The Dictatorship
‘86 47’: How Trump’s war on dissent gave his opponents a political rallying cry
In 2003, Barbra Streisand sued a photographer for $50 million after an aerial photo of her cliffside Malibu mansion appeared online. The lawsuit was ineffectual; not only did Streisand lose, but the ensuing publicity drew hundreds of thousands of eyes to the image, which until then had only been viewed six times.
The press called it the “Streisand effect”: when attempts to censor information only bring it more attention. And today, President Donald Trump is grappling with the phenomenon, as his heavy-handed campaign to bury a meme — and his political opponents — has amplified the term “86 47” from a small bit of political speech to an international symbol of protest and defiance.
Last May, while strolling on a beach on the North Carolina shore, former FBI Director James Comey snapped a photo of seashells arranged in the sand that read “86 47,” and posted the shot to Instagram. The numerals represent an abbreviated Trump protest; “86” is restaurant jargon for an item that should be removed from service or nixed, and “47” refers to the 47th president.
The Trump administration cast “86 47” as a threat to kill the president, and within hours, Comey’s post was the right-wing media’s cause célèbre. Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, said Comey should be “put behind bars.” Trump himself told Fox News that the post “meant assassination, and it says it loud and clear.” The Secret Service launched an investigation.
For his part, Comey deleted the post and issued a statement on May 15, 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.”
But Trump — who had long expressed anger at Comey over the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election — did not let the post go. A little less than a year later, Comey was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly making threats against the president. “86 47,” the Justice Department argued, amounted to “a serious expression of an intent to do harm to President Trump.”
The indictment came amid the Trump administration’s growing focus on political violence, targeted specifically — and, some experts argue, solely — on the president’s political opponents, usually groups and individuals deemed leftist or liberal. The White House designated the decentralized antifascist movement “antifa” a terrorist organization last year, and released a separate “domestic terrorism” memo that positions a number of speech and religious issues under that terrorism umbrella, including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.” And on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was set to host delegates from more than 70 countries for a summit on combating “transnational far-left terrorism.”
Comey maintains that his post had no violent intent. He told Stephen Colbert last year that he saw the shell arrangement as nothing more than a “clever political message,” and argued during an appearance on “Meet the Press” this year that it was within his rights as a private citizen to post partisan messaging to his social media accounts. The federal criminal case against him remains active, though his lawyers recently filed motions to dismiss the charges, arguing that he is being prosecuted vindictively.
Democrats and political experts have lined up to defend Comey. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., said on Facebook that he believed the indictment was nothing more than Trump using the federal government to “arrest and potentially jail those expressing dissenting views.”
“Nobody seriously believes that the former director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations is inciting violence against the president of the United States,” Peter Loge, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, told MS NOW. “That doesn’t even pass the sniff test.”
The Comey indictment is part of a pattern of retribution from Trump and his administration, Loge said. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is investigating its online criticsadministration officials reportedly encouraged reprisals against individuals who posted condemnations of the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and, as with the frenzy over “86 47,” the president released a memorandum decrying the antifascist movement as a “rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault” against the core principles of the country.
“The administration has shown that they are not necessarily afraid to take unorthodox approaches towards quashing disagreement or dissent,” Luke Baumgartner, an extremism researcher at GWU, told MS NOW. He suggested that the average American sees the Comey indictment as politically motivated.
Loge also argues that there’s an ulterior motive behind the Comey indictment: It’s a signal to Trump’s critics in Washington that dissent will be met with prosecutorial force.
However, in the months since the charges against Comey were filed, “86 47” has instead become a rallying cry for the anti-Trump movement and has made a variety of appearances in the nation’s capital over the past couple of months.
In early June, visitors to the top of the Washington Monument were greeted by an unusual sight: dead grass in the open space between the obelisk and the World War II Memorial. Upon examination, the discoloration appeared to spell out Comey’s catchphrase. The National Park Service announced that it would investigate the alleged vandalism, but did not respond to a request for comment regarding the status of the case.
The numbers then reappeared a little farther down the National Mall as members of the press and public alike flocked to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to see its new sea-green hue. Multiple witnesses told MS NOW that an individual had drawn “86 47” in algae on the bottom of the pool, before it was ultimately scrubbed away by the cleaning staff on site. Then the message surfaced at the Great American State Fair, at an interactive graffiti exhibit within the Texas tent, Forbes reported.
Tourists arriving for America’s 250th were greeted by the digits cast upon the side of the National Gallery of Art earlier this month, and protesters chanted the phrase as they marched down Constitution Avenue during the semiquincentennial celebration. The numbers have been spotted on protest signs, banners and flags across the district in recent months, including outside the Supreme Court.
