Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

James Comey, Zohran Mamdani, and the lost art of doubling down.

Another writer once told me that she never, ever apologizes. How unenlightened and abrasive, I thought at the time. This was circa 2019, when the specter of cancellation loomed large, where old tweets were being dug up, and public apologies abounded.

I like to think we’ve come out on the other side a bit more canny. The era of overcorrection converted me to the idea that, with few exceptions, you should not publicly apologize, and you should not retreat.

I’ve been thinking about this again in the wake of former FBI Director James Comey’s second indictment stemming from a dumb joke he literally wrote in the sand. While on a beach vacation last year, Comey spelled out the words “86 47” and posted the photo online. For this limp act of resistance, he’s been charged with threatening to kill the president and transmitting the message via interstate commerce, i.e., Instagram.

For those who’ve never worked a service industry job and are not unruly, public drunks — which would make for an interesting Venn Diagram for members of this administration — “86” is slang for removing someone from an establishment. It’s ludicrous to imagine this being read as a threat on Donald Trump’s life, but that was hardly the point.  

What matters is that Comey made a critical misstep: He deleted the post and retreated, giving his detractors exactly what they so richly desired. “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,” he said at the time.

Now, some necessary caveats: There is great value in addressing specific wrongs to the specific people you’ve wronged. This is best done in private. If you find yourself apologizing to a large group of unspecified people for hard-to-pin-down or ever-evolving wrongs, it should give you pause, ditto if you start by opening up your Notes app. Consider who is asking you to apologize and their motivations for doing so. Are they trying to exert control over you? Do they want to gain leverage for future use?

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Comey’s de facto apology not only didn’t matter to its intended audience, but it also telegraphed the former FBI director as weak. Announcing himself as willing to capitulate only chummed the water further, the sharks circled, and he bent the knee to the worst actors rather than stand his ground. Deleting the post, in the modern era, ends up looking like an admission of guilt — or, at least, an admission that the bad guys got under your skin, which means they can do so again, at will, in the future.

Once you start apologizing to appease the nameless, faceless ombudsmen looking to catch you out, you might find it’s impossible to stop. 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is experiencing this firsthand. Early in March, the........

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