On October 13, 2025, during The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, Maddow wasn’t covering Portland — she was covering for it. Instead of reporting on the city’s lawlessness — the vandalism, street blockades, Antifa agitators, fires, graffiti, open drug use, and mobs surrounding an ICE building and harassing federal officers — Maddow turned the chaos into entertainment. She laughed it off, downplayed the damage, and turned serious disorder into comedy. She celebrated protesters dressed as dinosaurs, bananas, and frogs — who blew bubbles in officers’ faces, tied donuts to poles to lure federal agents, and mocked law enforcement — before praising Portland’s naked bike ride as part of what makes the city “wonderful and weird.”
That entire monologue could have been written by the protesters themselves. Maddow turns mobs into heroes, sneers at law enforcement, and calls the breakdown of order “absurdist resistance.”
Maddow said:
“Yes, actually. Haha. Yes. It turns out the American people — at least — are going to complain about it, particularly about the masked secret police force brutalizing people in the streets, part of it, which we are experiencing right now.
The American people are going to complain about that in every way they know how, including while they are dressed in inflatable Tyrannosaurus Rex costumes, and when they are dressed up as frogs and unicorns and axolotls and bananas — so many bananas — and peacocks and pandas and raccoons and spacemen and lobsters and sharks.
We will protest and mock you while dressed up as mushrooms and Pokemons and SpongeBob SquarePants, and while dressed up as Bob Ross — yes, Bob Ross, the painter — wearing a Bob Ross wig, painting the ongoing protests around us.
Protesters in Portland this weekend blew bubbles at ICE agents and hula-hooped at them. They formed a flash mob to do a coordinated dance performance of the Cha Cha Slide. They held formal afternoon tea services. They went, quote, ice fishing. They tied donuts to poles and pretended to lure federal agents with those delicious sugary pastries.
This form of absurdist resistance and protest and mockery in Portland started with a guy in a chicken suit showing up at the ICE headquarters every day, and one guy in an inflatable frog costume showing up at the protest every day and not backing off — even when the masked Trump goons pepper-sprayed the inflatable frog.
In Portland, Oregon, they have been laughing at the fact that Trump was trying to justify sending in the troops by saying this was a war-ravaged city — by showing in every way they know how that Portland is just as wonderful and weird as it’s always been.”
If this is what Maddow thinks “the American people” look like, she’s been on TV too long and outside too little. Ordinary Americans aren’t out there in banana suits blowing bubbles at cops — they’re working, raising families, supporting law enforcement, and trying to live in peace. These protesters don’t represent America — they embarrass it. And the fact that Maddow cheers them on says more about her than it ever could about this country.
She mocks officers as “secret police” and “goons,” but cheers people dressed as frogs and SpongeBob SquarePants, blocking federal buildings. She calls Portland “wonderful and weird” — ignoring the crime, vandalism, drug crisis, illegal immigration, and closed businesses that locals face every day.
Maddow even suggests the city’s naked bike ride is about “showing vulnerability.” She makes it sound noble — like public nudity is some form of civic awareness. But naked people on bicycles aren’t making streets safer — they’re creating a distraction that could cause an accident and exposing children to indecency in broad daylight. There’s nothing “vulnerable” about that — it’s reckless and inappropriate.
“And because Portland is Portland, where every year they hold a naked bike ride — because, why not? And, to show the vulnerability of cyclists so drivers take care to not hurt cyclists on the road.”
Who’s really making Portland safer — the officers sent in to protect federal buildings and restore order, or the mobs in costumes and naked cyclists Maddow celebrates as ‘resistance’?