Among a flurry of dramatic new executive orders issued by Donald Trump, today, was a particularly explosive one targeting Joe Biden.
Among a flurry of dramatic new executive orders issued by Donald Trump, today, was a particularly explosive one targeting his predecessor Joe Biden.
Mr Trump is appointing two of his allies, Attorney-General Pam Pondi and White House Counsel David Warrington, to investigate “whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state, and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the president”.
The idea, here, is that Mr Biden’s cognitive decline while in office was so severe that staffers were essentially running the government, in his name, without his input.
The order comes shortly after the release of a book, from journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, detailing the extent of Mr Biden’s decline since the death of his son Beau in 2015. The book is called Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, should you wish to read it.
Joe Biden, Donald Trump and their spouses on the day of Mr Trump’s inauguration earlier this year. Picture: Jim Watson/AFP
The executive order’s text largely focuses on Mr Biden’s use of an autopen, which added his signature to documents without him needing to do it manually.
Autopens are quite common in politics due to the sheer volume of papers that need to be signed, and have been used by US presidents for decades. Mr Trump himself has admitted to using them, though in his telling, for “only very unimportant papers”.
His expressed suspicion, regarding Mr Biden, goes further. He suggests the former president was not merely delegating the affixation of his signature to documents, but didn’t even know it was happening.
“Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!” Mr Trump wrote on social media in March, for example.
The text of today’s order, which requires Trump administration officials to review a series of executive actions signed during Mr Biden’s term in office, stresses that a president’s signature “holds tremendous power and responsibility”.
Joe Biden. Picture: Roberto Schmidt/AFP
“Words on paper can become the law of the land, individuals are appointed to some of the highest offices in government, national policies can be created or eliminated, and prisoners can go free. In sum, the nation is governed through presidential signatures,” it reads.
“In recent months, it has become increasingly apparent that former president Biden’s aides abused the power of presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline.
“This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history. The American public was shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden’s signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts.”
It goes on to argue that “for years, President Biden suffered from serious cognitive decline”, and nevertheless, the White House continued to conduct business in his name.
“Although the authority to take these executive actions, along with many others, 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,” the order says.
“The vast majority of Biden’s executive actions were signed using a mechanical signature pen, often called an autopen, as opposed to Biden’s own hand. This was especially true of actions taken during the second half of his presidency, when his cognitive decline had apparently become even more clear to those working most closely with him.
“Given clear indications that President Biden lacked the capacity to exercise his presidential authority, if his advisors secretly used the mechanical signature pen to conceal this incapacity, while taking radical executive actions all in his name, that would be an unconstitutional wielding of the power of the presidency.”
And naturally, this would “have implications for the legality and validity” of those actions.
Donald Trump. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP
Mr Trump himself is not necessarily immune from this issue, should it be taken further – already, since taking office in January, he has claimed he “didn’t sign” at least one significant executive order which clearly does bear his signature.
That being the order invoking a law from 1798, intended to be used in wartime, to justify the detention and deportation of migrants without due process.
Still. His argument here is that Mr Biden was chronically unaware of his own White House’s actions, not merely in one instance, but in many.
The investigation conducted by Ms Bondi and Mr Warrington will address several aspects of the alleged scandal, including:
– Any activity, co-ordinated or otherwise, to purposefully shield the public from information regarding Biden’s mental and physical health;
– Any agreements between Biden’s aides to cooperatively and falsely deem recorded videos of the president’s cognitive inability as fake;
– Any agreements between Biden’s aides to require false, public statements elevating the president’s capabilities;
– The purpose of these activities, including to assert the authorities of the president.
In addition, the investigation will consider the “circumstances surrounding” numerous executive orders, specifically those “for which the autopen was used”.
Trump administration reviewing Biden-era submarine pact with Australia, UK
US President Donald Trump’s administration has launched a formal review of former President Joe Biden’s AUKUS defense pact with Australia and Britain to allow Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, a US defense official said.
Australia, which sees the submarines as critical to its own defense as tensions grow over China’s expansive military buildup, said it remained committed to the project and looked forward to working closely with the US on the review.
As well as causing alarm in Australia, the review could also throw a wrench in Britain’s defense planning. AUKUS, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, is at the center of a planned expansion of Britain’s submarine fleet.
“We are reviewing AUKUS as part of ensuring that this initiative of the previous administration is aligned with the President’s America First agenda,” the US official said of the review, first reported by Financial Times.
“Any changes to the administration’s approach for AUKUS will be communicated through official channels, when appropriate.”
AUKUS was formed in 2021 to address worries about China’s growing power.
It envisages Australia acquiring up to five US Virginia-class submarines from 2032. Then, Britain and Australia would design and build a new class of submarine, with US assistance. The UK would take first delivery in the late 2030s, with delivery to Australia in the early 2040s.
