This is not a matter of interpretation. That’s what 86 means, in the same way black means black and not white.
Alas, in US President Donald Trump’s never-ending quest for revenge against his perceived opponents, the Department of Justice has charged former FBI Director James Comey with calling for the president’s assassination by sharing a meme of seashells spelling out “86 47.”
Trump believes that “get rid of” might mean mob speak for a hit. This is, of course, a ludicrous interpretation.
T.J. English, a prolific journalist covering organised crime, told The Battleground, “No one in the real world, mob or otherwise, uses the term 86 in the way the president has suggested. It’s possible it has been used that way in movies and television dramas and comedies, but you would have to be delusional to think that it applies to real life.”
Of course, the term 86 appears in film and television. For example, it appears in the movie Casino and in context, it refers to someone’s ban from a particular establishment.
Merriam-Webster clarifies that any concept of lethality doesn’t play into the established definition: “Among the most recent senses adopted is a logical extension of the previous ones, with the meaning of ‘to kill.’ We do not enter this sense, due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.” Well, as they said in Goodfellas, that’s that.
The meme calls for removing Trump, the 47th president, from his current position, the presidency. Comey was calling for his impeachment, resignation or the invocation of the 25th Amendment.
We know this from the right’s attack on the last president, Joe Biden.
Newsweek noted: “Social media users have since circulated examples of Republicans and conservatives posting ‘86 46’ during Biden’s presidency, fueling debate over how such messages are interpreted and enforced.”
But Department of Justice attorneys are in the same boat as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is walking around in shoes the size of pontoons because they were thrust upon him by Trump.
Fear of the commander’s wrath motivates this administration’s viceroys, not duty or reason. The lawyers know this case is bullshit and that Comey will likely skate home unconvicted. But they have to go through the motions to appease El Jefe.
It’s bad enough that taxpayer money and national attention will be wasted on something so frivolous. But it is classically Orwellian that national media friendly to Trump are indulging in the idea that the government can retroactively redefine what words mean to convert constitutional dissent into unlawful threats.
Consider how The Wall Street Journal, the most reputable outlet of the Murdoch empire, introduced the case:
The latest indictment charges Comey with making a threat against Trump and transmitting an interstate communication threatening to kill him. It centers on a May 2025 Instagram post in which Comey wrote, ‘cool shell formation on my beach walk,’ under a photo of seashells arranged in the numbers ‘86 47.’ Trump officials at the time said it was a threat to encourage killing Trump, as ‘86’ is old-time slang for ‘get rid of,’ and Trump is the 47th president.
This ambiguous definition gives the administration some leeway to redefine this piece of slang as violent, specifically as mob-related.
Given Trump’s history with organised crime, and the fact that the FBI’s job is fighting the mob, Trump might be projecting a little, but that’s a topic for another time.
Murdoch’s far less restrained Fox News is unsurprisingly having a field day with the news.
Speaking to host Sean Hannity, legal analyst Gregg Jarrett mocked Comey, saying “St. James pretended to be confident,” despite DoJ evidence and witnesses that “may blow a hole in Comey’s preposterous claim, ‘Oh, gee, I simply discovered these pretty little shells on the beach, I didn’t understand their meaning.’”
Jarrett added that the FBI is trained in “coded messages, subliminal calls for violence, so nobody really believes what he’s saying”.
Soon after that, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told NBC’s Meet the Press that the indictment was based on more than just the Instagram post, anchoring Jarrett’s claim that the DoJ has an evidentiary ace up its sleeve.
Some scepticism is in order, given how the last federal case against Comey fell apart.
Instead, the Fox segment simply treats the government’s allegations as settled fact, and the network chooses to abandon the constitutional presumption of innocence.
In fact, the New York Post, the empire’s trashier tabloid, reran Fox content blasting Larry Lang, a Democratic official in California’s Silicon Valley, who had recently posted “86 47” multiple times on social media.
The article quoted the state’s Republican chairperson calling it a “death threat” and reported that his party was “pleading with Democrats to ‘stop advocating for the death of Donald Trump and Republicans’”.
Many paragraphs in, Fox and the Post finally defined 86 as “to get rid of something”—after more paragraphs like this:
“He needs to resign as vice mayor!” conservative social media account Libs of TikTok said after uncovering the posts.
Nick Poche, spokesperson with the Republican National Committee, added that Democrats “must immediately dial back their unhinged rhetoric” or risk encouraging “deranged” supporters who might wish to kill the president, such as the suspect from the recent White House Correspondents Dinner shooting that was stymied by the Secret Service.
Other outlets are contributing to the problem. A Washington Post editorial rightly opposed the indictment, mocking it in the Trump-speak headline, “The Lowest-Energy Lawfare Yet.” But the newspaper, which has moved to the right under the ownership of tech oligarch Jeff Bezos, also said, “The post was in poor taste, but Comey more likely meant Trump should be removed from office or otherwise defeated politically.”
First, when a presidential administration threatens the world with war crimes and mocks anyone who offends Dear Leader, it is not the media’s job to police the decorum of those criticising the government’s extremism. But it is inaccurate to say Comey “more likely” meant a nonviolent eviction of Trump from power. That is literally what those words mean.
This is not a minor quibble over vocabulary. If the presidency can redefine what words mean out of thin air, then the government can turn constitutional speech into criminality.
If they can get away with that, what stops them from saying that putting the words “dump,” “fuck,” “defeat”, or “crush” before the word “Trump” is a threat?
A great deal of media coverage is helping to manufacture consent for the president’s paranoid and vengeful administration.
Photograph courtesy of Duncan Cumming. Published under a Creative Commons license.
