‘Auto’ Focus

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Republicans care about it, one might answer, because Joe Biden’s senescence is a momentous civic scandal. It’s not his use of an autopen per se that’s alarming; it’s the fact that he and his staff have given us every reason to doubt whether the president was the one making decisions about whom to pardon. “Five people were running the country,” one Biden insider told Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson for their book, “and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”

According to the Times, the president met with his deputies until nearly 10 p.m. on his final night in office to discuss the last round of clemency. A draft of his decisions at that meeting was quickly prepared and okayed—but not by Biden himself. “I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons,” his chief of staff, Jeffrey Zients, wrote in an email to participants. Was Zients relaying his boss’ wishes, or was he acting unilaterally in his capacity as a member of “the board”?

How confident are we that a man who needed naps to get through preparations for his debate with Trump was even capable of staying awake until 10 p.m.?

Presidents have the authority to issue pardons, of course, but chiefs of staff do not. The autopen scandal is ultimately about whether an unelected junta was running the country in the cognitive absence of our elected leader, entirely unbeknownst to Americans. A constitutional travesty of that magnitude is worth investigating, especially now that staffers who had reason to know the truth about Biden’s condition have begun to plead the Fifth.

But my colleague understands all of that. In asking why Republicans are keeping the matter alive, he wasn’t implying that the cover-up of Biden’s decline isn’t of civic interest.

He was implying that there must be an explanation other than civics to explain the GOP’s interest since, as you may have noticed, modern Republicans don’t care about civics. Not at all. Not even a little. There’s no form of corruption in which the current president might engage that would cause GOP partisans to oppose his continued leadership. To MAGA, civics is the province of suckers and weaklings who foolishly regard self-restraint as a virtue.

There must be political, not civic, reasons to explain why Republicans are interested in l’affaire autopen. What are they?

Corruption in perspective.

I don’t think Trump’s interest in the matter is particularly complicated. He envisioned his second presidency as an exercise in “retribution,” and Biden’s last-minute pardons deprived him of the targets he was most eager to hit.

Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, the Biden family, and the January 6 committee were all placed beyond the legal reach of the incoming administration hours before it took office. Imagine the president’s frustration in having to content himself with harassing minor enemies like woke universities and left-leaning law firms while major nemeses like Liz Cheney escape “justice.”

It must drive him nuts—and not just him. On Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul proposed challenging the validity of Biden’s pardons by indicting one of the recipients anyway and letting the courts sort it out. His preferred target? Fauci, with whom he clashed numerous times in Senate hearings during the pandemic and has accused of perjuring himself in testimony. Like Trump, Paul seems irked that an archenemy has been spared the wrath of Republican “retribution” and is searching for legal pretexts to justify putting them back in play.

Another reason for Republican interest in the autopen matter is that MAGA has always run on conspiracy theories, from Barack Obama’s birth certificate to the “deep state” plot against Trump to the rigged election of 2020 to the Jeffrey Epstein client list. There’s no degree of civic or moral corruption to which liberals won’t stoop to cling to power: That’s the grassroots right’s core conviction, the obvious irony notwithstanding.

So what choice do their representatives in government have but to investigate when Democrats really do conspire to maintain their hold on power by hiding the truth about an elderly president’s mental faculties? It may be true, as my colleague implied, that Republicans won’t gain much (or at all) at the polls by continuing to pursue the “Biden was old” scandal, but that’s not the point. To his question—“What is the point of Republicans trying to keep it alive?”—I suspect a MAGA devotee would say, “What is the point of the Republican Party if they don’t try to keep it alive?”

The highest duty of modern Republicans, I’d argue, isn’t to seal the border or bring back manufacturing jobs; it’s to discredit liberals by exposing their chicanery. Trump’s refusal to do that in Epstein’s case is what’s driving populist anger at him. Refusing to do it in Biden’s case would be another betrayal.

L’affaire autopen is useful in a third way to Trump. It’s a reminder, albeit a pitiful one, to voters that no matter how unhappy they might be with him, things could be worse.

And they are unhappy. Per Nate Silver’s poll tracker, the last time Trump was net positive in average job approval was early March. His current rating of 44.4 percent is one of his lowest marks since returning to office, and it might be headed south if the Epstein backlash or the latest inflation data has legs. He’s now underwater on all four major issues (the economy, trade, inflation, and immigration) and has reached a net disapproval of greater than 10 points on three.

If you’re a “soft” Trump supporter who voted for him reluctantly, it’s in the GOP’s interest to remind you that the alternative was a party whose nominee until late July 2024 was en route to becoming a vegetable and whose deputies kept it a secret. Hate the current president all you like, but you can sleep soundly at night knowing that the corrupt pardons that issue from his White House were ordered by him personally, not by his chief of staff. He’s trustworthy—by the standards of modern America.

And then there’s this, the most cynical reason for probing Biden’s pardons: Given how unethically Trump has behaved and will continue to behave, Republicans need to do what they can to undermine Democrats’ moral authority to eventually hold him to account. The president’s party can’t stop him from being who he is, so it’s forced to try to stop the other party from capitalizing on any indignation voters might be feeling about Trump’s conduct.

In that respect, the autopen pardons were a godsend. Granting clemency to presidential relatives was shady as hell; doing it via a dubious process guaranteed to invite suspicions about Biden’s competence and the lawfulness of his orders was icing on the cake. Trumpy populism has always purported to champion good government while practicing rotten government and rationalizing it by pointing to corrupt Democratic precedents. (“Double standard!”) Whataboutism is its lifeblood, and the autopen episode was a major transfusion.

