When Donald Trump’s administration issued orders to send the National Guard into Portland, Oregon, a person in a frog balloon suit showed up at the city’s ICE facility, where protesters had gathered. After the frog humped the air in front of a throng of federal law enforcement — many dressed in head-to-toe camo with military-grade helmets, gas masks, and riot shields — the feds slowly began to retreat. What else could they do? A soldier knows what to do when they encounter another soldier. But an air-humping frog?
As of writing, this video has over a million views on TikTok and has been reposted and repackaged on that and other platforms. The Frog is ludicrous. The Frog makes no sense. The Frog is a viral symbol of resistance against the Trump regime, and the key to understanding what has happened to discourse in the second Trump presidency.
The first Trump presidency involved Trump tweeting insane things and the White House desperately trying to act normal in the aftermath. (Toward the end, the White House stopped holding press conferences entirely.) But this second administration, and the new GOP, has leaned into Trump’s vibe, resulting in chaotic, incoherent, and abnormal political discourse.
The Trump regime and its closest allies oscillate furiously between making Alligator Alcatraz memes and calling for violence against the shadowy forces of antifa domestic terrorism. It’s not just Republicans doing this back and forth — California governor and aspiring podcaster Gavin Newsom, too, swaps between grandstanding and attempting to Trump-post.
Even when individual speakers are not engaged in this dizzying, constant tone shift, all of American discourse is swamped with a feverish mix of Churchillian sermons and intentional inanity.
By intentional inanity, I don’t mean satire. Satire turns meaning on its head — even when it is absurd, it has a reference point and a message. Pokémon deportation memes are neither a satire of Pokémon or immigration policy. Neither is the Frog a satire of anything in particular. The Frog is not like Saturday Night Live from 2017–2020. The Frog is meaningless. If the Frog showed up at a grocery store in another era, the reaction he would elicit would be puzzled looks and possibly someone trying to escort him out of the produce section.
But the Frog in its context is powerful.
“I am concerned with what is happening in my community and with what the Trump administration is enabling these ICE agents, these DHS agents, these federal agents to do to my community members day in and day out,” said the Frog in an interview on local TV channel KATU. “I don’t want to see anybody treated inhumanely.” They then called the DHS “immature” for ineffectually pepper spraying the vent of their suit.
Although the Frog seems to be in earnest, the effect of this interview is ridiculous. A serious television reporter is holding up a microphone to a big smiley cartoon balloon frog person with googly eyes. The effect is even more pronounced when you hear the Frog’s slightly squeaky voice. It is one of the most incredible rejoinders to the militarized repression of the Trump regime, and should be understood as the peak representation of how political speech in America operates today.
In short, politics boils down to three modes. There are still people behaving normally — or rather, attempting to behave normally as the weirdness of the world accelerates around them. But most politics is now split between two internet-poisoned types of behavior: aura farming and shitposting.
Aura farming is an earnest attempt to look cool. Vice President JD Vance was aura farming when he declared he would take vengeance for Charlie Kirk. Trump was aura farming when he threatened to jail Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Pritzker was aura farming when he responded with “Come and get me.” And Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was aura farming when she paraded on the roof of Portland’s ICE facility in supposed defiance of antifa.
Unfortunately for Noem, she was posturing at a guy in a chicken suit. A shitposter.
Shitposting is incoherence in the form of humor, a sort of nihilism that refuses to engage with meaning, words, or reality. Shitposting is a mockery of seriousness, but because it is so incoherent, it has little to no effect on normal people behaving normally. Imagine if a guy in a chicken suit showed up to protest Chuck Schumer giving a speech about inflation. It simply would not be the same thing.
But shitposting will always beat aura farming. That’s the upshot of the White House’s ASMR deportation videos — they are shitposts aimed at #Resistance aura farming. They make no sense and have no inherent politics other than meaningless cruelty. There is no call to action, no attempt to persuade, no message to be heard. It’s just a shitpost.
The Frog might, as a person, have a message to convey, but the Frog’s costume has no meaning, either. It is the juxtaposition against an increasingly militarized ICE that makes its big googly eyes so powerful.
You might think of the dynamic here as something like rock-paper-scissors (or, if you’re a dork, like the sword-axe-lance triangle of the Fire Emblem series).
Politics in the second Trump era can be mostly defined as people Posting adversarially in public. 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.
The aura farmers have tremendous sway over the populace — that is, over normal people acting normal. But they are by nature very vulnerable to shitposters. Meanwhile, shitposting has little efficacy when deployed against normal people behaving normally.
A normal-versus-normal matchup is what politics used to be — persuasion, messaging, negotiation, compromise. Behaving this way will lose against someone donning body armor while calling you an antifa domestic terrorist MS-13 gang member. And the guy in the body armor will always lose to the guy in the inflatable frog suit.
Aura FarmingShitpostingActing NormalAura FarmingStronger aura farmer winsShitposter winsAura farmer winsShitpostingShitposter winsSociety losesActing normal winsActing NormalAura farmer winsActing normal winsWe live in a societyThe Frog is the best thing to happen to American politics all year, but the fact that politics has devolved into Posting is ultimately a bad thing. As you can see in the grid of outcomes, the majority of the time, people are simply posting at each other instead of engaging with reality or solving collective action problems. The question of who wins or who loses in Triangle Posting Politics is divorced from material conditions, justice, or the common good.
For any other increasingly authoritarian state, I would assume that the politics of Posting would eventually collapse under the weight of all that militarization — you can’t keep Posting Through It when there’s no internet and memes are illegal.
But this second Trump presidency is so intertwined with and so dependent on internet poisoning that it’s impossible to predict what happens next. All we know is that the Trump regime is incapable of behaving normally. And so long as they keep aura farming, the shitposters will win.
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