How the Portland Frog Used the Genius of Intentional Mockery to Disarm the White House
Portland, Oregon is a lovely city three hours of south of where I live. Unfortunately, I haven't visited Portland enough. That's entirely on me. But thanks to IFC's Portlandia helmed by indefatigable duo Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, we all feel a certain kinship with this quirky, strange northwest city. Whether the satire hit the mark or was eye-rolling is left to Portlanders to debate. But the overall image of a livable, vibrant green metropolis full of laissez-faire folks made an indelible cultural impression last year. Still to this day I will watch a marathon of episodes on a Saturday afternoon.
My wonderment with Portland predates even this time. As a lifelong Season 3-10 Simpsons fanatic, the city resides deep in my soul given that the names of key characters derive from Portland streets of Matt Groening's youth. You mean there is a "Terwilliger" street? Can't be, I thought as a child. So knowing that Portland is part of this mythology has always made me love the city from afar.
But, as with everything in our era, there is a lurid, strange extremely online vision of Portland that is spread far and wide across the right-wing media. As you walk its downtown streets, poke your head around farmer's markets, or explore its idyllic pocket bedroom communities like Lake Oswego, you'd be forgiven for having no idea that Portland is an apocalyptic hellscape to a swath of elderly Americans in red states.
Act I: Portland's Very Own Joker Villain, Andy Ngo and The Creation of a Faux Journalist Right-Wing Media Darling
First, let's dive into how Portland became a talisman for right wing anarchy. I wish I could blame a vast right-wing conspiracy. It would at least be interesting. But sadly, it simply took a shameless and irresponsible internet instigator, Andy Ngo, to put Portland in the crosshairs of the current administration. Ngo is a forty-year-old man-child provocateur born in Portland in 1986. He claims to be the editor-at-large for The Post Millennial, some clownish rag based out of Canada. Edward R. Murrow he is not.
But Ngo is clever. He saw a lane in becoming some kind of purported anti-terror expert on "Antifa", a group as real as Bond's SPECTRE. That is to say, not real at all. He even authored a ridiculous book Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. Funny how he doesn't seem to have any issue with the GOP actually attacking the underpinnings of democratic elections by mercilessly waging war on the right to vote. You'll be shocked to the core to learn Ngo's book was published in 2021, to coincide with the election of President Biden.
Ngo is a properly Orwellian figure, who adhering to no journalistic standards or codes of conduct has fashioned himself into an authority figure on the profession. With respect to Nick Shirley's recent gonzo effort to bring chaos to Minnesota, Ngo is defending Shirley and warning of attacks on "journalists." Ngo elevating Shirley to the status of a journalist is a sort of "lift as you climb" into the depths of hell. Ngo's defense of Shirley has been picked up by online polemicists portraying him as some kind of expertise on this "form of journalism."
Ngo's "journalism" was certainly designed to grab the attention of the right wing. This is because he starts from the premise that all roads lead to Antifa and works backwards to connect a series of dots to prove the case. He selectively edits various video posts to portray an image of Portland as a dire landscape full of violence and chaos unleashed by Antifa. One of his rhetorical advantages is that Antifa doesn't exist and it’s always harder to prove a negative. Any person can scrawl Antifa on a wall, and they are suddenly a member of this "terrorist organization" and part of a complex plan to destroy democracy.
Credible rumors have it that these Ngo videos of his adventures around Portland percolate up to President Trump through the various conspiracy sewage overflows that drain into his addled mind. Thus, we are left once more to speculate hopelessly if Trump believes "Portland is on fire" (and therefore isn't lying explicitly), or if he knows that Ngo is part of a constellation of tricksters aligned with spiritually with Roger Stone, James O'Keefe, Laura Loomer and the like.
Ngo's ability to use a relatively unsophisticated low-tech approach to undermining Portland and command attention from the White House, sternly judges the form of the internet we have built in America. With platforms able to skate on any consequences using their Section 230 immunity, algorithms designed to boost and reward rage-bait, and a right-wing media ecosystem prepared to anoint him some kind of Prosecutor-General of Directorate of Portland, Ngo has been able to use his aggressively misleading tactics to harass and pester the people of Portland. Ngo has also been able to persuade gullible Fox viewers that Portland is besieged by Antifa as though it is ISIS in Aleppo.
