This video, as of now, has garnered over a million views on TikTok and continues to be shared across multiple platforms. The Frog is absurd and incomprehensible, yet it has become a viral emblem of opposition to the Trump administration, capturing the essence of discourse during the second Trump presidency.

The first Trump presidency was marked by Trump’s outrageous tweets with the White House scrambling to maintain a semblance of normalcy. By the end, the White House even ceased holding press conferences. However, in this second term, Trump and the GOP have embraced his unpredictable style, leading to a disorderly and baffling political conversation.

The Trump administration and its key supporters fluctuate wildly between creating Alligator Alcatraz memes and advocating for action against perceived antifa domestic threats. This erratic behavior isn’t exclusive to Republicans. California governor Gavin Newsom also alternates between political grandstanding and mirroring Trump’s online antics.

Even when individuals aren’t partaking in this constant tonal whiplash, the American narrative is engulfed in a chaotic blend of noble speeches and intentional nonsense.

Intentional nonsense differs from satire. While satire flips meanings and delivers messages, nonsensical memes like those of Pokémon deportations or the Frog lack specific reference points or messages. They don’t parody Pokémon or immigration policies. The Frog is unlike the Saturday Night Live skits from 2017–2020. Instead, it’s meaningless. In a different era, a Frog suit appearance in a grocery store would likely result in confused stares and perhaps someone escorting them out of the produce aisle.

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.

The 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.