That latter instance led to a legal clash between the organization behind the protests, Accountability NOW USA, a group that advocates for Trump’s impeachment and removal from the presidency, and the Interior Department, which sought to ban “86 47” from material included in a planned protest that received a National Park Service permit, due to its alleged violent connotation.
In June a federal judge disagreed with the department’s assessment. U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss ruled that the organization’s “signs and flag fall well within the heartland of protected First Amendment speech” and ordered that the park service allow protesters to use the four-digit code in their demonstrations.
Outside the district, however, federal law enforcement still appears to be taking seriously the alleged threat posed by Comey’s phrase. Last week, a man in Mattituck, New York, was reportedly interviewed by two Secret Service agents after he added “86 47” to a flag hanging above his farm, according to The Suffolk Timesa local Long Island publication.
It seems unlikely that Comey’s seashell arrangement would have inspired such a prevalent new motto for the anti-Trump resistance on its own. Comey is hardly a social media star, with under 200,000 followers, and many of his posts fail to crack even 1,000 likes.
Instead, it appears that the Justice Department’s indictment and the Trump administration’s reaction to the post had the same effect as Streisand’s $50 million lawsuit: a surge of media coverage and a lot more attention on the very conduct that was meant to be punished.
MS NOW Newsgathering Intern Tyler Iglesias contributed to this report.
Adam Hudacek is a desk associate for MS NOW covering national politics in Washington, D.C.
The president couldn’t be decent even for 24 hours. Less than a day after Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced Tuesday that it would pause most vehicle stopsDonald Trump posted on social media early Wednesday morning that “we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”
“The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch,” he wrote on Truth Social. Shortly after, Trump reversed the pause on traffic stops.
ICE operates this way because we as a country have allowed it to happen.
In truth, suspending the stops wouldn’t have brought back Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastian Guerrerothe two Latino fathers killed by ICE agents during separate stops in a span of a week. They are two more victims of an administration that has terrorized immigrant communities relentlessly. The real issue isn’t whether the traffic stops are now ending or continuing — it’s that ICE agents are never held accountable for killing people.
As I have written in the pastICE operates this way because we as a country have allowed it to happen. ICE is now the country’s largest-funded enforcement agency. Just last month Congress passed $70 billion more in funding. Nothing will change until ICE is abolished.
“They’re just trying to cover for the fact that what they are doing shouldn’t be allowable in the first place,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said of ICE’s announcement Tuesdaybefore Trump’s post about traffic stops. “And the fact that they’re pausing it is to distract from the fact that in many of these instances they shouldn’t be allowed to do it in the first place.”
AOC is right, and restoring the stops proves her point. There have been many instances. In March of last year, 23-year-old Ruben Ray Martinez was killed by an ICE agent helping route traffic in South Padre Island. The Department of Homeland Security said Martinez tried to run over the agent, but the video didn’t support that claim.
In January, the nation mourned the deaths of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three shot in her SUV as she left a protest, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse killed during another protest. The federal government withheld the evidence in both cases — body camera footage, hard drives, even Good’s bullet-riddled SUV — from state investigators until this week. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said he was “deeply troubled” that it took that long.
This is a pattern of manipulation: stripping away every detail of a human’s life until all that’s left is “illegal alien.”
“There have been at least 10 deaths involving encounters with immigration agents since Trump launched his deportation campaign,” The Associated Press reported. Nobody has been charged in a single one of those deaths. Guerrero’s also marks at least the 18th time in the past year that federal officers have fired at people in carsaccording to an MS NOW database. That’s on top of at least 22 people who have died in ICE custody this year alone, along with 33 last year.
The Trump administration claimed that Guerrero was a threat to “public safety” instead of a loving husband and parent to a 3-year-old daughter. It’s the same narrative this administration is trying with Salgado Araujo, who has been in this country for 35 years and raised three sons (who all earned college degrees). A week after his death, the FBI even said it was searching Salgado Araujo’s van for drugs. Never mind that, as the New York Times noted, there was “no prior suggestion that Mr. Salgado Araujo or the others in the van had been involved with drugs or had any relevant criminal history.”
This is a pattern of manipulation: stripping away every detail of a human’s life until all that’s left is “illegal alien,” because it’s easier to kill someone once you have already decided they were never fully a person to begin with. Dehumanizing immigrants is official government policy, and people are dying under it.
“Let’s be clear: it never was about documented or undocumented people — what we’re seeing is pure xenophobia and racism. Our community has been targeted and persecuted with zero accountability,” Voto Latino’s Beatriz Lopez saidcalling for the resignation of DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
While the government is in the hands of the prejudiced, the most American things we can do are to reject government talking points when the video evidence says otherwise, and to uplift who the victims really were.
“He had a great vision for getting ahead, so many dreams to fulfill,” Guerrero’s father, Omar Durán, told The New York Times. “My son is a wonderful son — I don’t know why they did that to him.”