Ngo has one further tactical advantage that has always aided his efforts. He is relentlessly earnest. It hardly matters whether his self-seriousness stems from a true belief that the ends justify the means, or he simply views trouble-making as a serious and credible vocation. Ngo brings a certain grudging sobriety to his posts that provide a thin veneer of credibility. He is unperturbed and presents himself in a calm fashion for the most part. This surface level decorum has permitted him to claim that he is merely a "journalist" and elevated his profile within the right-wing media ecosystem and become a regular Fox News guest.
Act II: The White House Sets the Table for a Confrontational Face-Off in Portland and the Deployment of the National Guard
Portland is lush and scraggily. When you cross the Willamette River into the city center, it is perched along hillsides. The mighty Columbia River rumbles further away to the northeast outside the city, forming the border with Washington. Ironworks provide a gritty skeleton and a nod to Portland's seafaring past. But sleek buildings abound as well. Portland has a delightful transit system and cozy neighborhoods. The residents love their NBA Trailblazers as well as the Portland Timbers and Thorns professional soccer teams. It's a city of flannel and well-kept beards for men, and eclectic piercings and tattoos and colored hair for all. It's also a city with its windows open. Mount Hood rises majestically on the horizon and every Portlander seems to always be doing something outdoors in all four seasons. Portlandia memorably gently teased the residents by placing the eccentric mythical mayor (Kyle MacLachlan) in a "commuter kayak" in a suit.
Could you imagine a city and a people more at odds visually with the circus tent-suited, khaki wearing, cheesy, fake-gold bedazzled Florida man prowling his golf courses in an oversized white club polo? This is a man who lumbers around sourly and sweat-stained in a black suit and red tie in seemingly every context. Portland is an avatar of everything Trump isn't: free-spirited, creative, feral, athletic and witty.
So on a relatively mild late autumn day in Washington, D.C., Trump gathered together some of the foremost experts on a national security risk of the gravest importance. I am speaking of course about Antifa. The experts were goobers with cell phones. Once again, it bears mentioning that Antifa is a fictional non-organization for which there is no membership or coordinated planning. However, President Trump is not one to let such trivial details derail him from indulging his own fantasia, day-dreaming about criminal anarchy like he's writing fan-fiction for a Charles Bronson's Deathwish Cinematic Universe.
President Trump kicked off his October 8, 2025 remarks at the conference with a rambling aside about his travel schedule to the Middle East before a bizarrely immediate segue into his prepared statement:
"It should be clear to all Americans that we have a serious left wing terror threat in our country. Radicals associated with the domestic terror group Antifa that you've heard a lot about lately, and I've heard a lot about them for ten year, and other far left extremists have been carrying out a campaign of violence against ICE agents and other officials charged with enforcing federal law. In Chicago anarchists have surveilled at least four local ICE facilities and posted diagrams of the buildings online...And in Portland, Oregon, Antifa thugs have repeatedly attacked our officers and laid siege to federal property in an attempt to violently stop the execution of federal law. Everything we're doing is very lawful. What they are doing is not lawful. The epidemic of left-wing violence and Antifa inspired terror has been escalating for nearly a decade."
You get the theme. The timeline here is worth noting. The president sees Antifa as something that has existed "for a decade," which is to say since he descended from the golden escalator at Trump Tower in the summer of 2015. In the second Trump administration, the president has sought to solidify a historical record that conflates all political opposition he has ever faced with an overarching epidemic of "left wing terrorism." In this construct, opposing him at any point since his ascendance as a political figure can only mean you are part of a terrorist movement because he represents the only legitimate ruling authority.
This conference was, in essence, his declaration "L'etat, c'est moi!" (I am the State!) Ngo was present at this meeting for a very specific purpose. He provided Trump the viral video clips to allow him to reverse engineer the conclusive belief that from the time he took office in 2015, he has been engaged in a pitched battle with left-wing radical elements. This is hard to do when the image of the vast majority of protestors in cities are smiling, peaceful families with clever signs. Trump needed what Ngo could provide: the dark guerilla cinematography of strife for a war he desperately declared days earlier.
Ngo loves to insert himself into kinetic situations with his phone. He records in a fashion designed to ramp up the sense of bewildering chaos. He often claims to be a victim of Antifa violence. This raw documentary style footage was highly useful to Trump because he could frame his crackdown on American civil society as a defense of the alleged "journalists" sitting before him. The irony was rich given Trump was frequently the most hostile president to the press since Richard M. Nixon.
