Elon Musk is the autopen

And Trump is incompetent.

Musk during an (unsuccessful) campaign appearance in Wisconsin on Sunday. (Joshua Lott/Washington Post via Getty)

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“I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” President Trump told reporters on March 22. In the span of a week, the president “forgot” that he invoked the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport hundreds of people to a Salvadoran gulag.

“Other people handled it, but Marco Rubio has done a great job and he wanted them out and we go along with that,” he mumbled vaguely.

The media framed the debacle as a clever effort to “downplay his involvement” in the ugly episode, rather than evidence that the president is totally checked out and letting other people run the government.

And yet, just five days before his own memory lapse, Trump “declared” his predecessor’s pardons of the January 6 Committee “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT” because Biden was too senile to understand them.

The post is part of an ongoing campaign to undo Biden’s presidency by claiming that he was too incompetent by the end to exercise actual power, and some unnamed, shadowy figure was running the White House instead. It’s shockingly inappropriate, of course. But the juxtaposition is even more jarring as we are daily confronted with a president who is disengaged from the details of his job, preferring to outsource most of his authority to an unelected billionaire.

President 4chan

Undoing pardons is not a thing. Not even if Biden used an autopen. As the Supreme Court made clear in Trump v. US, the president’s exercise of his “core” powers, specifically the pardon, is unreviewable. But Trump is captured by internet memes, and so he’s thrilled to amplify the “autopen” conspiracy currently flooding the rightwing media ecosystem.

“The person that operated the autopen, I think we ought to find out who that was because I guess that was the real president,” Trump said in the Oval Office on March 20.

Why the Wisconsin Supreme Court race is a big deal

As the New York Times points out, the “autopen” story was a conservative op from the get-go. Mike Howell, a Heritage Foundation operative who describes himself on Twitter as “Top Deportation Scientist. Official Pardon/Autopen Inspector,” spent the past four years trying to undermine the Biden administration through more or less questionable means. Looking to recycle that work in the Trump era, Howell is now trying to find ways to undo Biden’s work.

Heritage’s official position, at least since January 20, is that the president has un-challengeable authority over virtually every aspect of government. In 2024, even as the conservative think tank spearheaded litigation to challenge Biden’s supposedly tyrannical abuses, Heritage published Project 2025, a blueprint for imposing conservative rule. But consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, and so, as Trump rushed to implement the Project 2025 agenda in the first weeks of his second stint, Howell and former Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz were trawling through Biden’s signatures hoping to find a way to magic away his executive actions.

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On March 5, Missouri Attorney General Andy Bailey unknowingly boosted Howell’s project.

“I am calling for a federal investigation into President Biden’s mental decline and legality of executive orders, pardons, and all other actions issued in his name,” he blustered on social media. “I am urging the Department of Justice to determine whether unelected White House staff exploited the president’s cognitive declined to issue executive orders without his knowing approval.”

The post was accompanied by a fake news release bearing the seal of Bailey’s office.

Bailey, who is no stranger to using his position for political stunts, cited zero evidence that President Biden lacked mental capacity. But for Howell, the signal boost was a godsend.

“Whoever controlled the autopen controlled the presidency,” he tweeted.

Howell’s post went viral, and soon rightwing media was running the story wall-to-wall.

How right-wing media is legitimizing a nonsensical and nonexistent lawsuit

Smear early, smear often

Perhaps reasoning that no one but liberals reads the “fake news” New York Times, Howell gleefully described the plan to reporters.

“We determined that the most legally vulnerable documents were the pardons,” he gushed, tacitly admitting that the goal was destruction for its own sake, not to further any policy goal or because the orders were themselves defective.

It’s an odd strategy. Even conservative stalwart Jonathan Turley is rolling his eyes at the idea of invalidating Biden’s pardons. And, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett pointed out in her partial dissent, the Court’s immunity decision would make it impossible to prosecute a president for selling a pardon, much less auto-signing one away, since questioning his advisors in court is now illegal.

Which is a lucky thing for Trump, who just pardoned Trevor Milton, a convicted fraudster who just so happened to have made a $1.8 million donation to the president’s campaign. Trump seemed not to know that Milton was found guilty by a jury of defrauding investors in his electric car company.

“He was exonerated. It was a big celebration,” he babbled, adding that “They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president. He supported Trump. He liked Trump.”

Trump went on to call the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York “vicious people.”

“They’re violent,” he ranted, accusing the Justice Department of going after “thousands” of innocent people. He appeared blissfully unbothered that pardoning Milton will likely deprive his victims of hundreds of millions of dollars that would have gone to restitution.

Bondi demands Crockett apologize for aggravated mean to Elon

Trump, who, at 78, is just three years younger than Biden, is clearly decompensating before our eyes. And yet, even as he free associates on live television, back-formulating justifications for orders he’s obviously never read, the right leans ever harder into the story of Biden’s supposed incompetence. Last week a federal judge on the Fifth Circuit took the occasion of an unrelated appeal to bring it up in a wholly unrelated case.

“Questions have arisen about the flurry of last-minute pardons issued by the Biden Administration,” Judge Andy Oldham wrote conspiratorially, without saying who was raising those questions.

“Some or all were allegedly effectuated via autopen,” he intoned, again omitting to mention who is doing the alleging.

“Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, stated that President Biden ‘genuinely did not know what he had signed’ in at least one instance toward the end of his presidency,” he went on, as if Johnson’s interview with conservative journalist Bari Weiss was cognizable evidence.

Judge Oldham went on to condemn Biden’s “pardon” of the defendant as “a stain on the noble prerogative of executive mercy.” In fact, it wasn’t a pardon at all, but a commutation of the death sentence for a murderer who will never leave prison. But Andy Oldham really wants to be a Supreme Court justice, so when he saw an opening to abuse the president’s former rival while expressing his support for the death penalty, he took it.

Accuse your enemy of what you are doing, as you are doing it to create confusion

“If Obama …” or “If Biden …” is a pointless exercise. And yet we are daily confronted with a president who is vigorously, confidently not doing his job.

Trump doesn’t know what he’s signed when it comes to pardons, executive orders, or anything else. He’s outsourced the job to an unelected billionaire who is currently slashing through the government, bragging on social media about feeding entire federal agencies “to the woodchipper.” Elon Musk leads cabinet meetings, dispatches his henchcoders to take over agency after agency, and purports to cancel federal contracts at will. He has no statutory authority, but claims only to be acting as an extension of the president.

Turns out DOGE can't beat FOIA by shouting NOT AN AGENCY

In short, Musk is the autopen, illegitimately usurping executive power while claiming to be a mere extension of the president, mechanically recording his wishes and codifying his orders. And so, to compensate, Trump leans into the old, familiar foil.

It’s not the Trump kids who are trading on their father’s position to enrich themselves. It’s Hunter Biden. It’s not the Trump administration storing classified information on unsecured devices. It’s Hillary Clinton. And it’s not Donald Trump who signs whatever his aides put in front of him, no matter how corrupt. It’s Joe Biden.

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