Last night at Truth Social, President Trump "re-truthed" a post that claimed Joe Biden was executed in 2020 and replaced by a clone. Does he really believe this?
I don't think Trump believes this. Trump sometimes posts conspiratorial ideas that he doesn't express himself -- for instance, he's retransmitted and amplified QAnon messages over the year without ever fully embracing QAnon. It's a way to stay connected to his craziest supporters -- and it's a way to own the libs.
What Trump does believe is that Biden wasn't in charge of his own presidency. Last weekend, I told you about this Truth Social post:
Trump's own theory is that there were "people that knew [Biden] was cognitively impaired, and that took over the Autopen." Biden was alive, in Trump's view, long after 2020 -- he just wasn't the real president.
Then on Friday, in his joint press conference with Elon Musk, Trump said this:
The headline was Trump attacking Biden after Biden's cancer diagnosis (which suggests that Trump knows Biden is alive) -- but again, if you watch a longer version of the clip, you see Trump questioning who was really president the last four years:
TRUMP: One thing I can't figure out is what would an administration -- what were they thinking when they allowed millions of people from prisons all over the world -- not just from South America, Venezuela, all over the world, from the Congo in Africa, hundreds of people, thousands of people from the Congo, rough, rough prisoners, from Asia, from Europe, rough parts of Europe -- why would they allow them to come into our country? Why would they do that? It's the one thing I can't figure out.
And I don't believe it was Joe Biden. I really don't. I mean, look, he's been a sort of a moderate person over his lifetime -- not a smart person, but a somewhat vicious person, I will say. If you feel sorry for him, don't feel so sorry, 'cause he's vicious. What he did with his political opponent, and all of the people that he hurt -- he hurt a lot of people, Biden. And so I really don't feel sorry for him. But he wasn't a person that would allow murderers to come into our country. He wasn't a person that was in favor of transgender for anybody that wanted it, take kids out of families, et cetera, et cetera.
So I just don't understand why, why a thing like this, how a thing like this, could have been allowed to happen. Very sad. It's very, it's very sad, very sad for our country.
Again, Trump clearly believes that there is a living Joe Biden who doesn't deserve our sympathy, but who also wasn't involved in his own admini stration's policy-making.
As I told you last weekend, Trump really, really wants to prosecute political enemies who were pardoned by President Biden at the end of his term, and he also presumably wants to invalidate bills and executive orders that were signed by Biden. So Trump is pushing the "Biden was too mentally checked out to function as president and subordinates controlled the autopen" conspiracy theory.
I also told you that fossil fuel interests are pushing the autopen theory -- and now here's a Fox News story from a couple of days ago:
A pro-energy group is renewing its call for an investigation into over half a dozen Biden administration executive actions related to climate that it believes should be deemed null and void due to them being signed by an autopen without any public comment from former President Joe Biden confirming his knowledge of them.
Power the Future, a nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs, reviewed eight Biden executive orders that it says were significant shifts in domestic energy policy and said it found no evidence of the president speaking about any of them publicly, raising concerns that the orders were signed by autopen and that he was not aware of them....
The executive orders reviewed by Power the Future include an Arctic drilling ban in 2023, a 2021 executive order committing the federal government to net-zero emissions by 2050, an executive order mandating "clean energy" AI centers and an offshore drilling ban executive order shortly before leaving office in 2025.
Finding no evidence of Biden publicly speaking about the executive orders on climate, Power the Future sent letters this week to the DOJ, EPA, DOI, DOE, along with the House and Senate Oversight Committees, calling for an investigation to determine who made the decisions, drafted the executive orders and ultimately signed them.
"In light of the growing evidence that actions purportedly taken by the former president may not have been approved or signed by him, but instead promulgated by a small coterie of advisers in his name without his knowledge or over his signature using an ‘autopen,’ the need for congressional access to information has grown in importance with these revelations," the letter to GOP House Oversight Chair James Comer states.
Here's some information about Power the Future:
Power the Future is an energy advocacy organization with a “mission of offering truth, facts, and research that will enrich the national conversation on energy.”
Power the Future was launched in February 2018 by Daniel Turner, a former Republican communications staffer and alumni of the Charles Koch Institute. Turner also worked for Generation Opportunity, a non-profit 501(c)(4) organization that is funded by Freedom Partners, a multimillion dollar Koch-tied funding vehicle.
And before you get too mushy and sentimental about Josh Hawley because he's positioned himself as a defender of Medicaid, remember that he's still a bog-standard Republican in most ways. Here he is peddling anonymous gossip about Biden to Fox News -- and, of course, invoking the autopen:
... a Republican senator has made an explosive new claim: that Biden would sometimes get lost in a closet inside the White House while serving as commander-in-chief.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., made the stunning claim on "Hannity" Friday, citing an unnamed Secret Service whistleblower who Hawley said was assigned to Biden.
"He [Secret Service member] told me that Biden used to get lost in his closet in the mornings in the White House," Hawley said. "I mean, the guy literally stumbling around in the White House residence couldn't find his way out of his own closet. The president of the United States. I mean, this is outrageous. We were lied to."
... Hawley said the brewing scandal about the Biden administration’s use of an autopen to sign executive orders amounts to "one of the worst constitutional crises of our country’s history."
"We need to find out who actually signed off, so to speak, on all those autopen signatures and all of those pardons and all of those clemencies."
"It’s a rogue’s gallery of crooks and criminals and terrible people, rapists and others, I mean who actually was doing that, we know it wasn’t Biden, he didn’t know anything about it. "we’ve got to figure out who was actually in charge cos it sure as heck wasn’t Joe Biden."
Can they go mainstream with this? As I said last weekend, I think they'll try.
Posted with permission of No More Mister Nice Blog
