Portland’s Dancing Protesters Are Showing Us How to Stand Up to Trump
The president wants us to be afraid. These activists are clowning him instead.
A protester in a frog costume stands in front of a line of federal law enforcement officers outside a United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Portland, Oregon, Monday, October 6, 2025.
(Stephen Lam / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)Donald Trump wants the world to think that Portland is a veritable hell-on-earth—so scary and out of control that the National Guard needs to step in and bring peace.
On Wednesday, Trump told reporters, “The amazing thing is, you look at Portland and you see fires all over the place. You see fights, and I mean just violence. It’s just so crazy.” The president went on to compare Portland to a postapocalyptic movie that features “bombed out cities.” He added, “I don’t know what could be worse than Portland. You don’t even have sewers anymore. They don’t even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows. But most of the retailers have left.”
Needless to say, these are all ridiculous lies. The thankless task of correcting Trump has been left to journalists, local officials in Oregon, and even a Trump-appointed federal judge. But many residents in Portland have taken a more creative approach to combating Trump’s dishonesty.
Trump is a sinister buffoon, a menacing clown. His prevarications about Portland are motivated by political malice but also show his characteristic detachment from reality. Perhaps deciding that it’s best to fight fire with fire, Portlanders have deployed a more joyful form of protest: wearing animal costumes while dancing in the streets in front of Trump’s heavily armed ICE troops. The protests have the dual effect of refuting Trump’s fearmongering while also showing that no one is intimidated by him. They are a way of countering Trump’s nasty clowning with giddy clowning.
Both responses —fact-checking and satire—are necessary. The fact-checking won’t convince any MAGA cultist, but it’s still important, in the face of authoritarian deception, to keep as close a record of history as possible. On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that documents from the Federal Protective Services, the agency that monitors the safety of government buildings, showed that Trump’s core claims about Portland were untrue. According to these documents, in the two days before September 27, when Trump described Portland as “war ravaged,” the Federal Protective Services characterized protests as “low energy.” Far from being an apocalyptic hellscape, police reports described the protests outside of an ICE building as “uneventful.”
According to the Times, “Internal reports from the week before Mr. Trump ordered troops into Portland show that, by and large, the officers observed displays of civil disobedience, including protesters standing in front of vehicles on the road, playing loud music and ‘flipping a bird,’ and an older woman using chalk to write on a wall.”
Loud music, graffiti written with chalk, and a bird flip are hardly grounds for sending in the military.
Local officials have rightly called out Trump’s fabulations. On Wednesday, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson said, “Portland continues to manage public safety professionally and responsibly, irrespective of the claims of out-of-state social media influencers.” Oregon Governor Tina Kotek said she supported Wilson’s efforts to “to hold the line in response to the Trump administration’s lies and aggressive tactics.” Last Saturday, US District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, blocked his deployment of National Guard troops to Portland and declared that the president’s comments about the city were “untethered to the facts.”
But the political battle against Trump’s authoritarianism won’t be won with fact-checking. Trump and his minions are well practiced in the art of replying to facts with more lies. Right on cue, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that Wilson and Kotek were “covering up the terrorism that is hitting their streets.”
Trump’s lies are a political problem and require a political response. Only a popular mobilization will give Trump and his allies pause and facilitate the formation of a political majority that can defeat his politics.
Fortunately, on the streets of Portland, we’re seeing a very successful mobilization that is using satire to mock Trump’s fearmongering deceptions.
On Thursday, HuffPost reported,
For the past couple of days, social media platforms have featured a steady trickle of videos and images of protesters in Portland, Oregon, who are rallying against President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown through the peaceful and playful tactic of wearing inflatable animal costumes and dancing to music in the streets….
“Let’s check in on the war zone in Portland,” one post on X reads alongside a heavily shared video of a dinosaur, unicorn, raccoon and bear dancing to Farruko’s hit “Pepas.”…
Courtney Vaughn, an editor at the Portland Mercury, also posted similar videos to Bluesky Tuesday, which feature the unicorn, bear and raccoon dancing together to another song.
“Streets are still closed off in front of the Portland ICE facility at 8:30pm,” Vaughn captioned her video. “Protesters have gathered on a side street. Dance party in progress.”
Popular
“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →Another much-shared TikTok video showed a person in a plastic frog outfit in a seeming staring contest with the police.
These silly costumes have a serious intent. Trump has painted a terrifying picture of Portland. The boisterous party in the street shows how false his claims are. On an emotional level, they counter Trump’s grimness and cultural despair. They refuse to let Trump set the mood for their lives.
With Trump threatening to unleash the “Full Force” of the military on Portland, the very act of putting on a silly costume and dancing in the street sends a powerful message of defiance. Trump’s project is to use fear to squash his political foes. Portland is showing the way to organize against Trump is to live openly and daringly without fear.
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