86 47? James Comey's Dangerous Rhetoric is Not An Isolated Incident
Excusing Violent Anti-Trump Rhetoric Will Have Terrible Ramifications
The Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service opened an investigation into former FBI Director James B. Comey after he posted an Instagram photo of seashells on a beach arranged to spell “86 47” — a message many interpreted as a call to assassinate the 47th president, Donald J. Trump.
Comey quickly deleted the post after backlash, saying: “I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message. 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.”
Trump was unconvinced and said Comey knew it was “calling for the assassination of the president.”
According to Merriam-Webster, “86” means “to refuse to serve” or “to get rid of.” But Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang also defines “86” as shorthand for “to kill, to murder; to execute judicially.” Even by Comey’s own admission, he recognized the message as political.
Broader Pattern
This controversy comes amid years of increasingly extreme rhetoric from Democratic leaders, many of whom have likened Trump to Adolf Hitler. Former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris have drawn such comparisons, while figures such as former Vice President Al Gore have directly invoked Nazi Germany when criticizing the Trump administration’s policies.
The media has also amplified the narrative that Trump is an existential threat to the United States. The June 2024 cover of The New Republic featured Trump rendered as Hitler under the headline, “American Fascism. What It Would Look Like.”
Less than a month after that cover was published, an assassination attempt on Trump’s life nearly succeeded in Butler, Pennsylvania. Days before the attempt, President Joe Biden had told donors in widely publicized remarks that it was “time to put Trump in a bullseye,” which Biden later called a “mistake.”
Soon after, there was another attempt on Trump’s life on a Florida golf course; however, the assassin was apprehended before he was able to get a shot off.
With this in mind, the Comey post cannot be seen as an isolated incident. It represents a broader pattern of dangerous rhetoric directly targeting Trump, in which he is regularly portrayed not just as wrong but as an existential threat to democracy itself.
When Trump is compared to Hitler by prominent members of the Democratic Party, and his supporters to brownshirts or fascists, the implicit moral license is granted: any means of resistance becomes justifiable, even violence.
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