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Notes -
"I am hereby cancelling all Executive Orders, and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden, because the people who operated the Autopen did so illegally."
So this feels like a bit of an escalation to me. My attempt at an analysis, from someone who is not American:
Overall, I feel like this is kind of a misplay from Trump - I think that it guarantees that the next Democrat administration will do the same to his executive orders and pardons. I worry that this will lead to each administration basically cancelling everything that the previous one did, which I worry will lead to more power being entrenched in the permanent bureaucracy (as the administration's actions will all be seen to be impermanent, so the bureaucracy will just ignore orders they don't like). Some will argue that is the current state of affairs, and I don't necessarily disagree; the worry is that it would prevent another Trump-like figure from actually making changes.
I also think that this is one of those actions that does lend a bit of credence to the accusations that Trump is acting like a fascist. To be absolutely clear: I think there is no actual informational value in almost all accusations against Trump of any sort; I think that almost everyone who accuses him of anything has started from the position of "Trump bad" and used that to justify any and all accusations against him. That being said - this feels like the sort of action that will kick off another escalation cycle. One thing that I've noticed about a lot of US political escalations is that they often start with an action that is fully legal, but against form; the other party then does something that is mostly-legal, which the first party then uses to claim that the first party has completely abandoned the rule of law. I am right-wing biased (I lean libertarian, but that's a "more libertarian than we are now", as opposed to an "absolute libertarian") - but even with that, I can't think of an equivalent on the left to this.
So, for the American commentators - should I be concerned about this? Is this just Trump saying shit, is there a left wing equivalent I missed, is there some form of precedent that excuses it? Did I miss something major in my interpretation of it? Is this just not a big deal at all?
To be perhaps excessively fair to Trump:
In 2024 Speaker Johnson met Biden and asked about an executive order pausing new natural gas permits that Biden signed a few days previously. The response was horrifying:
Who the fuck signed that executive order if not the executive? Some anonymous staffer set LNG export policy without Biden's approval or awareness?
The use of the autopen itself is not actually concerning They've been in common use by US presidents for centuries. Biden not being aware of executive orders he supposedly recently signed is very concerning and I'm fine with Trump issuing a contrary executive order.
Having read Trump's announcement: he doesn't specify pardons. I hope he won't try to reverse pardons and he'd fail anyways.
The complicating issue is that many presidents do the "what? what? I don't know what you're talking about" all the time - Trump himself (low hanging X tweet video in question) literally within the last few days pulled it himself, and also has a history of this kind of thing as a tactical pseudo-deniability measure (I have lost track of the number of people who are wonderful friends one day, and the next year once they do something bad are suddenly suck-up hanger-ons that he 'barely knows'). It's taking advantage of and leveraging any wiggle room/benefit of the doubt in your political favor.
So there's personal judgement which is one thing - we can judge ourselves which are 'legit' and which are deliberate all we'd like in the political arena - but legal judgements are a totally different thing with totally different standards.
Presumably, in my opinion, if a president doesn't agree with the use of the pen by his office, it's incumbent on the president himself to correct it. And if he doesn't, then it's presumed legit. I'm not a fan of successive presidents attempting to reverse engineer intent and state of mind, and on a practical level of course we seem to all agree it's a bad precedent and hard to administer fairly.
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