So that explains why Donald Trump is suddenly so obsessed with the autopen
It’s routine for a United States President to use a mechanical autopen to “sign” certain unimportant items, such as routine thank you cards or ceremonial invitations. But last week the Trump-aligned New York Post suddenly claimed without evidence that the Biden administration had been using an autopen to sign important documents on Biden’s behalf. It was obvious at the time that the Trump regime had planted the baseless story. The question was why.
The plot thickened when Trump announced (again without evidence) yesterday that the last minute pardons issued by President Biden were invalid because they had supposedly been signed by the autopen. This claim is a farce on its face; no serious person would believe that Biden would decide to issue such crucial pardons and then not bother to sign them himself. But it turns out there’s more to it.
If you dig down into the nineteenth paragraph of that same New York Post article – the one whose headline claimed Biden was abusing the autopen – you find the real story:
A memo dated Jan. 28 and also reviewed by The Post grants Scharf and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles the authority to use the autopen “for all matters.” Scharf’s deputy and the president’s executive clerk are allowed to make the call at Scharf’s direction.
So now we have our answer as to what this is really about. Donald Trump is so deep into dementia and so uninterested in doing the work of the presidency, his top advisers have been granted blanket authority to “sign” literally anything on Trump’s behalf with the autopen. In other words, this is – as usual – a matter of projection. The Trump regime is trying to get out ahead of the fact that it has a machine signing a senile Trump’s name on everything, by falsely claiming that Biden was the one doing it.
We’ll see where this goes next. The Biden pardon claim is just a distraction and a non-story. This instead has to be about something that the Trump regime used the autopen on that they shouldn’t have, whether it’s legislation or something equally important. Now we wait for the other shoe to drop.
