Of all the constitutional crises Donald Trump has tried to manufacture, this one might take the cake: he’s now directing the Department of Justice to investigate Joe Biden’s use of the autopen. Yes, the autopen—an ordinary, mechanical device presidents have used for decades to sign routine documents when they’re not physically available. Not a conspiracy. Not a cover-up. Not a threat to democracy. Just a pen with a motor.
Yet Trump is treating it like Watergate 2.0.

You almost have to admire the gall. At a time when the country faces existential challenges—economic inequality, climate instability, a fragile world order—Trump wants America to focus on…a robot pen.

This isn’t satire. This is the political reality of Trumpism: governance by distraction, outrage by design. When there are no policies to offer, and no vision to articulate, create chaos. Flood the airwaves. Gaslight the nation.

The Greatest Show on Earth

Trump’s obsession with the autopen is only the latest installment in his long-running circus of manufactured scandals. Remember when he pushed to investigate President Obama’s birth certificate? Or insisted that millions of undocumented immigrants had voted in 2016—without a shred of evidence? Or accused Joe Biden of being part of a global child trafficking ring based on QAnon conspiracy theories.

There’s also the infamous sharpie incident, where he altered a hurricane map with a black marker to support a false claim. And let’s not forget his paranoid fixation with light bulbs, windmills, and toilet flushes. These aren’t just oddities—they are distractions with a purpose: to dumb down political discourse, turn facts into fiction, and keep the public chasing shadows.

The autopen “scandal” is another desperate attempt to paint Biden as weak or absent, implying he’s not in control, or worse, not even present. Trump knows exactly what he’s doing—it’s not about truth, it’s about narrative. And it’s working. Every hour spent on this nonsense is an hour not spent talking about Trump’s legal woes, authoritarian tendencies, or hollow platform.

A History of Use—and Non-Issue

For the record, the autopen is not some shady backdoor to governance. President George W. Bush used it. President Obama used it—famously to sign an extension of the Patriot Act while in France. Trump himself likely used it during his time in office, though now he pretends not to remember. It is a normal, legal, bureaucratic tool—not a deep state mechanism.

So why the outrage now? Because Trump needs a target, any target, to deflect from his own unraveling. And as always, he bets that the public will either forget the facts or never learn them in the first place.

A Nation Trapped in Farce

The deeper tragedy here is what it says about the state of American politics. We have let unserious men dominate serious debates. The GOP, once a party of ideas, is now a party of theatrical grievance, led by a man who treats truth as optional and distraction as strategy.

When a former president demands federal resources be spent investigating a signature machine, we’re no longer in a functioning democracy—we’re in a late-stage reality show. And every second we entertain this farce is a second stolen from real governance.

Time to Say Enough

So, when do we say enough?
When does Congress grow a spine and call out this dangerous absurdity for what it is? When does the media stop chasing the shiny objects? And when does the public—yes, even Trump supporters—ask themselves why their leader is more concerned with pens than policies?

The answer cannot come soon enough. Because while Donald Trump obsesses over autopens and vendettas, the rest of the world is moving on. And if America doesn’t wake up, we may find ourselves permanently stuck in a loop of political theater while the real crises of the 21st century go unanswered.
Autopen? For real, Donald?
Yes. And that’s exactly the problem.