Masked agents should not get to decide whether Salgado Araujo and Guerrero get to live.
“He was a hard-working family man who never wanted his name to be known by anyone outside of his family. He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people,” said Ronaldo Salgado, Salgado Araujo’s sonlast week at a press conference.
“He did not deserve to die,” Ronaldo added.
Masked agents should not get to decide whether Salgado Araujo and Guerrero get to live. Current ICE tactics have communities terrified. It’s part of why half of Americans support abolishing ICE. Immigration as continued militarized enforcement will only lead to more deaths. It may be hard even to visualize a country without ICE, but as Amy Gottlieb, U.S. migration director for the American Friends Service Committee, noted earlier this yearan ICE-less world can include “legal services, case management, social services, and other community-based support” that would help “navigate immigration processes while keeping families together — creating stability in our communities rather than chaos.”
Immigration policy through continued militarized enforcement will only lead to more deaths. What country do we want to be? One that values humanity, or one that wants to dehumanize people who believe in this country’s promise? This is the choice each American has to make. Are you for killing innocent people in broad daylight, or are you for decency and compassion? The America I believe in would choose the latter. So enough with the dehumanization, enough with the deaths, and no more ICE.
Julio Ricardo Varela is the founder of “The Latino Newsletter” and co-editor of “Pressing Issues from Free Press.”
The Dictatorship
Ken Paxton hasn’t debated a rival in more than a decade. Talarico is now challenging him to one
This is the July 16, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter.Subscribe hereto get it delivered straight to your inbox every Monday through Friday.
“And who is my neighbor?”
— Luke 10:29
A CONVERSATION WITH JAMES TALARICO
Two ICE shootings in nine days have put immigration enforcement at the center of the Texas Senate race. Democratic nominee James Talarico joined “Morning Joe” to discuss border security, the fear in Hispanic communities, and what his grandfather — a Baptist preacher in South Texas — taught him about loving thy neighbor.
MB: Do you believe there should be robust border security?
JT: Absolutely. We have to protect our immigrant neighbors while also securing our southern border with commonsense policies. That means more Border Patrol agents, more surveillance technology, more immigration judges — not this crazy border wall through Big Bend National Park.
JS: Would you agree Democrats made a big mistake not focusing enough on border security?
JT: No question. I’ve called out President Joe Biden for failing to secure our southern border. National Democrats took the border for granted — we stopped showing up, and that’s why people along the border started looking for alternatives.
JS: You’ve been traveling the state, knocking on doors. What are you hearing from Hispanic communities?
JT: So many young people are showing up at our town halls, many of them Hispanic. They tell me they’re worried their parents aren’t going to come home at the end of the day.
The president promised to go after the criminals, and that’s something I support. But that’s not what’s happening. ICE should be cracking down on the cartels, not our communities. ICE should be deporting violent criminals, not small-business owners. ICE should be hunting down human traffickers, not moms and babies.
WG: How are you going to reverse the 30-year trend of Democrats losing statewide in Texas?
JT: The first words out of my mouth when I launched this campaign were that the real fight in this country is not left versus right — it’s top versus bottom. None of us can afford the basics: groceries, gas, utilities, childcare, prescription drugs.
We are trying to take on the megadonors who increasingly control our politics — and the puppet politicians who do their bidding.
WG: Republicans have gone after you personally — calling you a vegan, questioning your “Texas swagger.” How do you answer that?
JT: I think it’s funny. I’m the eighth-generation Texan in this race. Ken Paxton was born in North Dakota, raised in California, and I think transplants like Ken Paxton can become Texans. Texas is a state of mind, as John Steinbeck wrote.
And when I first heard the low-T thingI had to look it up — guys my age aren’t really worried about that. People realize we’re being played by these politicians who want to throw nicknames at each other. They’re ready for a serious senator who’s going to bring both parties together to get this economy back on track.
JS: Ken Paxton spent the Fourth of July on Westminster Bridge — celebrating 250 years of American independence with the British. How about you?
JT: I was with an American treasure — Willie Nelson — at his annual Fourth of July picnic in Austin.
A Tale of Two Fourth of Julys
Talarico and Nelson in Austin. Go”https://www.instagram.com/p/DaZYpSypCGw/”>James Talarico on Instagram
Paxton in London, July 4, 2026. Via @TheLincolnProject on YouTube
JS: Your opponents attack your faith. Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan — a man is left in a ditch, his own people pass him by, and it’s a despised foreigner who saves him. How is what we’re seeing right now the antithesis of that?
JT: My granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas. When I was little, he told me that as Christians, we’re supposed to follow the two commandments Jesus gave us: Love God and love your neighbor. It’s that commandment to love thy neighbor that got me into public service. I’m trying to love my neighbor through public policy.