Before that, the US and Britain would start forward rotations of their submarines in 2027 out of an Australian naval base in Western Australia.
Vocal skeptics among Trump’s senior policy officials include Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy adviser, who cautioned last year that submarines were a scarce, critical commodity, and US industry could not produce enough to meet American demand.
Submarines would be central to US military strategy in any confrontation with China centered in the First Island Chain, running from Japan through Taiwan, the Philippines and on to Borneo, enclosing China’s coastal seas.
“My concern is why are we giving away this crown jewel asset when we most need it,” Colby said last year.
Only six countries operate nuclear-powered submarines: the US, the UK, Russia, China, France and India.
A spokesperson for Australia Defense Minister Richard Marles said the US had informed Australia and the UK of the review.
“AUKUS will grow both US and Australian defense industry as well as generating thousands of new manufacturing jobs,” the spokesperson said.
A British government spokesperson called AUKUS “one of the most strategically important partnerships in decades” that also produces “jobs and economic growth in communities across all three nations.”
“It is understandable that a new administration would want to review its approach to such a major partnership, just as the UK did last year,” the official said, adding that Britain will “continue to work closely with the US and Australia … to maximize the benefits and opportunities” of AUKUS.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but one official told Reuters the Trump administration “is regularly reviewing foreign agreements to ensure they align with the American people’s interests – especially those initiated under the failed Biden foreign policy agenda.”
US Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said AUKUS was “critical to ensuring a free and open Indo-Pacific” and the administration should work to strengthen it and the US submarine industrial base.
“Anything less would play directly into China’s hand,” said Kaine, who represents Virginia, where US submarines are built.
Australia’s biggest defense investment
AUKUS is Australia’s biggest-ever defense project, with Canberra committing to spend A$368 billion ($240 billion) over three decades to the program, which includes billions of dollars of investment in the U.S. production base.
On Tuesday, Britain announced plans to invest billions of pounds to upgrade its submarine industry, including at BAE Systems in Barrow and Rolls-Royce Submarines in Derby, to boost submarine production as announced in Britain’s Strategic Defence Review. Under this, it will build up to 12 next-generation attack submarines of the model intended to be jointly developed by the UK, US and Australia under AUKUS.
In the US Congress on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said “we’re having honest conversations with our allies” and added in reference to Australia: “We want to make sure those capabilities are part of how they use them with their submarines, but also how they integrate with us as allies.”
Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who signed a previous agreement to acquire French submarines shelved in favor of AUKUS, told CNBC last week it was “more likely than not that Australia will not end up with any submarines at all, but instead, simply provide a large base in Western Australia for the American Navy and maintenance facilities there.”
AUKUS expert John Lee at Washington’s conservative Hudson Institute think tank said the Pentagon review was aimed at determining whether it could afford to sell up to five submarines when it was not meeting its own production targets.
Kathryn Paik, a Biden White House official now at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, said providing submarines to Australia would not sacrifice US readiness but instead boost collective deterrence.
“This review most definitely makes our allies in Canberra and London concerned, and could cause them to doubt US reliability as an ally and partner,” she said.
Trump’s Justice Department examining pardons issued by Biden
Ed Martin, the Justice Department’s pardon attorney, wrote in an email seen by Reuters that the investigation involves whether Biden “was competent and whether others were taking advantage of him through use of AutoPen or other means.”
The email stated that Martin’s investigation is focused on preemptive pardons Biden issued to several members of his family and clemency that spared 37 federal inmates from the death penalty, converting their sentences to life in prison.
Joe Biden’s activist Treasury issuance continues under Donald Trump
Despite past criticism by Scott Bessent and Stephen Miran, the debt strategy persists and is spreading internationally
The writer is a professor emeritus at the Stern School of Business at New York University and senior economic strategist at Hudson Bay Capital.
The rise in long-term rates around the world is worrying finance ministries and Treasury departments.
Higher rates not only make servicing the rising public and private debt burdens more costly, but also put economic growth at risk.
Independent central banks are reluctant to intervene by resuming past quantitative programmes of buying long-term bonds, or even cutting benchmark policy rates given above-target inflation in many leading economies. So backdoor quantitative easing via new forms of public debt management has become an option for financial ministries.
During Joe Biden’s administration, the US Treasury department started to change the composition of public debt issuance with more short-term offerings.
In a paper last year with my former colleague Stephen Miran — now chair of the Donald Trump administration’s Council of Economic Advisers — we labelled this strategy as Activist Treasury Issuance.
ATI was a variant of the so-called Operation Twist, where, after the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve pushed rates on longer-term bonds lower by purchasing them and selling shorter-term debt at the same time. Instead, however, the Treasury pushed down long-term debt by selling less of it.
We criticised ATI as a form of encroachment on monetary policy by fiscal authorities. And many Republicans — starting with the current Treasury secretary Scott Bessent — echoed similar concerns. However, despite Miran and Bessent’s roles in Trump’s senior economic team, ATI is not being phased out. It is being continued for now, as phasing it out would sharply increase long rates.
