The Undo Button
I have seen a lot of strange things in this town. I have seen scandals over suits, scandals over emails, and scandals over where a President went to dinner. But I have never seen anything quite like this.
It is December 2025. We are nearly a year into Donald Trump's return to the White House. And just when you thought things might settle into a rhythm, the President decided to try and erase the last four years.
Not with a law. Not with a vote. But with a post on Truth Social.
The claim is simple. Trump says that Joe Biden did not sign his own papers. He says a machine did it. An "autopen." And because the machine did it, Trump says none of it counts.
"Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated, and of no further force or effect," he wrote.
Read that again. "Terminated."
He is not just canceling executive orders. He is saying they never happened. He is saying that because a mechanical arm held the pen, the laws and pardons and orders are fake. He claims Biden did not even know what he was signing.
It is a bold move. It is a wild move. And it is causing a massive headache for everyone in Washington.
The Machine in the Room
Let's talk about the autopen.
Trump talks about it like it is some secret spy tool used to trick the public. But it is not. It is just a machine. It has been around for a long time.
Thomas Jefferson used a device to copy his letters. It was a "polygraph" (not the lie detector kind). He wrote with one pen, and a second pen copied his hand movements.
The modern autopen is a bit fancier. It is a robot arm. You put a pen in its hand. You give it a template of the signature. And it signs the paper. It looks exactly like the real thing because it follows the exact pressure and curves of the President's hand.
Why use it? Because Presidents are busy. They have thousands of letters to sign. They have bills to sign when they are traveling.
Barack Obama used it. He was the first to use it for a major bill while he was in Europe. George W. Bush used it. The Department of Justice said it was fine way back in 2005. They wrote a whole legal opinion on it. They said the President does not have to physically hold the pen. He just has to say, "Sign that for me."
It is the same as telling a secretary to stamp a letter. The intent matters. Not the ink.
But Trump does not care about the 2005 opinion. He cares about the narrative.
The 92 Percent Lie?
Trump claims 92% of Biden's documents were signed this way.
Is that number real? Probably not. It sounds like a made-up number. A "Trump number." Like when he says a crowd was the biggest in history. Maybe it was a lot. Maybe it was half. But 92% implies that Biden basically never touched a piece of paper for four years.
That is the picture Trump wants to paint. He wants you to believe Biden was asleep in a chair while a robot ran the country.
He even threatened to arrest Biden.
"Joe Biden was not involved in the Autopen process and, if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury," Trump wrote.
Think about that. He is threatening to charge a former President with lying under oath if he claims he signed his own bills. It is aggressive. It is personal.
It is also a legal nightmare.
The Pardon Problem
Here is where it gets messy.
Executive orders are easy to change. A new President can just sign a piece of paper saying, "The old order is gone." Trump has already done that with a lot of Biden's policies. That is normal. That is politics.
But he is trying to go further. He is trying to say the old orders were never valid in the first place.
Why does that matter? Because of pardons.
A President has the power to pardon crimes. Once a pardon is given, it is done. You cannot take it back. It is like squeezing toothpaste out of the tube. You cannot put it back in.
But if Trump can prove the pardon was never signed? If he can say, "The robot signed it, not Joe, so it doesn't count"? Then maybe he can revoke them.
He wants to undo the pardons Biden issued. Maybe for Hunter. Maybe for others.
Constitutional scholars are screaming "No." They say a pardon does not even need to be in writing. The President could just shout "You are pardoned!" and it would count. The paper is just for the record.
But Trump is betting that the courts might see it differently. Or at least, he is betting that he can cause enough chaos that it won't matter.
The Chaos at the Agencies
Imagine you work at the EPA or the Department of Energy right now.
You have rules you have been following for four years. Rules about pollution. Rules about nuclear safety. Suddenly, the President tweets that those rules are "terminated" because of a signature machine.
Do you stop following them? Do you wait for a judge?
If you stop, you might be breaking the law. If you keep going, you might get fired by Trump.
It is a freeze. Everything stops. Nobody knows what is real.
I spoke to a source at the Justice Department yesterday. He sounded tired. He told me they are digging through archives, trying to find out which papers were signed by hand and which were signed by the machine.
"It's a witch hunt for ink," he said. "We are looking at microscopic pressure lines on paper to see if a human did it."
This is what our government is doing right now. Instead of fixing the economy or fixing the roads, we are analyzing ink.
The Dangerous Precedent
This is not just about Biden. This is about the future.
If Trump succeeds, he breaks the Presidency.
Every future President will do this. The next guy will come in and say, "Oh, Trump didn't sign that tax cut. His secretary did. Void."
Nothing will be permanent. Every law, every order, every pardon will be temporary. It will only last as long as the guy who signed it is in the chair.
It destroys trust.
When the President signs a contract with another country, that country needs to know it is real. If the next guy can just say "oops, wrong pen," why would anyone make a deal with America?
The View from the Street
I walked past the White House this morning. It was cold. The tourists were there, taking photos through the fence.
They do not care about autopens. They care about the price of gas. They care about thier rent.
This fight? This is inside baseball. It is a rich man's game.
But it affects them. If the government stops working because lawyers are fighting over robot signatures, the people suffer. Grants don't go out. Rules don't get enforced.
Trump knows this. He thrives on the noise.
He knows that even if he loses in court, he wins the news cycle. We are all talking about him. We are talking about his power. We are talking about how "senile" Biden was.
That is the goal. The autopen is just a prop.
What Happens Next?
The lawsuits are already flying. The ACLU is suing. Former Biden aides are lawyering up.
The Supreme Court will probably have to decide. Can a machine sign for a President? The answer has always been "yes." But with this Court? Who knows.
Until then, we are in limbo.