The Trumpster, the US President and resident of the White House, has stated on many occasions that he is going to ‘drain the swamp that is Washington’. In school-book mythology Washington and the White House were built literally in a swamp. Wetlands, such as swamps, are unhomely homely, or uncanny, places involving the return of, and to, the repressed. The uncanny as developed by Sigmund Freud in his famous essay of 1919 is the unhomely and homely that is both frightening and fascinating at the same time.

In Trumpster mythology, Washington is metaphorically a swamp—whatever that means. Getting in the way of a good metaphor is not something the Trumpster does. Whenever he uses it at his supporter rallies he gets a big cheer. It seems to press the right buttons with his supporters. Tropes such as this one are the dreams of speech in which the repressed, such as the swamp, returns. Such tropes are placist and exercise placial discrimination of one privileged place against another denigrated (literally ‘blackened’) place. In this case they ascribe pejorative qualities associated with the swamp (darkness, disease, monsters), a natural place created by ancestral beings, to a city, a cultural place built by modern human hands.