March 20, 2025

I’M PRETTY SURE THAT WOODY ALLEN DIDN’T INTEND FOR SLEEPER TO BE A HOW-TO GUIDE FOR THE FUTURE: Did Joe Biden’s presidency really happen?

The only Biden update that has made waves is the autopen story. A project from the Heritage Foundation has been claiming that Biden and his aides routinely used a machine to add his signature on key documents. Trump then declared that some of Biden’s pardons are void because he hadn’t actually signed them. The media of course called the claim a mad right-wing theory: fact-checkers pointed out that almost all presidents, going back to Thomas Jefferson, have used a signing machine; that the Heritage Foundation was looking at digital files which replicated Biden’s signature as a matter of course; and that Trump himself had used an autopen. (“Only for very unimportant papers,” Trump replied.) When the media gets in such a flap about an outrageous Trump claim, it usually means it’s true.

But the veracity of the autopen story is secondary to its mythic power. It taps into the idea, now widely accepted as correct, that Biden was for years too demented to be president, that his aides effectively ran the country while he doddered about ice cream, and that the media helped cover up the fact that the Commander-in-Chief was not all there.

Now, 60 days into Trump 2.0, the strangest part about Biden is that, even though he’s still alive, he’s abruptly disappeared from the public eye in a way that no other president has. He is Schrödinger’s president – neither dead nor alive, but existing in some liminal space on the edges of our human understanding.

Did Biden’s administration really happen? Or is America so cognitively impaired and inattentive that it cannot remember what occurred just the other day? Don’t think about that for too long, because Donald Trump just did something else.

As the befuddled historian said of Richard Nixon in Sleeper, “Some of us have a theory that he might once have been a President of the United States. But that he did something horrendous, so that all records, everything was wiped out about him. There is nothing in history books. There are no pictures on stamps or money.”

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Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll