Donald Trump targets Biden's mental health: GOP demands probe into autopen use, Presidential fitness under microscope
Now, the United States House of Representatives is launching its own investigation into Joe Biden, specifically taking aim at allegations surrounding the former president's cognitive decline and the Democratic party's coverup of it.
Additional investigations are underway in the United States Senate, with the White House also conducting its own investigation into Joe Biden's alleged autopen use, which is a talking point Trump has leaned into quite often recently.
This political strategy has drawn considerable scrutiny, giving that the mid-term elections are due next year.
Donald Trump continues to bring up Biden health issues
Joe Biden was infamously in the headlines for his reported cognitive decline. While Biden's political opponents had been accusing him of being out of it as far back as his 2020 election campaign, matters really came to a head during the 2024 election cycle's first Presidential debate.
Joe Biden's performance during the June 27 debate hosted by CNN was widely panned by political pundits as being among the worst debate performances in modern American history.
This resulted in accusations of the Democratic party covering up Biden's cognitive decline to skyrocket.
As evidenced by the Republican party's current investigations, this is not a scandal Donald Trump or his operatives are willing to let die anytime soon.
Trump urges reporters to cover Biden's autopen and not Epstein pic.twitter.com/g2rb2he0f9
The House Oversight Committee investigation into Biden's alleged use of an autopen is being led by Representative Derrick Van Orden, who claimed that using an autopen was a violation of the United States Constitution's Article II, which vests executive authority solely with the President. As Van Ord said,
'It doesn't say chief of staff. It doesn't say an auto pen.'
CNN's debate moderator has also made accusations of a coverup
Donald Trump and the GOP aren't the only ones who've raised questions about Joe Biden's cognitive decline.
On May 2025, Jake Tapper, who was one of the debate moderators, published a book detailing Biden's decline called Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.
Tapper did, however, court controversy for promoting his book instead of focusing on Donald Trump's own scandals.
Still can't get over that Jake Tapper, the top guy at CNN, wrote a book about how everyone knew about Biden's mental decline but covered it up. He's the guiltiest of them all. In a sane world, he'd be fired for journalistic malpractice. But still top guy at CNN
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Indian Express
30 minutes ago
- Indian Express
From Obama's ‘treason' to missing gold reserves, the wildest conspiracy theories consuming Trump's Washington
OK, so US President Donald Trump's name is in the Jeffrey Epstein files. But who put it there? Could it possibly have been Barack Obama from his prison cell? Or a tranquilized Hillary Clinton? Oh wait, maybe it was etched onto the documents by Joe Biden's magical autopen. Or is that mixing up different scandals? It's so hard to keep up with the latest wild notions circulating in the capital and beyond. Washington is awash in conspiracy theories these days, a cascade of suspicion and intrigue promoted or denied in the Oval Office, ricocheting around Capitol Hill and cable news and propelled at warp speed across social media. No commander in chief in his lifetime has been as consumed by conspiracy theories as Trump, and now they seem to be consuming him. They have been the rocket fuel for his political career since the days when he spread the lie that Obama was secretly born overseas and therefore not eligible to be president. More than a decade later, Trump is coming full circle by trying to divert attention from the Epstein conspiracy theory with a new-and-improved one about Obama supposedly committing treason. The harmonic convergence of competing conspiracies has overshadowed critical policy issues facing America's leaders at the moment, whether it's new tariffs that could dramatically reshape the global economy or the collapse of ceasefire talks meant to end the war in the Gaza Strip. The Epstein matter so spooked Speaker Mike Johnson that he abruptly recessed the House for the summer rather than confront it. The allegations lodged against Obama so outraged the former president that he emerged from political hibernation to express his indignation at even having to address them. The whispers and questions — 'this nonsense,' as Trump put it — followed the president all the way to Scotland, where he landed Friday for a visit to his golf club. 'You're making a very big thing over something that's not a big thing,' he complained to reporters, suggesting, in his latest bid at conspiracy deflection, that instead of him, the news media should be looking at Epstein's other boldface friends like former President Bill Clinton. 