A federal judge on Monday issued a temporary restraining order against the National Park Service, ordering it to not interfere with a group that had been flying an “8647” flag in Washington, D.C. Common restaurant slang for “eighty-six” goes back nearly a century, the judge noted, saying that it meant “to throw out” or “to get rid of.”

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss issued the two-week restraining order at the request of Accountability Now USA, an anti-Trump group that had been protesting the president “for months at a site in front of the federal courthouse on Constitution Avenue,” Politico reports. The judge “says the banner can’t plausibly be read to threaten violence against President Donald Trump.”

Judge Moss agreed that the group’s goal is to have Trump lawfully removed from office via impeachment, “and that ’86’ is not an unambiguous call to political violence — and certainly not the kind of ‘imminent’ violence that would be necessary to justify restrictions on speech,” Politico noted.

“The Court does not doubt that political violence is on the rise and that it poses a grave threat not just to the targets of the threats but to the country as a whole,” Moss wrote. “But the enormity of that problem does not change the meaning of Plaintiff’s speech, which by any reasonable measure merely advocated for the President’s impeachment and removal from office — that is, ‘to throw [him] out.’”

Anita Carey, an organizer with Accountability Now USA, said that the group was “pleased that the court saw through the government’s baseless accusations about our 8647 flag.”

“We want to lawfully, peacefully, and constitutionally impeach and remove the President from office. We will now resume proudly flying our 8647 flag, and we encourage everyone who agrees with us to do the same,” she said, according to the ACLU of the District of Columbia.

Judge Moss did not mention the Trump DOJ’s case against former FBI Director James Comey, who had posted to social media a photograph of shells arranged in the form of an “8647” message — Comey later deleted the message and apologized, but was indicted in late April. The indictment alleges that any reasonable person would have seen the “8647” message as “a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.”

Last month Trump called Comey a “Dirty Cop.”

Politico notes that Judge Moss’ “determination underscores questions about the genesis of the charges against Comey.” Comey has denied that his “8647” post was intended to provoke violence.

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A prominent economist has calculated the overall cost of President Donald Trump’s Iran war on American consumers, boiled it down to how much it is costing each U.S. household, and is issuing a warning on the economy.

Dr. Mark Zandi is the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics and the co-founder of Economy.com. He puts the total cost of Trump’s war at $100 billion — a conservative estimate to some — which amounts to about $750 per household so far.

That $100 billion includes “the additional U.S. military costs and the higher energy and other prices resulting from the war,” says Zandi, who calls it a “big economic blow.”

Last week, Zandi told CNBC that if prices stay roughly the same, and the war drags on to a full year, the total cost will jump to about $2,000 for each U.S. household.

He warns that while Trump’s “deficit-financed tax cuts have cushioned it” so far, as of the middle of last month, “the bigger tax refunds Americans have received this year no longer cover the higher costs of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel caused by the war.”

Patrick De Haan, the head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, on May 19 reported that “Americans will be spending $2 billion more on gasoline over the four day Memorial Day weekend compared to a year ago, according to GasBuddy estimates, or roughly $22 million more every hour.”

Looking at the “hard-pressed middle and lower-income households,” Zandi found that the financial pressure is “mounting quickly.”

He notes that the U.S. consumer’s savings rate is now “about as low as it ever goes,” and warns that “unless the war ends soon and energy prices come down,” Americans “will have little choice but to rein in their spending, weighing further on the already sagging economy.”

Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon, told CNBC that consumers “are increasingly facing an income squeeze, which is forcing them to use savings, credit and wealth to sustain their spending patterns.”

The Trump White House over the weekend offered a different take.

Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters that “People are spending more on gas, but they’re also spending more on everything else — not just groceries, but restaurants and so on,” MS NOW reported. “I think that that’s a sign that you would see when people are optimistic about the future.”

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America’s farmers once formed a reliable pro-Trump coalition. Now they’re hurting, and the cause is the president’s own trade policies — which have been “waged with little to no coherent strategy” and have “punched farmers in the mouth.” This time, Trump can’t blame a global pandemic for their pain.

That’s according to a Washington Post op-ed by Marc Short, “Trump betrayed farmers. Now real signs of anger show.” Short served as Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff during the first Trump administration.

“Trump’s global war on trade risks upending the Republican coalition across the heartland,” writes Short. “Continuing to ignore the plight of farmers is a risk Republicans shouldn’t tolerate heading into November.”

The statistics for farmers are staggering, Short finds. $34.6 billion in losses last year alone. Bankruptcies are the worst in six years — since the COVID-19 pandemic. Seven out of 10 farmers cannot afford all the fertilizer their crops need — the cost for some fertilizers is up 47 percent — and the price of gas amid Trump’s Iran war has surged.

It gets worse.

Ninety-four percent of farmers’ financial situations have “worsened or remained the same” since 2025, when 15,000 farms closed. Bankruptcies were up 46 percent in 2025 and have jumped 70 percent through May alone this year.

Trump’s trade war with China led to that country, once the top foreign buyer of America’s soybeans, buying zero soybeans from May to November last year.

Canada’s boycotts of American products, the result of Trump’s trade war, have resulted in a loss of $1 billion for American agricultural exports.

Polls in farm country reflect these hardships, Short says.

“In Ohio, JD Vance’s old Senate seat and the governor’s mansion are considered toss-ups,” he writes. “Polls for the Senate race in North Carolina, another agriculture-heavy state, show Democratic former governor Roy Cooper with a healthy lead over former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley.”

Iowa “is currently rated as likely Republican for its open Senate seat but polls continue to show a tight race and the Democrat winning the governor’s race.”

Polls are pushing Republicans to spend heavily on ads in states that were once considered safe. “The Senate GOP’s top super PAC is spending $79 million in Ohio, $71 million in North Carolina and $29 million in Iowa,” Short says.

He reminds Republicans that political coalitions “are not set in stone; they must be won in every cycle,” and he warns politicians who don’t deliver or break promises “will face retribution at the ballot box.”

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