The quiet resistance of Etsy’s subtle anti-Trump merch

For people who want to wear their opposition to President Donald Trump on their sleeve without being too conspicuous, there’s the subtle anti-Trump world of Etsy.

During Trump’s first term, Democrats were loudly proclaiming “Resist.” During former President Joe Biden’s time in office conservatives used “Let’s Go Brandon” as a euphemism for how they really felt about him. But today, anti-Trump messages can be much more veiled, from “8647” to coded ways to communicate the not-safe-for work sentiment that can be abbreviated “FDT.”

Etsy—which saw its revenue grow last year despite a drop in gross merchandise sales—has all that and more written across T-shirts. It’s all part of an emerging genre of almost quaint Trump 2.0 resistance design that the site collects into a category it calls “subtle left leaning.”

Former FBI director James Comey’s since-deleted social media post showing an image of seashells arranged to say “8647” has brought the slogan to a wider audience, with “86” being hospitality-industry slang for kicking someone out of a restaurant and “47” standing for Trump being the 47th president. Though Comey was interviewed by the Secret Service over whether the slogan was intended as a threat toward Trump, Republicans used “8646” as an anti-Biden message before, and it’s not necessarily meant as an incitement to violence but a way to signal opposition to Trump in just four numbers.

On Etsy, “8647” doesn’t look threatening at all, written in flowers on a butterfly in one T-shirt design and over the stems of a dandelion in another. Another shirt obscures the message even more with an image of four dominoes with dots that total up to eight, six, four, and seven.

Generally, these designs embed anti-Trump messages into otherwise apolitical illustrations of flowers, butterflies, books, and dogs, like the “French bulldog, Doodle, Toy fox terrier” T-shirt that uses dog breeds as a stand-in for “FDT.” A coffee-themed version spells out the initials in acrostic—“Foamy, Double shot, Tea latte.” A pasta version says “Fettuccine, Ditalini, Tortellini.” One turns the acronym into a message about self-improvement: “Flourish • Dream • Thrive.”

These shirts are meant to go unnoticed, with slogans that likely won’t be caught by the passing eye. Some shirts write out “FDT” messages in tiny type—like the small scribbles on a T-shirt with an illustration of strawberries—or hide them in a larger image, as the creator of another T-shirt did with an elaborate mandala with “8647” woven subtly into the design. Others are designed like typical tourist-town tees that say “Gulf of Mexico.” It’s a form of protest that just so happens to look like a shirt you maybe bought on vacation a few years ago.

Resistance to Trump so far looks different in his second term than his first, and as Etsy’s “subtle left leaning” section shows, that sometimes means its less conspicuous instead of more.