So, just in case the president ends up pardoning himself or blatantly trading an act of clemency for a bribe, it’s important for the GOP to seize this opportunity to juice as much public contempt as possible for Team Biden’s deception. Democrats can’t stoop to a Weekend at Bernie’s presidency and then posture later as norms-loving avatars of law and order at Trump’s expense.

Remember, populists don’t need to be better than the establishment. They only need to be able to argue semi-plausibly that they’re not meaningfully worse.

Tired of winning.

A different answer to my colleague’s question, though, is that it’s in the nature of movements like Trump’s to behave like they’re in the minority even when they’re in charge of everything. Given an opportunity to investigate now-retired Joe Biden’s autopen usage, the GOP will leap at the chance to behave like the out-party probing a sitting president because it can’t help but think of itself that way.

Wisdom on that point came from the unlikely figure of Breitbart reporter Matt Boyle.

Earlier this month, Axios asked him why so many figures in the MAGA establishment seem paranoid about being betrayed by the administration. “There’s a war-like mentality to everybody in the America First movement in that they live in a bunker. They’re ready to turn the war machine back on at a moment to be on guard,” Boyle told the outlet. Then he dropped this: “I do think it’s sometimes hard for some people to accept the fact that we’re winning.”

Now there’s an idea. Are some MAGA figures … “tired of winning”?

We can all relate to the pain of coping with defeat. Coping with victory is another matter. Why would some populists have trouble with that?

You can go as shallow or as deep as you like psychologically in trying to answer.

One possibility is that ideologues are purists, and so they’re destined to be disappointed by messy political realities. It’s no different on the left: How happy did hardcore progressives sound with Biden’s administration when Democrats controlled Congress in 2021 and 2022? If anything, the more power an ideologue’s party has, the less happy he or she is apt to be. It’s one thing for the opposition party to thwart your side’s agenda, after all, but there’s no excuse for failure when your own party is in charge of everything.

That goes double for MAGA. Socialists have tried and failed to unseat liberals as the Democratic Party’s dominant faction, but right-wing populists actually succeeded in dethroning traditional conservatives atop the GOP thanks to Trump. No wonder, then, that nationalist ideologues like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson sound disgruntled lately. The glorious postliberal revolution triumphed—so why hasn’t the new government enacted their entire wish list of priorities? Where the hell is the Epstein client list?

If you’re ideologically predisposed to feel like your side isn’t “really” winning even after it wins everything, making the Biden administration squirm over its dubious pardons must feel like a nice consolation prize.

A more prosaic answer for being tired of winning is that we’re all creatures of our environment, and the environment that’s nurtured Trumpism runs entirely on grievance.

That’s where the bunker mentality Boyle described comes from. Even before the president entered politics 10 years ago, right-wing media was 20 parts complaints about liberals in the Democratic Party and the media to one part advocacy for conservatism. It wasn’t evident at the time, but when the war on terror and the financial crisis produced a traumatic Barack Obama landslide in 2008, I think the right quietly became almost entirely unmoored from policy. In hindsight, the “constitutional conservatism” of the Tea Party was a placeholder, an atavistic default until something new came along to dislodge it.

Fox News, conservative talk radio, and right-wing publications filled the ideological void of the post-Bush, pre-Trump era with attacks against Democrats and the liberal elite. And they did such a good job of it that when Trump jumped into the 2016 race, the fact that he was the most pugnaciously aggrieved liberal-hater on the menu mattered more than whether he was conservative. The right had been conditioned to approach politics as “war,” in the words of Boyle’s former boss, and Trump was the most warlike leader available.

After a decade of him and his media servants egging on Republicans in apocalyptic terms to feel besieged by cultural enemies on all sides, go figure that many have become paranoiacs who can’t shake the sense that they’re losing even when they are, in fact, winning. Investigating Biden is a way to appease them by going on offense in the eternal “war,” never mind that the White House has been on offense on every front since January 20.

The struggle is the thing.

A more philosophical answer, though, lies in a passage from Francis Fukuyama that’s grown famous over time for obvious reasons:

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

That’s the last decade of American politics in four sentences, written more than 30 years ago. The struggle is the thing.

And if the struggle is the thing, it figures that postliberals of any stripe will be reluctant to give up the struggle even when they win. You can read progressive crusades for ever more extreme forms of “social justice” through that lens. After succeeding spectacularly in normalizing gay marriage, what else could they do but quickly switch to struggling for the right of trans women to play women’s sports?

This is why progressives typically reluctant to acknowledge major progress even when it’s obvious. If progress is real, then there’s less reason to struggle, and the struggle is the thing.

Right-wing populists also feel called to struggle but they no longer have a hostile government to struggle against. In a normal political party the base can and will satisfy that urge by erupting at times at its own leader for disappointing them but a quasi-religion like MAGA can’t do that comfortably. Perhaps that’s begun to change amid the Great Disappointment but I sure wouldn’t bet on it. The itch to struggle will need to be scratched and it can’t be scratched at Trump’s expense.

Fulminating against the Biden administration’s almost certainly legal pardons and its almost certainly legal autopen pardons is a way to scratch it. Trump won last year, and the postliberal right won with him—and that’s a real problem for a movement that imagines itself as a heroic populist insurrection attempting to unseat an eternally entrenched elite. Investigating a Democratic president whom no one cares about anymore reassures them that the struggle continues. The revolution has won, yet can never truly win.