When the administration of Donald Trump authorized the deployment of the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, an incident unfolded that encapsulated the bizarre intersection between protest, spectacle, and modern political expression. At the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility—already a focal point for demonstrators—a figure in an enormous inflatable frog suit suddenly appeared. The absurd sight of a bulbous amphibian balloon gleefully performing suggestive thrusts before a line of heavily armed federal agents—men and women encased in camouflage uniforms, military-grade helmets, respirators, and transparent riot shields—turned the confrontation into something surreal. Stunned, the officers began to retreat, uncertain how to respond. Military training conditions soldiers to respond to hostility or strategic resistance, but what manual could possibly instruct one to engage with a gyrating frog balloon? The situation defied logic itself, and its ridiculousness became its power.
The resulting video spread across digital platforms with unparalleled velocity, surpassing a million views on TikTok alone before being remixed, reposted, and reframed by countless users elsewhere online. The character—dubbed simply “the Frog”—became at once absurd, fascinating, and emblematic. It stood for nothing yet somehow symbolized everything: a chaotic and contradictory icon of defiance against the Trump administration’s authoritarian performance. In its meaningless humor, it captured the incoherence of public discourse during Trump’s second presidency.
Where the first Trump term had been typified by incendiary presidential tweets followed by desperate attempts from a beleaguered White House staff to project normalcy—press briefings tapering into silence as absurdity became routine—the sequel administration fully embraced the aesthetic of chaos. Rather than restraining Trump’s impulses, the second iteration of his regime magnified them, amplifying an ecosystem of provocation and incoherent political theater. The new Republican Party, reimagined in his image, leaned into the carnival-like energies of social media and partisan spectacle, transforming conventional political dialogue into an unpredictable swirl of aggression, absurdity, and irony.
This environment oscillated wildly between two tonal extremes: gleeful meme-making and apocalyptic rhetoric. On one hand, the regime’s online allies generated grotesque images and digital jokes—so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” memes—while, on the other, they issued ominous calls for violent resistance against the supposed infiltrators of “antifa domestic terrorism.” Such inconsistency wasn’t limited to Republicans; even figures such as California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, performed similar tonal flips, vacillating between pompous moral grandstanding and online performance that mimicked Trump’s own gleeful provocations.
In this hall of mirrors, public communication across America seemed infected by a single feverish condition—a hybrid of self-serious oratory and deliberate nonsense. By “intentional inanity,” the phenomenon transcended satire. True satire, after all, always gestures toward meaning, subverting or exaggerating truth to reveal contradictions. The memes invading political space, like those referencing Pokémon deportations, lacked such reference points entirely; they were neither a commentary on the game nor a critique of immigration policy. Likewise, the Frog embodied no articulated ideology. Unlike traditional sketch comedy or televised parody such as *Saturday Night Live* once offered, this new symbol generated power precisely from its emptiness—it was a shapeless provocation, absurd and yet charged by its context. In another age, a frog-costumed performer at a supermarket would have elicited bafflement or removal; in Portland’s militarized protest zone, it became a moment of profound, almost cosmic, dissonance.
When interviewed by local television on KATU, the Frog—speaking through the comically muffled squeak of an air-filled costume—offered sincere words about the moral responsibilities of their community and the abuses sanctioned by federal agents. They condemned inhumane treatment and mocked the Department of Homeland Security for their clumsy attempt to pepper-spray the costume’s air vent, calling the action “immature.” Yet the sight itself—the earnestness of conscience emerging from the mouth of a bulbous inflatable amphibian—rendered the exchange almost unbearably ludicrous. The result was both comic and sublime: an image of a journalist solemnly holding a microphone to a wide-mouthed green caricature, revealing a truth that words alone could not express. The Frog’s unintentionally comic sincerity became perhaps the most perfect rebuke imaginable to the theater of state repression and an uncanny mirror reflecting the deranged state of discourse in twenty-first-century America.
