WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has ordered an investigation into pardons and other executive actions issued by his predecessor, Joe Biden — launching an extraordinary effort to show that the Democrat hid his cognitive decline and was otherwise too mentally impaired to do the job.
Trump, who turns 79 this month, has long questioned the mental acuity and physical stamina of Biden, and is now directing his administration to use governmental investigative powers to try and back up those assertions. Biden, 82, and now undergoing treatment for prostate cancer, dismissed Trump’s actions as “ridiculous.”
Here’s a look at what Trump is alleging, what impact it could have, and why the country may never have seen anything like this before.
Trump directed his White House counsel and attorney general to begin an investigation into his own allegations that Biden aides hid from the public declining mental acuity in their boss. Trump is also casting doubts on the legitimacy of the Biden White House’s use of the autopen to sign pardons and other documents.
It marks a significant escalation in Trump’s targeting of political adversaries, and could lay the groundwork for arguments by leading Republicans in Congress and around the country that a range of Biden’s actions as president were invalid.
“Essentially, whoever used the autopen was the president,” Trump said Thursday.
He then went further, suggesting that rogue elements within the Biden administration might have effectively faked the president’s signature and governed without his knowledge — especially when it came to pushing policies that appeased the Democratic Party’s far-left wing.
“He didn’t have much of an idea what was going on,” Trump said, though he also acknowledged that he had no evidence to back up those assertions. A Trump fundraising email released a short time later carried the heading, “A robot ran the country?”
Legal experts are skeptical about that the investigation will do much more than fire up Trump’s core supporters.
“I think it’s more of a political act than one that will have any legal effect,” said Richard Pildes, a constitutional law scholar at New York University School of Law. He added: “I think it’s designed to continue to fuel a narrative that the administration wants to elevate, but courts are not going to second-guess these sorts of executive actions” undertaken by Biden.
Trump has long questioned the legitimacy of pardons his predecessor…
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