At the event, Trump growled in his usual world salad :
"These are agitators and anarchists. And they're paid! These are bad people. These are people who want to destroy our country. We're not going to let it happen!... They have attacked journalists reporting on their crimes. Don't worry you're very safe. I hope that's not going to turn you around. But they have been very threatening to people. We're going to be threatening to them! Far more threatening to them than they ever were with us! That includes people that fund them!"
This gathering took place approximately one month after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a right-wing podcaster and co-founder of the college campus extremist group and conference circuit political event organ Turning Point USA. Trump virtually bubbled with rage. In his mind, therefore, Portland would have to pay a stiff price for its insolence. Ngo gave him the videos of an American ISIS, now he could deploy his troops to crack heads.
A fellow "independent journalist" Nick Sortor decided to up the ante. It wasn't merely that Antifa was conspiring to engage in mayhem in the streets of an American city. Sortor thundered that Antifa was actually working with local governments and law enforcement.
"The fact that we are here today on such short notice shows how serious you guys are taking this issue of trans terrorists and frankly the cities and police departments that are cooperating with Antifa such as Portland! The Portland politicians are literally willing to sacrifice their own citizens just to appease these Antifa terrorists! It's sickening! I've seen it first-hand obviously.
Could anything have made Trump happier than listening to these silly, foolish, dim-witted "journalists" intensifying the lurid story he told by further alleging that Antifa was conspiring with governments and law enforcement to wage "trans terrorism" on innocent Americans?
Act III: Portlanders Use Humor as a Devastating Weapon Against Trump's Budding Fascism
All of this White House pageantry and theatre makes more sense if you look at the timeline of Trump's efforts to escalate his attacks on Portland in particular. Trump initially thought he would be able to use the National Guard as domestic army.
On September 27, about ten days before his Antifa Summit, Trump announced he was going to "protect war ravaged Portland" by activating two hundred National Guard troops. Within twenty-four hours, Portland leaders and Oregon Governor Tina Kotek sued the administration. On October 4, Judge Karen Immergut, a Trump appointee to the federal bench, granted a restraining order blocking the deployment until October 17.
With his way blocked by the Courts, a bored Trump summoned these actual agitators to the White House for a "b*tch session." On October 20, Trump won a limited appeal restoring his right to deploy guard troops. Judge Immergut held a three-day trial to establish the facts from October 29-31 in light of the Court's order. On November 7, armed with additional evidence, she issued an order permanently barring the president from deploying guard troops. Trump, no doubt one of "his judges", a woman no less, thwarted him must have sent plates flying throughout the resident.
Although he appealed to the Ninth Circuit, Trump had lost momentum. Intriguingly, he never successfully deployed the guard to Portland streets. Eventually the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the administration in late December in a parallel case emerging out of Illinois. This effectively tied his hands on any effort to activate the National Guard in the Several States, as he had in the District of Columbia, where he exercised far reaching local power due to its unique legal status.
So that's the end of it right? Wasn't this article supposed to be about the Portland Frog.
When President Trump found himself bogged down with his National Guard deployment, he shifted tactics to relying on federal officers. Spread across various agencies, President Trump could use officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Marshall's Service, the Federal Protective Service, the Customs and Border Patrol, the Bureau of Prisons and the National Park Police to form a sort of low-rent Praetorian Guard, operating on his specific orders. He called on ICE in particular to use immigration sweeps as a jumping off point to engage in widespread enforcement operations against his political opponents, akin to what he had hoped to see from the National Guard.
Trump had made a crafty tactical move. The legal arguments made by Portland and Oregonian officials with respect to the National Guard were far more difficult when aimed at law enforcement units that operated within the Executive Branch. Questions of federalism, i.e. the competitive sovereignty between States and the U.S. government, were not available to opponents of the deployment of these resources. In effect, so long as Trump paid lip service to the remit of the enforcement agency, he had fashioned himself a means of intimidating Blue Cities and Blue States.
The Portland ICE facility is a low-slung block at 4310 South Macadam Avenue. For what it's worth it gets a 2.3-star review on Google. Portlanders decided to target the facility for protests. As Trump began to use ICE round ups to intimidate residents of the city, protestors gathered at the Macadam facility to draw attention to the sweeps and kidnappings by ICE agents. Seth Todd, a mild-mannered local resident took an inspired approach. Todd donned a cheerful green inflatable frog costume which he would use to dance around, sometimes waving signs.
