The frog uprising didn’t start as a movement; it started as a dare. Portland—bless that municipal id—has always had a soft spot for protest absurdism and emergency nudity, and somebody there looked at the calendar, saw No Kings Day coming, and said: “What if we upgrade the clowning?” First came one inflatable frog outside a federal facade—a big smiling amphibian doing slow-motion ballet to a Bluetooth speaker. Then came two frogs, then five. A drumline materialized because Portland is genetically incapable of witnessing whimsy without syncopation. A street preacher tried to yell that frogs were a plague from Exodus. The frogs bowed as if accepting an Oscar. The internet fainted with joy.
As the week progressed, the frogs began to multiply across the country. Seattle frogs in beanies croaking labor songs. Chicago frogs circling the Bean like a reflective lily pad. Dallas frogs in pearl-snap shirts doing line dances around a courthouse. Miami frogs in sunglasses distributing sunscreen and habeas corpus. Minneapolis frogs handing pocket Constitutions to cops who didn’t know whether to arrest them or offer a fist-bump. If your city had pavement, it had frogs.
Mike Johnson didn’t take notice. He was thoroughly distracted by the Grindr rumor he pretended not to hear, the digital mosquito whining by his ear all week. Every push notification made his eyelid jitter like a lie detector needle. Staffers learned to silence their phones under their thighs, like teenagers in algebra. He took to calling the rumor “the App” the way exorcists say “the thing.” He’d say: “We will not dignify the App,” and then spend four hours dignifying it to anyone who’d listen.
By Thursday, you could feel his nerves shedding their skin. He’d face the cameras with that Sunday-school serenity and then, off-mic, mutter, “This is what happens when people doubt covenants.”
Saturday dawned like a brand-new meme. The National Mall was already hopping by breakfast—literal hopping—riverbanks of amphibians stretched from the Capitol to the Lincoln, bellies inflating and deflating in contemplative rhythm like a nation relearning how to breathe. The No Kings Day banner climbed the scaffolds. A brass band tuned up on “This Land Is Your Land” because irony loves a standard. Families arrived with coolers; veterans arrived with posture; teachers arrived with the patient eyes of people who can find a bathroom in any public building.
The motorcade glided in. Black SUVs winked sunlight like beetles with badges. The frogs turned in unison and performed a courtly bow. I swear one of them produced a paper fan and fluttered it toward the Presidential seal on an aide’s portfolio. It was a theater of gentle disrespect, an amphibian ballet of we see you.
Mikey stepped out as if auditioning for Captain Morality at the state fair—navy suit assembled with missionary torque, tie cinched like a covenant, Bible tucked beneath his arm like an arrest warrant. He didn’t see the band first or the banner or the veterans. He saw phones—the lit rectangles of a million tiny confessionals—and their glow painted his cheeks the exact color of denial.
“Sir, water?” an aide whispered.
“Hydration is how they get you,” he said, and I wrote the line down because journalism is sometimes just stenography for future punch lines.
He mounted the steps. The frogs arranged themselves in an amphitheater smile. The Grindr rumor did a lap around the world and came back giggling. A child on her father’s shoulders asked, “Is that the sulky man?” and history flexed its knuckles.
Mikey set his pages on the lectern with care and attempted to clear his throat. He breathed the way actors breathe before pretending to be kings. The first sentence nocked itself on the bowstring of his mouth.
The first bead of sweat declared independence.
It rolled from hairline to eyebrow like a surveyor, charting the border between faith and combustion. His complexion, long accustomed to righteous pink, darkened. Red isn’t the right word. This was a bloom—a time-lapse of shame flowering. The frogs sensed weather. Their chests inflated with a soft, ceremonial whuff. Somewhere a trombone found a subwoofer’s note.
“This is—” he began, voice the exact pitch of an over-tight drumhead.
“—a HATE-AMERICA rally. I’m usually a patient guy, but I’ve had it with you people. Enough is enough.”
The microphones squealed like they’d just seen his internet search history.
Mikey’s collar tightened. His index finger tugged at the top button—pop—and the button flew across the Reflecting Pool like a piece of shrapnel. His tie slipped to a rakish angle. His glasses, fogged by conviction, spidered a crack right across the lens—an elegant diagonal through the part of reality he’d sworn to police. His hair, abandoned by product, made a small but consequential break for liberty.
