Portland Frog: The cultural reinvention of the amphibian, now as a symbol of resistance

When the US president announced he would deploy the National Guard in Portland to suppress protests that were critical of his anti-immigration policy, little could he have anticipated just how creative the resistance would get.

Since September 2025, protestors in the city have resorted to creative ways to express dissent, such as naked bike riding and ‘craftivism’ or knitting and crocheting artwork, living up to the city’s tagline “Portland Keeps It Weird.”

The most prominent presence has been “Toad” or the “Portland Frog”, real name Seth Todd, who dons an inflatable frog costume and has attended protests since June. Federal agents in riot gear pepper-sprayed them through an air intake vent in their costume on October 2. This proved counterproductive and triggered a massive outcry, which resulted in the formation of the self-proclaimed “Portland Frog Brigade”, featuring protesters in inflatable frog costumes, and “Operation Inflation”, encouraging them to don costumes ranging from chickens to unicorns and Tyrannosaurus rexes.

Eventually, Trump’s order was “permanently” blocked by federal courts, and the protests themselves concluded in October. However, the frog itself seems to have evolved into an anti-administration symbol.

The humble frog has been a staple of popular imagination across centuries. Frogs have also been revered as the symbol of fertility and vitality across civilisations, from ancient Egypt to ancient Greece and Rome.

Famed Greek storyteller Aesop featured the amphibian in a number of his fables. The Frog Prince, the famed German short story by the Brothers Grimm about a handsome prince transformed into a frog by an evil witch, has become an integral part of public imagination after several adaptations.

In the modern era, Kermit the Frog — the central character in the Muppets and at one time, a feature on Sesame Street — has been a mainstay of popular culture for over 50 years. He has featured in movies and television shows, has an honorary PhD (in “Amphibious Letters”, a play on Humane Letters) and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

More recently, however, Kermit has been upstaged by the cartoon character, Pepe the Frog. Pepe was created by cartoonist Matt Furie, and was perhaps the original Chill Guy before the animated dog by Philip Banks claimed the mantle. The quirky, apolitical Pepe first appeared in comics in 2005 and was based on Furie’s experiences as a 20-year-old with his friends and roommates.

Over the following decade, Pepe would become associated with the alt-right movement, with internet users reimagining the frog in a variety of scenarios. At its height in 2015-16, Pepe variants featured Nazi symbols and white supremacist imagery. Donald Trump, then on the campaign trail in 2016, reposted a meme featuring Pepe with Trump’s hair and suit.

Pepe also spawned the Groyper movement, in which a cruder variant of the frog was imagined by far-right users of a 4chan message board as a racist, Holocaust-denying character in 2014. Today, Groypers are associated with the likes of Nick Fuentes, a far-right white nationalist who counted among his ideological rivals the deceased conservative influencer, Charlie Kirk.

These developments happened to Furie’s consternation, and he reportedly tried to kill off the character and disavow himself from it. However, Pepe would later be “reclaimed”, featuring prominently as a protest symbol during the 2019 Hong Kong protests, alongside the iconic cartoon character, Winnie the Pooh, and slogans such as “Give me liberty or give me death.”

The frog suits in the 2025 Portland protests and the appearance of Pepe in the 2019 Hong Kong protests herald an increasingly popular trend of weaponising humour and absurdity to respond to perceived excesses. While humour has been deployed in protests since time immemorial, its use as a prop in mainstream culture has only been studied in recent decades. Since the 1990s, “tactical frivolity” has featured in protests worldwide, from the pink and silver costumes worn by anti-globalisation protests in Prague in 2000, to the use of the Jolly Ranger flag from the widely popular anime One Piece during the Nepal Gen Z protests in September 2025.

In an interview with The Marshall Project, performing artist and academic L M Bogad, who has authored a book on the subject, described the phenomenon as a tactic to both make protests accessible to the general public, as well as encouraging self-expression, while highlighting “how ridiculous the overreactions from police forces were in different countries.” He added that this practice dates back to carnival protests in the Middle Ages, with the public employing comedy and satire to make fun of the church or the king.

The use of humorous costumes is also a vital element of the contemporary public imagination, in which the streets become the final setting of a showdown that has already played out on social platforms and television. In an article in The Verge, journalist Sarah Jeong linked this with the larger politics of the Trump era, with marked aggression and adversarial posts against ideological opponents and “aura farming” or cultivating effortless charisma through repeated stylistic actions.

“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,” she wrote.

However, tactical frivolity has a significant role to play in highlighting the absurd, and is especially useful when protesters fear violent retribution, argues Bogad. “Here in the States, these are peaceful social movements, but they’re being portrayed in such a way that is so aggressive and dehumanising, to create a permission structure for violent repression [from the authorities]. It’s a cultural setup from above to make it possible at some point to be super repressive. What do we do on the chessboard, culturally? What’s our countermove?” he said.

The frog costumes and their inflatable peers also offer the protesters the cover of safety, at the very least, making it difficult for federal agents to use tear gas and pepper spray against them.

“I obviously started a movement of people showing up looking ridiculous, which is the exact point,” Seth Todd told The Oregonian, a local newspaper. “To show how the narrative that is being pushed [that] we are violent extremists is completely ridiculous.”