During a cruel presidency where many people are in desperate need of hope, the inflatable frog stepped into the breach. Everyone loves the Portland Frog. The juxtaposition of a frog (and people in other inflatable character costumes) standing up to ICE covered in weapons and armor is absurd, and that’s part of why it’s hitting so hard. But the frog is also a practical piece of passive resistance protest kit in an age of mass surveillance, police brutality, and masked federal agents disappearing people off the streets.
On October 2—just a few minutes shy of 11 PM in Portland, Oregon—a federal agent shot pepper spray into the vent hole of Seth Todd’s inflatable frog costume. Todd was protesting ICE outside of Portland’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office when he said he saw a federal agent shove another protester to the ground. He moved to help and the agent blasted the pepper spray into his vent hole.
Todd was unmoved. “I’ve definitely had spicier tamales,” he told the Oregonian.
“I got maced in the air vent. Essentially, I coughed a little. Noticed a small hint of peppermint and just continued to be in my frog costume for another hour,” Todd told KATU in a different interview. “I’m doing well. I’m doing fine. It wasn’t as bad as it looks, although quite immature and unnecessary and really excessive. But I think I’m doing OK.”
Symbols are important to protests. The frog and other inflatable costumes have caught on, but the best protest symbols also have a practical strength. During anti-authoriatarian protests in Hong Kong from 2014 to 2019, the people in the streets used yellow umbrellas to signal their solidarity. The umbrella doubled as a means of disrupting pepper spray and warding off small thrown objects. It is important to remember that these are inflatable costumes, but, of course, real human protesters are inside the costumes, risking themselves to push back against ICE’s terrorization of our cities.
The symbolic power of the frog costume is great, but it also kept the bulk of the pepper spray out of Todd’s face. Goggles and a gas mask can do a lot, but it’s hard for ICE to hit you in the eyes with spray if they’re not even sure where your face is. Being a frog at a protest also serves a privacy purpose, makes it more difficult for surveillance cameras and facial recognition systems to identify protesters. Police are using AI powered camera systems to identify people who appear at protests and protecting your identity in a crowd is key. Covering your face with sunglasses and a mask can work, but it also makes you look like the faceless law enforcement officers of the other side. Protesters have embraced practical whimsy by becoming frogs, dinosaurs, and Pikachus.
It’s been almost two weeks since a cop pepper sprayed Todd the frog. Typically that kind of viral image fades from public memory as fast as it took root. But not Todd. He’s kept appearing at protests and been at the center of other incredible moments. A photo journalist for Getty captured an image of him squaring off against a line of thuggish federal authorities, also wearing masks. The frog is passive, his hands down at his sides, staring forward into a line of black masked cops. It was another powerful image. People painted it. They’re selling it on T-Shirts.
And that’s the other bit of genius about the inflatable character protesters: The optics.
Others have joined in, showing up to Oregon protests in their own frog costumes or dressed as unicorns, bears, and dinosaurs. They frolic outside of detention centers and show that Trump’s assertion that the city is filled with violent, black clad antifa activists bent on destroying democracy is outlandish.
On October 7, DHS Secretary Krisit Noem visited Portland for a photo-op. She stood on the roof of an ICE facility and, according to right-wing influencer and known plagiarist Benny Johson, she stared down an “army of Antifa.” The crowd was small, a little more than a dozen. Most of them had cameras and might have been onlookers. There was one guy in a chicken costume wearing an American flag like a cape.
As Sarah Jeong explained in The Verge, American politics has collapsed into a war between aura farmers, normal people, and shitposters. “Politics in the second Trump era can be mostly defined as people Posting adversarially in public,” Jeong said. “The politics that get covered in the media are mostly aura farmers fighting other aura farmers — people posturing at each other in an accelerating arms race that inevitably justifies violence. Punching Nazis is aura farming. Military parades are aura farming. Sending in the National Guard is the penultimate exercise in aura farming.”
Next to a frog, the self-seriousness of ICE agents and a military that has been turned into an occupying force against the nation’s own people is shown for what it is: absurd. For people who’ve been pointing out how horrifying and absurd Trump is for a decade, there’s something about the frog among the police that makes people see it. It’s a meme that renders everything about our current political moment down into a single image, a hieroglyph that explains the first year of the second Trump presidency.
Todd the frog is not the first person to go viral while wearing an inflatable costume, he’s not even the first in the United States. Over the summer when protestors in Los Angeles clashed with federal forces, one person showed up in a blue inflatable dinosaur costume. Pikachu is another popular choice. In March, people took to the streets of Turkey to protest the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu. Video of the protests showed a surprisingly nimble Pikachu fleeing Turkish police.
In Chile, a pre-school teacher turned political activist donned an inflatable costume and became Tía Pikachu during protests in 2019. The people elected her as a member of an assembly charged with writing a new constitution and she showed up to the proceeding in costume.
Way back in 2017, during the first “Science March” protest against Trump, there were a handful of inflatable dinosaurs. But that early protest didn’t have the stakes of masked men snatching people off the streets and out of their homes. The early dinosaur protesters didn’t quite endure. Perhaps Portland’s inflatable characters will.