Todd's frog costumes encouraged others to join in. On October 9, one day after Trump's Antifa Summit in Washington, D.C., in which he gathered together his FBI Director, his Director of Homeland Security, the Attorney General for the United States, and the bevy of oddball "independent journalists", the Oregonian newspaper went to the ICE facility and reported "The Portland protest frogs are multiplying." Indeed, on the internet and across social media, bemused Americans were sharing images of people hopping around in costumes with funny signs. This was of course all a bit ridiculous. But it was also a crucial demonstration of a powerful psychological tool to use against a fascistic movement.
Earlier, I noted that Ngo was successful with his journalism because he acted seriously. Here was a Portlander warning the president of the rise of leftist terrorism. Trump built off of Ngo's work and thundered that he was going to get "threatening" with the "anarchists" of Portland. How did they respond? Jumping around in inflatable costumes you might see at a children's birthday party or on Halloween. It did something that is tremendously dangerous to a fascist leader. Seth Todd made President Trump a laughingstock. Here was arguably the most powerful leader on the entire planet engaging in back and forth with people being silly on purpose.
The relationship between humor and fascism is fascinating. The fascist is menacing. Once during the early phase of the Covid pandemic Trump blurted out that he had lowered the reported number of Covid cases. His first-term administration scrambled to clean up his remarks by suggesting that he was telling a mild joke. When Trump was asked about this explanation he snarled from a podium: "I don't kid." This was a rare moment of truth. Trump doesn't tell jokes. Trump deploys ridicule, mockery, and bullying slights to wound opponents and supporters alike. When a fascist says they are "joking" it is only to make their opponent's concerns look delusional and far-fetched. The implication is always you liberals can't take a joke.
But real humor and laughter is a dangerous threat to the fascist, as noted by scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat. It mocks their claims to power, which cannot be challenged. As the Portland Frog demonstrated, it is a simple, low cost, and non-violent way to make a fool of a powerful fascist. Trump recently told theNew York Times that the only thing that can constrain him at this point is "his own morality." This was actually a subversive joke because he knows we know that he has no morals. It was his smarmy way of saying "Nothing can constrain my power." But, if this is so, then why are so many people laughing at you in frog costumes?
Trump's fear of humor is obvious. He obsesses over late night show hosts Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and Seth Myers, providing whiny reviews of their monologues or hosting duties at seemingly strangely late hours of the night. The vibe is an old man alone in a room furiously annotating his TV Guide. Trump worked hard to get CBS leadership to drop Stephen Colbert's Late Show, hoping to do the same to Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Myers. One might wonder why? Sure presidents go on these chat shows from time to time, usually in connection with an election cycle or when they want to bump up sagging poll numbers. But prior to Trump, the idea of a president becoming a fixated TV critic would have come across as appalling.
If you reexamine his assault on humor in light of Trump's budding desire to be an autocrat, then his attacks on humor appear more purposeful, even if soaked in the cheap cologne of desperation. Those who laugh at you feel comfortable and empowered enough to publicly mock you. This insolence cannot stand for a dictator. It is why no one in Russian media makes a joke about Russian Dictator Vladimir Putin. He may chuckle viciously, but you best not. It's also why Chinese Premier Xi Jiping famously ordered Chinese social media sites to ban Winnie-the-Pooh cartoons which he viewed as an intolerable insult. Trump is no different.
As thoroughly mocked as he is by the wider culture, he is also insulated by his inner circle from most of it. The Portland Frog worked a bit of magic. It showed that true courage comes not from violent and accelerationist language, but from the willing to hold up a mirror to the chaotically absurd society Trump presides over. Dictatorships like the one Trump is trying to install here in America must be absurd because Americans are. The idea that a lazy, slovenly libertine like Trump should be regarded as an all-powerful leader with God-like power is farcical on its face. Frogs dancing around made that painfully clear to him.
Trump retreated from Portland with his tail between his legs. Trump warned that dangerous anarchists would meet a grisly fate in the northwest city, but he couldn't make any headway as lawyers, politicians, and every day people came at him from all sides. Trump raged that he was ready to hit hard. Portlanders in costume laughed in his face and danced into the night.