President Joe Biden signs a document with his very own hands.Oliver Contreras/White House/Zuma
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President Donald Trump has a new hobbyhorse: That his predecessor, President Joe Biden, didn’t legally grant pardons to people Trump wants to harass because the pardons were signed with an autopen, a device for replicating a signature, rather than by hand.
Trump has identified some signature requirement as the one rule presidents must obey.
“The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” he ranted on Truth Social just after midnight on Monday. “In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”
This argument is hilarious.
Trump and his MAGA allies have embraced a lawless approach to the presidency. Trump’s executive orders, actions, and legal filings all point to an understanding of the president as far more powerful than previously understood, with king-like powers over the entire executive branch. The president, they argue, is unbound by rules over firing officials or the civil service, by criminal laws, by the legal interpretations of other agencies (including the Justice Department), by Congress’ power of the purse, and it would seem—in multiple cases—unbound by court orders. But in Trump’s midnight rage-posting, he has identified some signature requirement as the one rule presidents must abide by.
The logic is absurd. Last summer, the Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for acts within their core powers, including the pardon power. Now, a president can literally trade a pardon for a bribe. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent, “Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune.” According to Trump’s new rubric, she omitted the golden rule that the pardon had to be signed by hand. Then, feel free to bribe away.
According to Trump, he can appoint the world’s richest man to dismantle federal agencies, halt payments, cancel contracts, and enrich himself—all outside the purview of Congress. It’s an extraordinary assertion of executive branch power—the power to delegate, in effect, all the executive’s power, and then Congress’ to boot. But what he cannot delegate is the signing of his signature to an autopen?
Usually the Trump administration is all about automation. They are reportedly using artificial intelligence to scan the social media posts of visa-holders and flag for deportation anyone it judges has made pro-Hamas or pro-terrorist comments. This dragnet is certain to ensnare people who merely criticized Israel’s tactics against Gaza or the United States’ support of that war—and that indeed may be the entire point. In other words, they are outsourcing a crackdown on free speech to AI.
It’s not the administration’s only use of AI. According to multiple reports, AI is being deployed across the federal government to reduce the workforce and transform federal agencies into an AI-run bureaucracy. So not only has Trump outsourced his job to Musk, but Musk is now outsourcing his—and most other federal employees’—to a chatbot. Whether a job exists or a deportation is ordered or your data remains private will now depend on an algorithm and the few DOGE employees who utilize it.
But outsource to an autopen? That’s a bridge too far.
Trump, of course, isn’t preoccupied just with the autopen but with what he claims it means: That Biden was too senile to govern, and the automatic signature is proof that someone else was calling the shots. It is obviously proof of no such thing. Conversely, signing by hand is no indication that Trump has read all of the dozens of executive orders he has issued since January 20. (We’ve all claimed to have read the fine print, haven’t we?) But Trump, in his zeal to delegate vast authority to Musk and AI, obviously is authorizing things he doesn’t know about or cannot foresee—like the time his administration fired the team working to stop a bird flu pandemic and then scrambled to hire them all back.
Usually the Trump administration is all about automation. But outsource to an autopen? That’s too far.
There are practical concerns with the no-autopen rule. What if a president is away from his desk when a pardon must be issued in order to avert, say, a wrongful execution? What if he injures his hands and cannot sign? Does he lose the pardon power? The pardon power has been set out by the Supreme Court as one of the president’s “core powers” that cannot be proscribed—yet somehow, according to Trump’s logic, this power can be entirely undone by use of an autopen?
To Trump’s credit, it doesn’t appear that he came up with this legal strategy. Instead, it seems to have emerged from the Heritage Foundation in an attempt to poke legal holes in Biden’s executive actions. Trump, according to remarks on Sunday, is so desirous to prosecute people Biden pardoned in the waning days of his administration—like former Rep. Liz Cheney, who co-led the January 6 Committee—that he intends to ask the courts to throw out Biden’s pardons on the strength of his autopen argument. “It’s not my decision; that’ll be up to a court,” he said. “But I would say that they’re null and void.”
Perhaps Trump is imagining that Chief Justice John Roberts, the author of the decision granting presidential immunity, will finally draw a line on executive authority. Do what you want, Roberts might decree, but you have to sign the document by hand.
Even for this Supreme Court, that level of absurdity is certainly too much.