He pushed his notes away; they stuck to his palm—sweat adhesive, the stickiest truth. He looked down, blinked, and in that blink the metamorphosis decided it was done with foreplay. From the podium down, his pants appeared to be gathering moisture followed by liquid choosing his left pant leg for its stream-of-consciousness debut, like a special effect the studio hadn’t cleared. The crowd gasped in a single inhale; the frogs bowed as if the curtain had risen.
“YOU DON’T GET TO LAUGH AT ME!” he roared, which is the same as handing the universe a laugh track with your name on it.
The red went brighter—neon cherry, siren syrup, the color of “I told you not to.” A voice in the crowd shouted, “Check your DMs, Mikey!” Another voice—sunburned Midwestern, the timbre of municipal decency—added, “Release the Epstein Files while you’re at it!” The band found its groove. The frogs croaked in phalanx, ten thousand ridiculous throats pulsing like an amphibian stadium wave, and that was the cue for the last prop to abandon him. His left shoe—perhaps tired of authoritarianism and the stench of urine—slipped his foot and cannonballed into the Reflecting Pool with a plop so perfect it should’ve been scored for timpani.
Memes were born live, in the wild, without a NICU. THE INCREDIBLE SULK hit number one before the shoe reached the bottom. ONE SHOE TO RULE THEM ALL hit number two, and a wizard somewhere edited a staff into his hand. A remix artist trapped his “HATE–AMERICA RALLY!” scream inside a dance track that made strangers grind happily in front of the Smithsonian. A street vendor produced boxes labeled AUTHENTIC SULK LEFT SHOE (SOUVENIR EDITION) and sold out before the second chorus.
Mikey lunged at the podium like it had insulted his ancestors. The podium scooted back an inch—fight-or-flight in furniture form. He tried to raise scripture and found gibberish; tried to summon thunder and found frogs. He stared at the amphibian line and saw not costumes, not citizens, not jokes—us. That was the wound. Kings can live with hatred; they cannot survive laughter.
Behind me, a teenager with WE THE PEOPLE painted across their cheeks whispered to nobody, “He’s sulking out,” and the title glued itself to the day.
He flung one final sentence at the sky—something about kingdoms and yokes and the wickedness of water bottles—and the sky, bored of poor metaphors, threw a breeze that flipped his notes like birds.
Then he made the most human sound a powerful man can make in public: the small noise of someone realizing the internet will never let him die. He backed away from the lectern, red aura cooling to merely furious. He turned, hair off-leash, glasses cracked in an X across his certainty, tie a question mark. The frogs parted like a polite velvet rope. He descended the steps with one shoe and half a plan.
By sundown the country was light-headed from oxygen and laughter. The frogs, their work complete, deflated themselves with the satisfied sigh of big balloons after a parade. Kids rolled across vinyl bellies. Veterans traded phone numbers with teachers. Someone kissed someone next to the statue of a man who once believed we could be decent. The brass band slid into a gospel version of “No Kings” that would’ve made a bishop twerk. For a minute, the Mall felt like the world we keep promising each other and then forgetting to build.
Inside, alone, Mikey stared at his cracked glasses on a desk that had seen better monologues. His aides had scattered to draft statements about patriotic fervor and dangerous costumes. The phone pinged again—the App blipping its Morse code of madness—and he shut his eyes as if he could power down the century by will.
He tried a prayer. It came out as a complaint. He tried a complaint. It came out as a joke. “Forgive them,” he said to the dark window, “they know exactly what they meme.”
Outside, the Reflecting Pool kept its secrets, which now included a left shoe and the last, wet inch of his authority. The No Kings banner fluttered in the kind of wind that tidies up after history. Somewhere, because Portland will never pass a chance, another pop-up Emergency Naked Bike Ride circled the block in jubilant, chilly defiance, bells ringing like little secular hosannas. A frog saluted them with a flipper.
I walked away with a press badge, a notebook full of amphibian scripture, and the warm suspicion that the country had discovered a weapon older than outrage: ridicule with manners. Not cruelty. Not shaming the powerless. Just frog-suit truth delivered with the relentless patience of a joke that refuses to blink.
The Incredible Sulk will wake up tomorrow pink again, chastened and blaming the weather. He will deny, he will double, he will make the App your fault and mine. He will comb the hair back into jurisdiction. The rumor will laze on a windowsill like a cat. The frogs will nap in garages and closets, waiting for the next call.
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This post has been syndicated from Closer to the Edge, where it was published under this address.