‘86 47': Does Trump really think James Comey wants him assassinated?

Yahoo

16-05-2025

On Thursday, former FBI Director James Comey took to Instagram to post a picture of some seashells he'd spotted on the beach. They were arranged to spell out '86 47.'
'Cool shell formation on my beach walk,' Comey wrote in the caption.
President Trump — Comey's former boss and longtime antagonist — is the 47th president of the United States. The number '86' is a slang term used mostly in bars and restaurants — and also the military — to indicate that something is no longer available or that someone should be removed from the premises.
But according to Cassell's Dictionary of Slang, "to 86" can also mean "to kill, to murder; to execute judicially."
Comey quickly decided to 86 his own post. 'I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message,' he wrote in a followup post. 'I didn't realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.'
Comey sounded apologetic. But apparently, his explanation wasn't good enough for Trump — or his administration. In a Fox News interview set to air Friday night, the president insisted that America's former top law enforcement officer wasn't just echoing a 'political message' on Instagram; instead, he was trying to get him killed.
'He knew exactly what that meant,' Trump claimed. 'A child knows what that meant. If you're the FBI director and you don't know what that meant, that meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear.'
'He did it for a reason,' Trump concluded. 'He's calling for the assassination of the president.'
Trump survived an attempt on his life in Butler, Pa. last July; the would-be assassin's bullet grazed and bloodied his ear.
Comey didn't invent '86 47'; he simply observed the slogan while out and about.
Whoever arranged the shells to spell out '86 47' likely picked it up online, where it's been circulating for months as a subtle shorthand for anti-Trump sentiment, especially on TikTok.
"It's not a call for impeachment necessarily, or even an endorsement of some other candidate," the online publication Distractify reported in March. "It's just a signal of opposition."
And this isn't the first time '86 47' has made the leap to the real world: The numbers were also spotted at a Hands Off! protest in April. ('86 47' merch — shirts, hats, pins and stickers — is widely available on Amazon, Etsy, Redbubble and eBay.)
Etymologically, 86 has a long but murky history in the U.S. Most experts think it's rhyming slang for 'nix.' Some say it comes from 1920s soda-jerk jargon; others trace it back to the bar Chumley's at 86 Bedford Street in Lower Manhattan.
Merriam-Webster acknowledges that some people have recently started using 86 to suggest violence — but not enough to warrant including that meaning in the dictionary.
'Among the most recent senses adopted is a logical extension of the previous ones, with the meaning of 'to kill,'' the site reports. 'We do not enter this sense, due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.'
His administration is certainly acting like it.
On Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed on X that Comey 'just called for the assassination of @POTUS Trump,' adding that both her department and the Secret Service would now be 'investigating this threat' and 'respond[ing] appropriately.' FBI Director Kash Patel posted that his agency would join the investigation and 'provide all necessary support.' On Fox News, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard accused Comey of 'issuing a hit' on the president and said he should be in jail because of his Instagram photo. And a Secret Service spokesman released a statement saying 'we take rhetoric like this very seriously.'
Asked on Fox what he wants 'to see happen' to Comey, Trump at first said he doesn't 'want to take a position on it, because that's going to be up to [Attorney General] Pam [Bondi] and all of the great people.'
'But I will say this,' Trump continued. 'I think it's a terrible thing. And when you add his history to that… If he had a clean history — he doesn't. He's a dirty cop. He's a dirty cop. If he had a clean history, I could understand if there was a leniency. But I'm going to let them make that decision.'
By calling Comey a 'dirty cop' without 'a clean history,' Trump is framing his contentious relationship with the former FBI director as a one-sided affair. But it's far more complicated than that.
A lifelong Republican turned independent, Comey was tapped by Democratic President Barack Obama to lead the FBI in 2013. He upset Democrats in 2016 by reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails two weeks before Election Day — and upset Republicans in early 2017 for leading an investigation to determine whether Trump associates coordinated with Russia during the previous year's campaign. Neither investigation led to charges.
Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017. In leaked memos and later in his testimony before Congress, Comey alleged that Trump had pressured him to end investigations, which some interpreted as obstruction of justice. An FBI inspector general eventually criticized how Comey had handled these controversies but also found that neither Comey nor the broader FBI harbored a political bias against Trump. In 2019, Trump's Justice Department declined to prosecute Comey.
Regardless, Trump has long bashed Comey as a 'DIRTY COP' and 'Leakin' Lyin' James B. Comey' on social media. In 2019, the president went so far as to accuse Comey of treason — a crime punishable by death in the U.S.
Whether anything comes of the investigations into Comey's 'threat' — or whether Trump and his allies are just trying to stoke outrage and dominate a few news cycles — remains to be seen.
In February 2024, Trump ally Matt Gaetz (then a Republican congressman from Florida) boasted on X that his political allies had recently '86'd' three party leaders, including then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had just announced that he planned to step down later that year. In 2022, the far-right, pro-Trump activist Jack Posobiec posted the numbers '86 46' on X. (Joe Biden was then serving as the 46th U.S. president.)
Neither Gaetz nor Posobiec were prosecuted.
Trump himself is no stranger to violent rhetoric — much of it far more explicit than a series of numbers that commonly connotes running out or getting rid of something. A few examples:
Claiming in 2023 that calls to Chinese officials by Gen. Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were so 'egregious' that 'in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.'
Wondering in a November 2024 interview how former Congresswoman Liz Cheney — a critic he characterized as a war hawk — would feel 'when the guns are trained on her face.'
Reportedly calling in 2020 for protestors outside the White House to be shot. 'Can't you just shoot them?' Trump asked, according to a memoir by former Defense Secretary Mark Esper. 'Just shoot them in the legs or something?"
Saying that if America elected Clinton instead of him in 2016, there would be 'nothing you can do, folks,' to stop her from appointing Supreme Court justices — 'although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know.' The Second Amendment protects Americans' right to bear arms.
Trump was not prosecuted for any of these remarks, either.
In 2021, Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for 'inciting an insurrection' by fraudulently trying to overturn his 2020 election loss — an effort that ultimately 'encouraged' and 'foreseeably resulted in' his supporters attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6 of that year.