Donald Trump’s unhealthy fixation on Joe Biden took a weird turn over the weekend, as the Republican incumbent amplified a social media message that accused the former Democratic president of being a robotic clone after secretly having been “executed in 2020.”
While this didn’t reflect well on the current president’s judgment, it did draw some guffaws from observers who marveled at the outlandish absurdities Trump has embraced as part of his hysterical campaign against his immediate predecessor. His latest anti-Biden move, however, was far less amusing. NBC News reported:
President Donald Trump on Wednesday directed a wide-ranging investigation into former President Joe Biden and officials in his administration, accusing his aides of using ‘autopen’ signatures to cover up his ‘cognitive decline’ and assert presidential power. … The announcement Wednesday directs the White House counsel and Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate whether anyone ‘conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the President.’
The presidential directive to the Justice Department came roughly two weeks after Trump published an item to his social media platform in which he accused officials in the Biden White House of having committed “TREASON” as part of a secret plot to “destroy our Country.”
Biden apparently wasn’t pleased with the developments, issuing a statement that described the investigation as a “distraction” from the Republican agenda. “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,” said the Delaware Democrat.
There is, of course, a degree of irony to the circumstances. After his defeat in the 2020 election, Trump spent years insisting that Biden had ordered an investigation into him — an odd conspiracy theory for which there is literally no evidence. Now, it’s Trump who’s doing exactly what he falsely accused his predecessor of doing.
What’s more, it’s not just the executive branch taking the anti-Biden crusade seriously. House Republicans are ramping up their investigations into the former president — House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer has even subpoenaed Biden’s personal doctor to testify before Congress — as are Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The broader question is why the party has launched this crusade.
To be sure, there are plenty of possible explanations. I’ve seen some suggest that Republicans are engaged in an elaborate act of performative cruelty against a partisan foe as he combats an aggressive form of cancer. Others have argued that the relentless GOP efforts against Biden are designed to keep an unpopular former president in the news, distracting attention from the current president’s controversies, while keeping Democratic officials and candidates off balance.
But it’s against this backdrop that some of Biden’s most antagonistic foes have already made their motivations clear. Just hours before Trump signed his new anti-Biden directives, for example, Comer was quite candid during an appearance on Fox Business. “If these executive orders were just done and authorized by staff, and Joe Biden’s signature was forged on the autopen as some would believe, then I think the Trump administration is gonna have a pretty good standing in court to get rid of a lot of these executive orders,” the Kentucky Republican told viewers. Similarly, the Justice Department’s Ed Martin, the Trump-appointed pardon attorney, declared this week that he’s investigating Biden’s clemency actions, which followed the incumbent president’s recent statement that he’s voiding at least some of Biden’s pardons because, according to Trump’s conspiracy theory, Biden wasn’t competent enough to sign or even understand them. With this in mind, the endgame is coming into focus: Trump and his party want to invalidate parts of Biden’s presidency, clearing the way for, among other things, new partisan investigations into those whom Biden protected, further empowering the incumbent in the process. Will any of this work? What will the courts say? Will there be a public backlash against Republicans for focusing so much energy into investigating the past instead of preparing for the future? Will the Justice Department start indicting Democrats to satisfy the incumbent president’s political demands? Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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