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Lemon. Wet. Good.

An introduction to SWAMP

Author

Chris Sick
29 Sep

Politics, however broadly or narrowly you want to use the term, is guaranteed to break your heart, but long before then it will always break your brain. The tragedies, inequities, and horrors of modernity are all enabled through the mechanisms of power and public approval that people mostly lump together as politics. But they arrive there by way of absurdity.

This is the driving hope of SWAMP, that it can serve as a vicious reminder to everyone who never had or has intentionally forgotten their memories of the years of the Trump White House. That the thuggery, fascism, corruption, and bloodlust were all terrifying, unmooring, and frightening;, but the route through which they arrived there was ridiculous and farcical in the extreme. Politics will break your heart, and the politics-as-practiced by the current gang of nascent fascists could even kill you wherever it finds you. But, first and foremost, it is absurd, idiotic, ridiculous, and comical in the darkest way.

During the writing of these pages a lot of the on-the-ground political situation has changed. So much so that, more than once, I found myself frantically texting those brave, early readers of my drafts, asking if Harris’ nomination and subsequent strategy of calling Trump, Vance, and the Right weird had managed to obviate the entire point of this story. Two long months that felt like so many decades to weary through later, it is clear that it had not.

It cannot be said enough how dangerous the broad, fascistic Right in this country is, but also how completely inept, clumsy, and stupid these fucking morons are. For every terrifying dystopia the Trump campaign promises, either on the stump or in documents like Project 2025, there’s a corollary moment of them metaphorically slamming their collective dicks into a car door. Just this week saw the release of the “Vance Dossier,”1 the 271-page oppo research doc prepared on Vance for the campaign during his vetting for the VP nomination.

This is one of those feature-not-a-bug situations; these people are intellectually crippled by the same sort of lacuna that infects their morality, personal style, and campaign strategy. The red flags that the Vance Dossier should’ve picked up on–that this dude cannot stop himself from spouting off some dumb, weird shit about cat ladies or white babies whenever someone puts a microphone in front of him–are broadly shared by the people vetting him. The bizarre tendency to fixate on white birth rates doesn’t seem like much of a dealbreaker to a campaign itself steeped in conspiratorial, white supremacist fears of their own irrelevancy.

None of which means Trump, Vance, their campaign, or the broader movement they represent aren’t dangerous. Just because they’re stupid doesn’t mean they couldn’t be terrifyingly destructive with the frankly awesome power of the federal government in their hands. Veterans and hack insiders of the first Trump administration are still dining out and cashing in on stories of Trump ordering troops to fire on protestors2 or hastily withdraw from operations globally3 , only to be stymied by either his or his advisors’ sheer incompetence. That and his own apparent lack of object permanence averted bloody tragedies at unimaginable scale.

In those long dark years between then and now I and many of my friends felt like cut-rate Cassandras. As Biden floundered and flailed, consistently trailing Trump in polls, we screamed warnings about the dark fascist future coming for us until partners, friends, family, and random strangers would politely, but firmly, insist on changing the subject. You know. At the very least.

If, after the shift in political dynamics and the resurgent possibility of defeating the fascist movement so thoroughly they might retreat from the scene for at least a few years, there remained a point to all this, it was to remind people that none of this was particularly new. Which brings us to my three favorite words in American political history–Lemon. Wet. Good.

Before his rebranding as one of the last Sane & Good Men in the GOP during the age of Trump, Mitt Romney was mostly just another plutocratic also-ran, unable to understand why his platform of destroying society in favor of tax breaks for people in his bracket failed to translate to an electoral win. Romney, circa 2012, was everything wrong with the Republican Party in the 21st century–painfully pasty white, incredibly privileged, and hopelessly out of touch.

In his effort to unseat Obama from the Presidency he blundered from one stupid news cycle to the next, having “officially” “reset” his campaign three times before October of that year. He had “binders full of women”4 to staff his hypothetical White House and left the family dog caged on the roof of his car for something like a five hundred mile road trip5 . Most famously, he told a room full of wealthy donors that he would have to write off almost half the electorate as impossible to win over because they were too poor to pay taxes6 .

But whatever else you could say about him–and believe me, I have some fucking notes–Mitt Romney is not an especially dumb man. He parlayed his father’s name recognition and family connections into a Harvard MBA, a fortune over a hundred million dollars, and the Massachusetts governor’s office. So when I tell you that politics will break your brain, imagine Mitt Romney, sweating in the sun, working a campaign event in the dog days of summer 2012, handed a cup of lemonade by a friendly supporter and asked if it was good by a reporter and responding, simply, “Lemon. Wet. Good.”7

The politics of Mitt Romney, however well he played the stock character of the Respectable Republican, were not that noticeably different from Trump’s, or the current party’s. They were slightly more coherent, and avoided some of the dick-car-door-slamming of Trump’s GOP simply because he lacked the same degree of self-destructive commitment to white supremacy. Romney was more a “don’t-fuck-with-the-money” kinda politician than modern Republicans, though I’m not sure that we can qualify restraint in defense of avarice as a virtue, even if moderating racial animus in pragmatic pursuit of votes isn’t exactly a vice.

That a Romney presidency would’ve simply been a slightly friendlier, less pugilistic, moderately more intelligible vehicle for all the draconian policy wet dreams of Project 2025 and Trump’s own Agenda 47, I want you to realize how many “Lemon. Wet. Good.” absurdities would’ve preceded those atrocities. If this novel I’m writing, in real time, weaving in every breaking news headline and bizarre twist and turn, dwells anywhere, it’s in that space. 

Between the breaths of the dark laughter that staves off the tears. Thanks for reading.