Politics, distilled to its essence, now seems to operate through three primary modes of behavior. First, there remain those attempting, however tenuously, to act “normal”—citizens and officials clinging to the protocols of rational debate even as absurdity swirls around them. The other two modes, born of the internet’s corrosion of discourse, are best described as “aura farming” and “shitposting.” Aura farming refers to the deliberate cultivation of coolness, power, or mythic charisma in the digital arena—an effort to project invulnerability or dominance rather than authenticity. Examples abound: Vice President JD Vance vowing revenge in defense of an ally, Donald Trump threatening to imprison Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, and Pritzker firing back with a taunting “Come and get me.” Even Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s dramatic appearance on the rooftop of Portland’s ICE facility, posturing against imaginary enemies, was an act of self-conscious aura farming. Ironically, her fierce display of political defiance faced not a militant protester but a man dressed in an inflatable chicken suit—a living shitpost.
Shitposting, the counterforce in this strange dualism, is the art of deliberate nonsense. It weaponizes incoherence and absurd humor as a refusal to participate in meaning itself. By defying logic, it undercuts gravitas: you cannot win a debate against that which refuses to speak the language of reason. A person in a chicken costume protesting an inflation speech by Senator Chuck Schumer would not represent a legitimate rebuttal—its power lies precisely in absurdity, not persuasion. Yet within this climate, shitposting consistently triumphs over aura farming, because incoherence collapses the performance of seriousness. The very same principle explains the unsettling spectacle of the White House’s viral “ASMR deportation videos,” which achieved nothing political except for a spectacle of meaningless cruelty—the aesthetic of policy emptied of its purpose. These posts offered no argument, no ideology, and no call to action. Their void was the message.
Similarly, though the person beneath the Frog costume spoke passionately about justice, the costume itself held no inherent meaning. Its resonance came from juxtaposition—the ridiculousness of an enormous, bumbling frog confronting the visual machinery of militarized power. The incoherence made visible the grotesque excess of authority. Politics in today’s America unfolds as a vast, multiplayer game of performance—what one might compare to rock-paper-scissors, or in the lexicon of gaming enthusiasts, the weapon triangle of sword, axe, and lance drawn from the *Fire Emblem* series. Each identity—acting normal, aura farming, and shitposting—defeats or succumbs to the others in predictable ways, a chaotic meta-game played out in public life.
In the second Trump era, most political theater consists of adversarial posting: online declarations, gestures, and stunts waged in public rather than thoughtful governance. Aura farmers constantly clash with one another in an escalating arms race of images and provocations, their mutual competition inevitably justifying more dramatized acts of control or resistance. From “punching Nazis” to organizing military parades or ordering National Guard deployments, these are all iterations of the same symbolic battle for dominance. While aura farmers wield immense influence over those attempting to maintain normalcy, they are vulnerable to shitposters who can annihilate meaning with a single image. By contrast, shitposting has little effect on those few still committed to coherence. A contest between two “normal” actors—the politics of persuasion, compromise, and policy negotiation—is what democracy once recognized as healthy debate. Yet this form collapses instantly when confronted by militarized performativity or nonsense masquerading as critique. Inevitably, the soldier in armor loses to the frog in foam.
The resulting dynamic can be visualized as a triangle of interactions: aura farming overwhelms conventional normalcy; shitposting defeats aura farming; and normalcy, when it exists, sometimes prevails against the meaningless void—though only in theory. This framework reveals a bleak conclusion: society is caught in an endless loop of performative posting, detached from material reality and collective well-being. Political exchange has become a competition of gestures rather than ideas. The so‑called “Triangle of Posting” dictates outcomes based not on justice or truth but on which absurd performance dominates the digital stage.
The Frog, for all its delightful absurdity, stands as a strangely uplifting yet deeply troubling emblem of this state of affairs. It represents the most astonishing act of political theater of the year—an inflatable parody of resistance whose very emptiness carries emotional meaning. And yet, as the triangular schema demonstrates, the system it dramatizes is unsustainable. When civic dialogue reduces itself to memes, costumes, and perpetual reaction, real governance evaporates. Policy becomes impossible; spectacle becomes everything.
In most authoritarian societies, such hollow theater eventually collapses beneath its own militarization—when censorship extinguishes the internet or criminalizes humor, the game ends. America, however, remains an exception. The Trump administration’s second coming is inseparable from the digital networks that birthed it, both dependent on and addicted to their chaos. In an era where the regime cannot behave normally because its identity is built upon constant posting, one outcome seems inevitable: as long as the engines of spectacle keep turning, the shitposters will always, inevitably, have the final word.
Sourse: https://www.theverge.com/policy/798491/frog-portland-trump-national-guard