And the parable of the Good Samaritan has so much to offer us at this moment. Jesus picked a Samaritan — not just an enemy, but a religious enemy. He lifted up the heretic and said, that is where salvation comes from.
MB: We understand you have a message for Ken Paxton.
JT: Ken Paxton hasn’t appeared on a debate stage in more than a decade. He refuses to answer basic questions — like why he gave an Epstein-style sweetheart deal to Adam Hoffman, an admitted child predator, or how he became a multimillionaire on a government salary.
So I am challenging Ken Paxton to three televised debates. I’ll be on that stage because I answer to the people of Texas. Ken Paxton answers to his billionaire megadonors. We’ll see if they let him show up.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.
President Donald Trump’s sweeping campaign to reshape how America’s elections are run — and to force states to hand over sensitive voter data — has repeatedly lost in the court of law. So on Thursday night, the president will again take his case to the court of public opinion.
Trump is scheduled to deliver a primetime speech from the White House reviving his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, according to administration officialswho told MS NOW that they expect him to allege election influence efforts by foreign adversaries, including China.
Thursday’s speech is about “personal vindication,” a person close to the White House told MS NOW. The 2020 election “keeps the president up at night.”
“He could care less about anything else,” said the person close to the White House, who was granted anonymity to describe internal deliberations. “Is this something Republicans need to be talking about four months before an election? Absolutely not.”
The challenges for the president are piling up. He has a record-low job approval rating and an escalating war with Iran that will soon enter its sixth month. Gas prices are on the rise, economic dissatisfaction is widespread among the American public, and his immigration enforcement crackdown resulted in federal agents killing two people within a week.
Against that backdrop, some Trump allies question the wisdom of the president focusing his message on relitigating the 2020 election.
“He created a base that wants the guillotine,” a former Trump administration official told MS NOW, given anonymity to address a sensitive topic. “His base cheered when they arrested James Comey for “86 47.” That’s what he needs to keep his base activated and energized.”
Separately, the person close to the White House told MS NOW that the political calculus is misguided. “There is no one adviser, outside of maybe [acting Director of National Intelligence] Bill Pulte, that is telling the president, ‘Yes, this is the thing we should be focusing on,’” they said.
Asked about Republicans who would prefer the president to focus his attention elsewhere, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told MS NOW that “as usual, anonymous sources are speculating,” adding that “nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say.”
Ultimately, Trump has faced defeat after defeat in his battle to expand his presidential power over the election process. Federal judges have ruled against the administration at least 21 times in cases involving elections and voter data, according to a review of the rulings by MS NOW. The judges were appointed by presidents of both parties, including at least six named by Trump.
Courts have blocked efforts to obtain unredacted voter rolls, halted new limits on mail ballots and stopped a program that screened voters against a federal database — a process that resulted in some citizens being purged from the rolls. Judges also blocked all three executive orders Trump has signed to overhaul election procedures, including a requirement that military and overseas voters produce documents proving citizenship and restrictions on mail-in voting registration for people receiving public assistance.
The White House did not respond to questions about the administration’s court losses in its attempts to change election rules and obtain voter rolls.
The losses have not slowed the president’s public campaign against the election system, mail-in voting and the local officials who run elections.
Beyond the courts, the administration has pressed states that have not complied with its proposed changes by threatening to withhold anti-terrorism fundingsending letters to election officials threatening criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting and dispatching election monitors. Federal officials have not ruled out sending federal immigration agents to polling places.
An election official in Arizona’s Maricopa County, where the administration has sought to investigate previous election results, said their office is preparing for a range of scenarios, including federal agents entering their building with search warrants.
In Michigan, Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum said she regularly fields questions from voters asking why the state will not hand over data such as Social Security numbers. Byrum, a Democrat, said the president’s claims are “dangerous” and have led clerks across the state to receive threatening voicemails and emails.
“Election conspiracy travels around the globe before I even have my first sip of cup of coffee in the morning,” Byrum said. “This is not safe.”
The White House did not answer questions about the threats and intimidation facing election workers.
Byrum said she plans to respond to Thursday’s speech by pushing out factual information on social media.
The speech may even fall flat with Trump’s supporters. Asked Wednesday about Trump’s planned speech on the 2020 election, some supporters of the president in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, expressed fatigue with the subject.
“It’s time to move on from that,” said Alicia, a 56-year-old self-employed woman who described herself as pro-Trump and declined to give her last name. “It doesn’t really need to be talked about a whole lot anymore.”
“That’s behind us,” said Jordan, a conservative Pennsylvania voter, who declined to share his last name. “We can’t change the past; let’s just keep moving forward.”
Akayla Gardner contributed reporting.
Laura Barrón-López covers the White House for MS NOW.
Selena Kuznikov is a desk associate for MS NOW.
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