Donald Trump once suggested that “Second Amendment people” were the only ones who could stop Hillary Clinton. He mused last summer about how Liz Cheney might feel when “guns are trained on her face.” He said at a rally that to shoot him, someone would need to shoot through the media, “and I don’t mind that so much.” And, when asked by ABC News’ Jonathan Karl what he thought of the January 6 rioters chanting “hang Mike Pence,” Trump responded simply, “Well, the people were very angry.”
So, excuse us for being a little incredulous that Trump is now accusing former FBI director James Comey of putting a hit on him when he posted an Instagram photo Thursday of seashells on the beach arranged to spell out “86 47.”
The number “86” is most commonly defined as meaning “to throw out” or “to get rid of.” But Trumpworld skipped right over those more obvious definitions and decided Comey’s message could only mean one thing: “Just James Comey causally (sic) calling for my dad to be murdered,” Donald Trump Jr. posted on X.
Comey quickly took the post down, writing in a statement on Instagram that he “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence” and that he “oppose[s] violence of any kind.” Comey didn’t respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.
By Thursday night, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had announced an investigation into Comey’s alleged call “for the assassination of @POTUS Trump” and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was calling for Comey’s imprisonment. On Friday, Trump himself was making the most of it on Fox News. “He knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant,” Trump said. “That meant ‘assassination.’”
Was it dumb of Comey to post a message so primed for willful misinterpretation by the right, particularly given they’ve played this same game of dictionary roulette with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer? Yes. Is it just as dumb for the Trump administration to willfully misinterpret a seashell message as a death threat? Also yes. Is it extra dumb that this ordeal has America frantically Googling the definition of “86” like we, as a nation, are all about to give the world’s worst best man speech? You bet! Merriam-Webster president Gregory Barlow told Vanity Fair that, as of Friday morning, “86” was the most frequently searched term on its website. According to Barlow, their research shows “it probably comes from 1930s soda counters, where it began as rhyming slang of nix, which means ‘to veto’ or ‘to reject.’”
The irony, of course, is that no one has accused the liberal pearl-clutchers of stirring up faux outrage over semantics more than Trump. Of course, he wasn’t suggesting “Second Amendment people” shoot Clinton, his 2016 campaign argued; he was just encouraging them to vote! He wasn’t calling for Cheney to face a firing squad; he was pointing out that “warmongers like Liz Cheney are very quick to start wars and send other Americans to fight them, rather than go into combat themselves,” his 2024 campaign said.
But the problem with this administration is that just because something’s dumb doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. The outrage over Comey’s post is a mere pretext for the Trump administration to do what it has established a solid track record of doing: Making perceived political enemies pay for their words.
Last month, the president ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi, as well as Noem, to investigate Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who countered Trump’s unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Trump has ordered another investigation into former DHS official Miles Taylor, who served in his first administration and wrote an anonymous book warning about Trump’s dangers.
And earlier this month, the FBI also opened a criminal investigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James, who prosecuted Trump in a civil fraud case, for alleged mortgage fraud. James has denied the allegations.
Whatever the findings of these investigations turn out to be, the fact that they exist at all has real consequences for their targets. Krebs has left his job, saying that fighting the order would require his “complete focus and energy.” Taylor told NBC News that he’s received a barrage of death threats and has been told by security experts to update his will. “People need to know how real it is to be blacklisted by the president,” Taylor said. “What I worry about is that they will try to use this tactic, this bludgeon of the bully pulpit of the presidency, to go shut people up.”
Meanwhile, Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk has only just been freed from six weeks in federal detention after being snatched off the street for the apparent offense of writing an op-ed criticizing her university’s response to the war in Gaza. Other international students, including Mahmoud Khalil, have similarly been detained for their speech and remain in custody or have been forced to leave the country.
We now live in a world in which the president pardons people convicted of actual political violence (and, incidentally, also rape and sexual abuse of a child) as long as they support him, while simultaneously casting a seashell message from someone who doesn’t as the highest crime of all. If recent history is any indication, Comey’s problems have just begun.
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