President Donald Trump’s move to revoke the validity of Joe Biden’s autopen‑signed documents is a direct shot at the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency and a major escalation in the fight over who actually exercised presidential power from 2021 to 2025. As exciting and necessary as this move is, there are reasons not to celebrate just yet.
On Friday, Trump went on Truth Social and declared that any document signed by Biden using an autopen is “hereby terminated” and has “no further force or effect,” claiming that about 92% of Biden’s official documents fall into that category. He insisted that an autopen “is not allowed to be used if approval is not specifically given by the President of the United States,” accusing “Radical Left Lunatics” around Biden of effectively running the presidency through a mechanical signature while Biden faded into the background. Trump framed this as a cleanup operation, saying he was canceling “all Executive Orders, and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden,” and warning that if Biden now claims he oversaw the process, he could face “charges of perjury.”
Make no mistake about it, this is an audacious legal gamble that will trigger an immediate war in the courts. But it’s also a fight Trump wants. From where he sits, Joe Biden shouldn’t have been president in the first place, and invalidating his executive actions would be poetic justice.
This fits into a broader strategy that Trump has been building for months. He already ordered DOJ to investigate whether Biden’s aides abused the autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and push through executive actions, pardons, and appointments that he may not have fully understood. Earlier this year, DOJ pardon attorney Ed Martin began an investigation into Biden’s autopen‑related acts of clemency, including those for Biden family members, and whether others exploited his mental state to drive those decisions with mechanical signatures and “other methods.” Trump’s team has also rolled back a large chunk of Biden’s 160 executive orders the old‑fashioned way, through new executive actions and policy reversals. But the autopen offensive goes further by addressing the constitutional problems posed by unelected aides potentially using the autopen without Biden’s awareness.
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The clemency angle is especially explosive. Biden issued 4,245 acts of clemency, including 80 pardons and 4,165 commutations. Trump previously declared Biden’s autopen‑signed pardons “void” and unenforceable. While that did not immediately unravel those actions, the new announcement is a signal that the White House intends to treat autopen‑dependent clemency as legally suspect going forward.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Presidents have used some version of an autopen since the 1950s. Still, its use for serious constitutional acts really took off when Barack Obama signed the 2013 “fiscal cliff” bill from his Hawaii vacation with an autopen, leaning on a 2005 Bush‑era Office of Legal Counsel memo that said a president does not need to personally perform the physical act of signing if he has authorized it. And that’s the rub, really. How do you prove that Biden wasn’t aware of the executive actions? For sure, if there is no solid record of his specific authorization, then there’s reason to suspect that staffers may have effectively exercised presidential power in his name. Still, I’m not a lawyer, yet even I know that this is hardly sufficient proof.
In practical terms, Trump’s declaration instantly throws hundreds, maybe thousands, of Biden‑era actions into uncertainty, but trust me, legally, this will be a brutal fight. Proving that a particular order, pardon, or proclamation was signed with an autopen without Biden’s knowledge or consent will require documents, witnesses, and probably some very uncomfortable testimony about Biden’s condition in his final years in office. Don’t expect many Democrats to turn on Biden when doing so actually would expose a conspiracy and a legitimate constitutional crisis.