Worse, Bessent is flagging the prospect of ATI with a far deeper form of Treasury-led QE: he has stated that if market conditions were to become disorderly, the Treasury could decide to do more outright buybacks of longer-term public debt as a way of preventing long rates from increasing too much.
And now ATI is becoming contagious across the world. In Japan, 10-year bond yields started to rise from negative before 2022 to close to 1.6 per cent now as the Bank of Japan started to normalise policy rates; long rates are rising also because public debt ratios are close to 250 per cent of GDP.
Given the bar for the BoJ to resume QE is very high — probably another deflationary recession — the Japanese Ministry of Finance is reportedly considering its own ATI programme to issue less longer-term bonds and more short-term debt.
So, the prediction of my paper with Miran is becoming reality; once a government starts ATI, the risk is that its successors will become addicted to it or even double down on it like the Trump Treasury may do. And this encourages other countries, like Japan, to start their own ATI programmes.
Who else could go into ATI after the US and Japan? For now ATI in the Eurozone is unlikely as the European Central Bank has emergency facilities to resume QE if spreads on different sovereign debt widens excessively beyond what is justified by market fundamentals. Also, there is no central fiscal authority in the Eurozone that can issue significant amounts of debt, which is a joint liability of the union. The UK is a more likely candidate given its shaky fiscal position.
Economists have long discussed whether a game of chicken between a loose-budget government and a monetary authority committed to price stability leads to fiscal or monetary policy dominance. But with inflation still higher than target in the US, Japan and UK, and rising public debt more generally, we are now moving away from a world where central banks wimp out and support the financing of large deficits.
Over time it will be increasingly tempting for fiscal authorities to try to implement policies such as ATI that keep a lid on long-term bond yields. But this is a risky, slippery path that leads fiscal authorities to interfere de facto with monetary policy.
In turn, this can lead to inconsistencies between monetary and fiscal authorities that cause moral hazard by encouraging more risk-taking with leverage and inflaming inflation.
Measures like ATI lead to looser financial conditions at times when monetary authorities are trying to achieve price stability and avoid the excessive overheating of their economies. This is dangerous stuff, opening the door for a more political business cycle.
Biden dismisses Trump inquiry into his cognitive decline as a ‘distraction’
Former president says investigation of decision-making in office is designed to take focus off ‘disastrous legislation’
Joe Biden accused Donald Trump of “distraction” after he launched an investigation into the former Democratic president’s time in office, claiming Biden’s top aides had covered up his cognitive decline and taken decisions on his behalf.
Biden said in a statement widely emailed to US media that the move announced late on Wednesday came at a time when Trump was pushing a major piece of legislation that critics had said included massive tax cuts and huge slashes to social spending.
“This is nothing more than a distraction by Donald Trump and congressional Republicans who are working to push disastrous legislation that would cut essential programs like Medicaid and raise costs on American families, all to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations,” Biden said.
Biden added: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”
Trump has repeatedly attacked Biden over his actions in the latter years of his presidency, even going so far as to promote a conspiracy theory that Biden was executed in 2020 and replaced by a robot clone.
However, there has been a broader focus on Biden’s mental acuity and physical health, especially after a book co-authored by the CNN anchor Jake Tapper was published containing a detailed account of Biden’s physical and mental decline as his presidency wore on – something the book said worsened as the 2024 election loomed.
In that campaign, Biden was forced to drop out after a disastrous debate performance heightened concerns over his abilities and age. He was eventually replaced by his vice-president, Kamala Harris, who lost the November 2024 election to Trump.
In his announcement of an investigation, Trump directed the counsel to the president, in consultation with the attorney general, Pam Bondi, and other officials, to investigate “whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the president”.
The investigation will center on Biden’s use of the autopen to sign legislation. An autopen is a mechanical device that is used to replicate a person’s authentic signature, and has been used by US presidents to sign executive actions for decades.
Trump called Biden’s use of an autopen “one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history”.
The announcement comes as Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act runs into high-profile opposition, as the US president and his political allies try to ram it through Congress.
His one-time ally Elon Musk – who recently appears to have broken with Trump after helping him slash government spending – has called the legislation a “disgusting abomination”.
The bill includes about $3.75tn in tax cuts – extending the expiring 2017 individual income tax breaks and temporarily adding new ones that Trump campaigned on, including no taxes on tips. The revenue loss would be partly offset by nearly $1.3tn in reduced federal spending elsewhere, namely through Medicaid and food assistance.
As a result, 7.8 million people would no longer have health insurance with changes to Medicaid, including 5.2 million from the proposed new work requirements on non-disabled adults up to age 65, with some exceptions, the analysis said. About 1.4 million people who are in the US without legal status in state-funded health programs would no longer have coverage.
