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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 episode 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.
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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.
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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.
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