The aim of the study is to identify the hierarchical organization of the GARBAGE cluster, one of the segments of the metaphorical model of dirt in the political discourse. The article shows that the GARBAGE cluster is singled out on the basis of the feature of cognitive deviation from the norm and includes useless and unnecessary remnants of human life, which, projected onto the sphere of politics, serve for a negative moral and ethical assessment of political actors. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the approach to the study of the metaphorical cognitive segment GARBAGE from the point of view of the conceptual and semantic continuity of the metaphor “politics is dirt”. As a result, a synonymic-gradual group of lexemes has been identified and characterized, which verbalizes the nuclear cognitive meanings of the concept GARBAGE; lexical representatives of specific varieties of garbage have been determined, their axiological potential has been described.