On June 4, President Trump issued a memorandum directing the White House Counsel and the Attorney General to investigate former President Biden and his aides to see if they “abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert Article II authority.”
“This conspiracy,” the order says, “marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history.”
Democratic politics invites citizens and political leaders to leave the past alone, except in extreme cases like genocide or apartheid. It requires victorious parties not to try to rewrite it to suit the fancies and fantasies of the moment.
However, Trump seems unable to resist casting his eye backward to denigrate and impugn his predecessor. His memorandum called “Reviewing Certain Executive Actions” is just the latest example.
The president’s Joe Biden-focused memorandum comes from the same place as his election-denialism. He wants to discredit everything Biden touched and sweep the last four years into the dustbin of history.
Readers of literature may recognize this impulse. George Orwell’s classic novel, 1984, offers a startling and imaginative rendition.
In that book, Orwell describes a political party bent on securing its power and dominating the society that it ruled. The party creates a Ministry of Truth and charges it to change narratives of the past to suit the whims of the Leader. It seeks, to quote from the book, to create a world where “nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
Eerie. Recall the moment in February when Trump passed out “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING” hats to members of the press, and his Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, intoned the administration’s mantra, “Always say yes to the president.”
Another literary classic, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, conjured another fictive regime intent on revising the past to suit its purposes. In its version of history, “The party,” one of Koestler’s characters says, “was always right, even when it was wrong.” Later, he says, “The liquidation of the past is the precondition for the acceptance of the future.”
This seems an apt description of Trump’s worldview.
As the Organization of American Historians explains, the Trump Administration proposes ”to rewrite history.” That impulse animates last week’s presidential memorandum.
There, the president asserts that “For years, President Biden suffered from serious cognitive decline. … Biden’s cognitive issues and apparent mental decline during his presidency were even ‘worse’ in private, and those closest to him ‘tried to hide it’ from the public.”
“Notwithstanding these well-documented issues,” the memorandum continues, “the White House issued over 1,200 Presidential documents, appointed 235 judges to the federal bench, and issued more pardons and commutations than any administration in United States history. Although the authority to take these executive actions, along with many others,” it continues, ”is constitutionally committed to the President, there are serious doubts as to the decision-making process and even the degree of Biden’s awareness of these actions being taken in his name.”
Note the impersonal construction: “There are serious doubts.” It is left unspecified who is experiencing or entertaining those doubts. It might help, however, to recall Lutnick’s admonition to his colleagues in the administration: “Always say yes to the president.”
Driving home its point, the president’s memorandum offers this insinuation: “If his advisors secretly used the mechanical signature pen to conceal this incapacity … that would constitute an unconstitutional wielding of the power of the presidency, a circumstance that would have implications for the legality and validity of numerous executive actions undertaken in Biden’s name.”
As I noted in March, when Trump first raised a question about the Biden Administration’s use of an autopen, there is nothing to this. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a 2005 opinion that presidents can validly sign bills by directing subordinates to “affix the President’s signature to it.” That should settle the matter. Biden’s judicial appointments, grants of clemency, and other official acts are not going anywhere.
But that is not the point of Trump’s fixation on Biden and his directive. It is instead another sign of a president hoping to dismantle the legacy that his predecessor left behind, or, if he can’t do that, to use his power to tarnish it.
The comedian Jon Stewart was on to something last August when he said of Trump’s obsession with all things Biden, “It’s all he knows. He misses (Biden) so much … He would give everything for just one more moment with ‘crooked Joe.’”
Whatever the psychological roots of Trump’s Biden fixation are, it does this country a great disservice. It stokes grievance, resentment, and division. It invites the kind of corrosive cynicism and disrespect that makes it hard for partisans to take a breath and agree on a shared version of history.
Trump is entitled to conjure conspiracy theories about Biden and his advisors, but Americans would be well advised not to join him.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.