'Don't talk about Trump,' he said. Conspiracy theories have a long place in American history. Many Americans still believe that someone else had a hand in killing President John F. Kennedy, that the moon landings were faked, that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job or that the government is hiding proof of extraterrestrial visitors in Roswell, New Mexico. Sixty-five percent of Americans told Gallup pollsters in 2023 that they think there was a conspiracy behind Kennedy's assassination. Some conspiracy theories do turn out to be true, of course, or have some basis. But presidents generally have not been the ones spreading dubious stories. To the contrary, they traditionally have viewed their role as dispelling doubts and reinforcing faith in institutions. President Lyndon B. Johnson created the Warren Commission to investigate his predecessor's murder specifically to keep rumors and guesswork from proliferating. (Spoiler alert: It didn't.) Trump, by contrast, relishes conspiracy theories, particularly those that benefit him or smear his enemies without any evident care for whether they are true or not. 'There have been other conspiratorial political movements in the country's past,' said Geoff Dancy, a University of Toronto professor who teaches about conspiracy theories. 'But they have never occupied the upper echelons of power until the last decade.' Conspiracy theories are not the exclusive preserve of Trump and the political right. Around the time of last month's anniversary of the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, some on the left once again advanced the notion that the whole shooting episode had been staged to make the Republican candidate into a political martyr. Trump, however, has stirred the plot pot more than any other major political figure. In the six months since retaking office, he has remained remarkably cavalier about suggesting nefarious schemes even as he heads the government supposedly orchestrating some of them. He suggested the nation's gold reserves at Fort Knox might be missing, resurrecting a decades-old fringe supposition, even though he would presumably be in position to know whether that was actually true, what with being president and all. 'If the gold isn't there, we're going to be very upset,' he told reporters. It fell to Scott Bessent, the decidedly nonconspiratorial Treasury secretary, to burst the bubble and reassure Americans that, no, the nation's reserves had not been stolen. 'All the gold is present and accounted for,' he told an interviewer. Trump has played to long-standing suspicions by ordering the release of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., an act of transparency for historians and researchers that may shed important light on those episodes. But Trump has gone beyond simple theory floating to make his own alternate reality official government policy. Some applicants for jobs in the second Trump administration were asked whether Trump won the 2020 election that he actually lost; those who gave the wrong answer were not helping their job prospects, forcing those rooted in facts to decide whether to swallow the fabrication to gain employment. Trump has likewise claimed that Biden was so diminished toward the end of his term that his aides signed pardons without his knowledge using an autopen. Biden was certainly showing signs of age, but the autopen story was conjecture. Asked if he had uncovered proof, Trump said, 'I uncovered, you know, the human mind. I was in a debate with the human mind and I didn't think he knew what the hell he was doing.' The past week or so has seen a fusillade of Trumpian conspiracy theories, seemingly meant to focus attention away from the Epstein case. Tulsi Gabbard, the president's politically appointed intelligence chief, trotted out inflammatory allegations that Obama orchestrated a 'yearslong coup and treasonous conspiracy' by skewing the 2016 election interference investigation — despite the conclusions of a Republican-led Senate report signed by none other than Marco Rubio, now Trump's secretary of state. She also claimed that Hillary Clinton was 'on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers' during the 2016 campaign. Relying on this, Trump accused Obama of 'treason,' suggesting he should be locked up and going so far as to post a fake video showing his predecessor being handcuffed in the Oval Office and put behind bars. The idea of a president posting such an image of another president would once have been seen as a shocking breach of etiquette and corruption of the justice system, but in the Trump era it has become simply business as usual. For all that, the conspiracy theorist in chief has not been able to shake the Epstein case, which reflects the rise of the QAnon movement that believes America is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Most of the files, the ones that his attorney general told him include his name, remain unreleased, bringing together an unlikely alliance of MAGA conservatives and liberal Democrats. It was well known that Trump was friends with Epstein, although they later fell out. So it's not clear what his name being in the files might actually mean. But Trump is not one to back down. Asked last week about whether he had been told his name was in the files, Trump again pointed the finger of conspiracy elsewhere. 'These files were made up by Comey,' he told reporters, referring to James Comey, the FBI director he had fired more than two years before Epstein died in prison in 2019. 'They were made up by Obama,' he went on. 'They were made up by the Biden administration.' The theories are endless.
