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I am (still) Autopen [1]

['View Profile', 'Thom Hartmann', 'Chitown Kev', 'News Corpse', 'Two Americas']

Date: 2026-05-07  

Trump’s PR minions are running out of distraction material so they resurrected a Biden meme for …reasons.

Mango Mussolini took the bait as the more important news of the day wasn’t Trump going all Zelensky on canceling a joint appearance with Brazil president Lula, or the ruling illegal of another set of Trump tariffs. Trump posted another attack on Biden the Autopen.

Trump’s prop-comic status is now renewed, although like Gallagher, he’s going to run out of fruit to smash with a circus sledge hammer. Biden cannot continue to be blamed for Trump’s incompetence. There’s less than a thousand days left for King Donald.

Some comics never run of of shtick even if they recycle material. The GOPhascist audience of one needs the simplest memory tricks like a seal needs a ball, but only in an aquatics show where animal tricks are called “behaviors”.

Federal prosecutors quietly examined whether former President Joe Biden or his aides broke the law by using an autopen to sign official documents, but the Justice Department ultimately failed to build a criminal case. For much of 2025 and into early 2026, Trump waged a peculiar, pedantic war against the “autopen”—the mechanical device used by his predecessors, and particularly Joe Biden.

In his latest swipe at his predecessor, President Donald Trump posted an artificial intelligence-generated image depicting former President Joe Biden asleep, surrounded by ice cream, while former President Barack Obama holds an “autopen” and Hillary Clinton looks on menacingly. Trump, who consistently peddles theories about Biden’s presidency, referred to the AI image as a “highly accurate depiction of the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration,” though it appears to show Obama, Clinton, and Hunter Biden, the former president’s son – none of whom were official members of his administration. Trump announced on Truth Social Dec 2, 2025, that he was terminating Biden’s autopen-signed pardons/commutations as “null, void, and of no further force or effect.” Legal experts across sources (Reuters, Stanford Law, Guardian, Al Jazeera) say this has no constitutional basis—pardons are final once issued per Supreme Court precedent, and autopen use is longstanding and accepted. No courts have invalidated them as of May 2026.

“Things are turned into memes. The meme of the prop becomes the memorable message.” Another recurring theme in his political speeches and publicity moments is his use of props — which is frequent. While it can at times feel a little like you’re up at 5 a.m., bleary-eyed, watching an infomercial for a blender, there’s actually real rhetorical power behind the objects (and people) Trump chooses to employ as props. And there’s neuroscience to back it up. “Objects affect the brain in a totally different way — specifically the limbic brain, that primitive brain,” nonverbal expert Patti Wood said. ”That increases the speed in which we process it. If someone sees a prop, it hits their limbic brain, they’ll see it faster and it hits them emotionally.” That speed is notably very fast, with an MIT study from 2014 finding that the human brain can process images in as little as 13 milliseconds. And it helps even more when there are other senses involved to better target the emotions of his audience — a tactile prop that comes with auditory cues, kinesthetic cues, scent cues — they can all fast-track getting the response you’re aiming for. Targeting the emotions allows the points being made (and even ones being made less effectively in terms of facts, logic and data) to reach these audiences in a way that’s more “visceral,” Wood noted. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-prop-analysis_l_698f421ae4b0224cd9c7bc0b

Primary thing Epstein suicide note proves is that billionaires are the worst writers in the world. — Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social) 2026-05-06T23:26:04.815Z

Did the Autopen do it?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/5/7/800035119/community/i-am-autopen/

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