Portland's protest frogs are dead serious about absurdity

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Portland’s protest frogs are dead serious about absurdity
In a battle of optics and performance, Portland is primed to meet the moment

By Andi Zeisler
Senior Writer
Published October 16, 2025 1:30PM (EDT)




(Salon) Down the street from ICE headquarters on the south Portland waterfront, a rainbow of costumes hung on a makeshift rack, a vertical banner with “FREE” in block letters attached. Available inflatables included a couple of sharks, a dinosaur or two, at least one cow and a banana, all ready to be pumped up for the cause. The cause, of course, is nonviolently protesting ICE while providing a maximally absurdist counternarrative to the assertion, first voiced by Donald Trump earlier this month and echoed near-constantly since by his administration and its media loyalists, that Portland is a war-ravaged burning hellhole.

You might have seen still photos and Instagram Reels of these creatures in the weeks since Trump announced that he intended to deploy the National Guard to “take back” the city’s teeming streets: The giant frog staring down a wall of ICE agents, the dinosaurs and raccoons shaking ass at a late-night dance party highlighted on “The Daily Show” last week. Those front-liners are just the start of the candy-colored confrontation ahead: A new crowdfunding initiative that launched last weekend, Operation Inflation, is taking donations to make sure every protester who wants to take part can do so inexpensively and enlargeably. From the outside, it might look like a deeply unserious set of tactics for a moment in which people’s lives are in real danger. But the media context in which that danger unfolds is a false narrative pursued by an authoritarian administration determined to wage war on blue cities. It’s necessary to fight fire with fire — and in this case, that means fighting performance with performance.

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“When you grow up in Portland, you grow up feeling like loud, creative aesthetic expression is how you participate in politics and in things like protest,” says Claire Aubin, a historian of the United States who lectures at Yale and hosts the history podcast This Guy Sucked. “Fighting optics with optics is a longtime protest strategy [here], but the media and even people who know protests often see Portland’s as anomalies.”

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If there were ever a rational way to respond to the president’s nonsensically grandiose fearmongering — “I don’t know what could be worse than Portland. You don’t even have sewers anymore. They don’t even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows” — that time has passed, especially since he’s achieved enough media capture that he’s never pushed to provide specifics for his wild claims. Still, as bizarre as Trump’s whoppers are, he is simply not going to win a war of weirdness in a city where more than a thousand residents braved Sunday’s harsh weather to participate in an Emergency Naked Bike Ride. Portland is by no metric a perfect city, but it’s one whose combination of staunch anti-authoritarianism and literal balls-out commitment to absurdism meets this uniquely chaotic moment. ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/10/16/portlands-protest-frogs-are-dead-serious-about-absurdity/