Economic Times
32 minutes ago
- Economic Times
US tariff deadline of August 1 is firm, no extensions: Commerce secretary
The United States will implement tariffs on August 1. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed no extensions will be granted. Customs will collect the money from the mentioned date. This decision sends a message to trading partners. They must meet commitments to strike trade deals with the Trump administration. Earlier, President Trump had mentioned the deadline could be extended or not. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Rising tariff floor: Trump sets 15% as the starting point Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads The United States will not offer any extensions to its August 1 tariff deadline , Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed on Sunday, according to AFP. This rules out any possibility of a second extension from the initial July 9 deadline set by President Trump.'So no extensions, no more grace periods. August 1, the tariffs are set. They'll go into place. Customs will start collecting the money, and off we go,' Lutnick told Fox News announcement sends a firm and final message to US trading partners: the deadline is real, and time-bound commitments must now be met. This is particularly relevant for countries, including India, still hoping to strike trade agreements with the Trump administration ahead of the so-called "reciprocal tariff" Donald Trump had earlier left the door open to a possible delay, saying the deadline 'could or could not' be extended. But Lutnick's remarks eliminate that uncertainty, cementing August 1 as the date when the new tariff regime will officially come into days before the deadline, the two-time Republican President indicated that the baseline tariff rate would be no lower than 15%, up from the 10% figure initially floated in at an AI summit in Washington on July 24, he said, 'We'll have a straight, simple tariff of anywhere between 15% and 50%. We have 50 because we haven't been getting along with those countries too well.'Earlier this month, Trump said that letters were being sent to more than 150 countries, informing them of the tariff hike. 'Probably 10 or 15%, we haven't decided yet,' he said at the time. But with the president now confirming a 15% floor and a possible ceiling of 50%, the scope of these levies appears to be Secretary Lutnick added further clarity during a separate interview with CBS News, stating that smaller nations—particularly in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa—would face a baseline tariff of 10%, slightly lower than the new floor, but still significant compared to pre-April norms.
News18
2 hours ago
- News18
'No Extensions Or Grace Periods': US Firm On August 1 Tariff Deadline
Last Updated: So far, five countries — Britain, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Japan — have agreed to new trade terms with the US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Sunday said that the United States will move forward with its planned tariffs on trading partners from August 1, with no extensions or exemptions. Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Lutnick made clear the administration's firm stance, 'No extensions, no more grace periods. August 1, the tariffs are set. They'll go into place. Customs will start collecting the money, and off we go." The decision adds pressure on key US allies and trading partners to finalise trade deals before the deadline, part of the Trump administration's push to rewrite global trade rules that it considers unfair to American industries. US President Donald Trump, currently in Scotland for talks with European Union officials, is still open to negotiations even after the tariffs are imposed, Lutnick said. However, he made it clear that the US has set the terms. 'They're hoping they make a deal, and it's up to President Trump, who's the leader of this negotiating table. We set the table," he added. So far, five countries — Britain, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Japan — have agreed to new trade terms with the US, securing deals ahead of the looming deadline. While the tariffs they accepted are often higher than the current 10 percent base rate imposed since April, they remain lower than what Washington had originally threatened in the absence of an agreement. The European Union, however, has yet to reach a deal. It now faces the risk of a 30 percent blanket tariff on exports to the US beginning August 1. Trump has said there's a '50-50" chance of striking an agreement with the EU. Earlier today, Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen were scheduled to meet at Trump's Turnberry golf resort in southwest Scotland. The meeting is seen as a final attempt to avoid a major transatlantic trade conflict. The EU's negotiating team has been working intensively to secure a deal that would protect a trading relationship worth an estimated $1.9 trillion annually. But any agreement must be approved by all 27 member states. EU ambassadors, currently visiting Greenland, were meeting Sunday to review the latest developments. (With inputs from agencies) view comments First Published: Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
