You won’t believe this—or actually, perhaps you will—but now the Republicans are investigating the autopen. The House Oversight Committee, led by that sea-green incorruptible James Comer, is preparing to subpoena some top Biden administration officials to get to the bottom of this “scandal,” which Donald Trump has been braying about for months.
Comer, you’ll recall, had spent 20 million taxpayer dollars investigating the “Biden Crime Family” by last summer and turned up nothing, which naturally never stopped him from going on Fox News to announce that a new devastating revelation was just around the corner. Remember the name Devon Archer? He was a Hunter Biden business associate who testified before the committee behind closed doors. He told the committee he knew of no bribery allegations involving Joe or Hunter Biden and would be shocked if such stories were true. Comer immediately went on Hannity to say: “Every day this bribery scandal becomes more credible.” And by the way—the Biden Crime Family investigation is ongoing!
The new investigation into Joe Biden’s autopen usage is not being driven by whether it’s constitutional for a president to employ an autopen to sign legally binding documents. Nearly every constitutional scholar in the country agrees that it is. Rather, the point is to prove … well … it’s kind of hard to say. Joe Biden’s mental acuity will hardly be an issue at the top of voters’ minds come 2028.
However, someone else’s mental acuity might be.
We got a little taste of Trump’s mental state Saturday when he told the graduating class at West Point to avoid “trophy wives.” It was no more bizarre than most Trump speeches, I suppose, but the solemnity of the setting made it seem more so, along with the fact that Trump broke custom and did not shake the hand of every graduate. (Imagine how Fox would have covered it if Kamala Harris were president and had done that.)
MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell has been more direct than most lately in speculating about Trump’s mental state. He charged recently that Trump’s infamous answer of “I don’t know” when asked on Meet the Press whether he needed to uphold the Constitution “could be a sign of mental illness, or it could be a sign of early-stage dementia in a 78-year-old man.” Pugilistic Trump spokesman Stephen Cheung fired back by accusing O’Donnell of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and boasting that Trump “aced his cognitive test.”
He may be referring to something more recent, but the most famous test Trump took was way back in 2018, when he sat for the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, on which he boasted he got a perfect score. I found a sample of the test online. It asks the person to draw a 3-D cube. That might be tricky for some—except that a drawing of a 3-D cube is right there; all the test-taker has to do is copy it. It asks the person to draw a clock with the time showing 10 minutes after 11. It shows drawings of a lion, a rhinoceros, and a camel and asks the person to name them. It asks the person to count backward from 100 by sevens down to 65.
These are not the LSATs, in other words.
I won’t speculate about Trump’s mental health. There’s no need to speculate. He shows us every day that he’s not a very smart man, and he brags about it. He genuinely thinks tariffs will produce enough revenue to eliminate the income tax. That’s about as dumb a thing as I’ve ever heard any elected official say.
There’s a trope working its way across Facebook that I’ve seen on the pages of some old high school friends who are MAGA. It says something like: If Donald Trump is so dumb, how did he get elected president twice, outwit the deep state, and so on and so on.
The answer is simple. He lies all the time, and he had and has thousands of important people lying and covering for him. Fox News hosts. The Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro types. Aileen Cannon, notably. Nearly every Republican officeholder, either by commission or omission.
It’s the simplest lesson for America of the Trump years: Lying works. And I don’t mean lying in private. You lie to your spouse or child or sibling or friend, you’re probably going to get caught; and because you have a conscience, you will fess up and you will be humiliated and will have to perform penance to win back the person’s trust.
But public lying? That works reliably in this country—and with this political press—as long as you stick to it, never give an inch, and then turn around and call your accusers liars. That helps too. It’s called DARVO—deny, attack, reverse victim and offender—and it’s Trump’s one neat trick for political survival.
Comer, in his odd way, is proof of this. He’s bumbled his way through these investigations telling lie after lie and blooper after blooper. But by cracky, he’s still the chairman of the powerful House Oversight Committee. He still directs the spending of taxpayer money on these mad chases, he still has subpoena power, and we all still have to take him seriously, even though he flaunts his unseriousness on the national stage every single day.
Comer hasn’t bagged any quarry. But that isn’t really the point. The points are three: first, to do whatever Donald Trump wants him to do; second, to keep the focus on Biden’s mental condition so as to deflect attention away from similar questions about Trump; and third and mainly, to keep the base in a state of agitation about the latest “Democrat” conspiracy. The Biden autopen is the new “but her emails.” And when it runs its course, they’ll find a new new pseudo-scandal to pursue. I suppose we can take comfort in the fact that they keep getting dumber.
