterbug — Twilly becomes the center of a rom-com with a charming “Moonlighting” vibe grafted to the side of this outrageous political satire. While wooing a savvy business manager working for a pair of odious philanthropists, he goes undercover as a member of the Strokers for Liberty. Given Twilly’s towering intelligence and physique, it’s hardly a dangerous assignment to join this “chorus of yammering Nazi fanboys,” but there’s a touch of suspense as he engineers a revenge plot against political corruption, sexual criminality and habitat destruction — a mission that’s utterly ridiculous and deeply satisfying.

Admittedly, “Fever Beach” feels about 100 pages too long — the cardinal flaw in most comic novels. But the real question remains: Is it funny? And in this case, should we be laughing? How many times have we been solemnly admonished to strive toward understanding the culty racists festering on the edge of the Republican Party? Are red-white-and-blue charlatans suitable subjects for comedy in light of our country’s slide toward fascism — the unraveling of environmental protections, the sabotage of science and medicine, the attacks on election integrity, the tirades against immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America?

Yes. Without in any way diminishing the seriousness of the threats we’re facing or the difficulty of restoring moral and political order to the United States, humor remains a powerful weapon to pierce the armor of tyrants and raise the spirits of patriots. For all his silliness, Hiaasen is working in a grand tradition that stretches back to Mikhail Bulgakov satirizing Stalinism and Charlie Chaplin mocking Hitler. At his best, he can pack a paragraph with so many little parodic bangs that it feels like a fireworks display, when the explosions come so fast you stop saying “Ahhh” and just stand in slack-jawed bedazzlement.

While white-shoe lawyers, university presidents and media moguls cower before the MAGA assaults on American democracy and decency, this mischievous 72-year-old writer is fighting back with every political gag and sex joke he can get his hands on.