You can just do things. They don’t tell you this, but it’s true.
It’s especially true when you’re the President of the United States, the executive branch of the world’s most powerful nation. You have a lot of scope to just do things.
In the past, and certainly during the first Trump presidency, it all too often seemed as if the president didn’t know this, as if his ability to act was limited not by any real physical constraints, but by a kind of mental phantasm, a mirage of constraint. The poet William Blake called it “mind-forg’d manacles.” I’ve always liked that metaphor, so I’ll use it here.
On so many occasions between 2016 and 2020, Trump and his administration failed to do things that could have been done, failed to act decisively, because of their mind-forg’d manacles. They clung to quaint notions like the need for civility and fairness, even towards your most bitter enemies, who want to kill you. These days, on the right at least, it’s the lavender-scented disciples of Bill Buckley who are most likely to tell you to play nice and be civil and not overstep the boundaries of decency—when they’re not throwing themselves athwart history yelling “STOP!” of course, like the natural-born losers they are.
So Trump said he’d lock Hillary Clinton up during the 2016 campaign, electrifying the race and producing one of the greatest clapbacks of all time—and then as soon as he won, promptly dropped the promise and offered the hand of reconciliation. Big mistake.
Now, though, that simple message appears to have been received: You can just do things. You: President Trump. You can do things.
Now Trump is doing things like declaring his predecessor’s pardons “void, vacant and of no effect.” He did that yesterday, via his social-media platform, Truth Social.
“The ‘pardons’ that Sleepy Joe gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” Trump wrote.
“In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them! The necessary Pardoning Documents were not explained to, or approved by, Biden. He knew nothing about them, and the people that did may have committed a crime. Therefore, those on the Unselect Committee, who destroyed and deleted ALL evidence obtained during their two year Witch Hunt of me, and many other innocent people, should fully understand that they are subject to investigation at the highest level. The fact is, they were probably responsible for the Documents that were signed on their behalf without the knowledge or consent of the Worst President in the History of our Country, Crooked Joe Biden!”
We all know that President Biden was a meat puppet, a living marionette with less working brain matter than John F. Kennedy—after his skull had been turned inside out by multiple gunmen’s bullets. Axios even told us as much when they let slip, in 2024, that a “Biden oligarchy” including his wife was making important decisions on his behalf.
The extent of Joe Biden’s incapacity remains to be established, but the autopen debacle, which has revealed that almost everything he gave his signature to while President could have been signed by someone else, suggests the 46th President of the United States really was asleep at the wheel the whole time.
So, instead of playing along with the game that America had an actual executive branch between 2021 and January of this year—which is exactly what the Democrat establishment and the mainstream media, which did so much to hide Biden’s cognitive decline, want to happen—Trump is just saying it: Joe Biden’s presidential pardons are null and void, because they were made by someone else. Simple.
The full scope of the President’s declaration isn’t clear at this point, but you’ll notice that he didn’t just single out the House Select Committee that persecuted him and the Jan 6ers. “Many others,” the President said, which suggests the last-minute pre-emptive pardon for Anthony Fauci could also be null and void, and the Doctor might finally be brought to account for all the evil things he’s done, including those abysmal experiments with beagles and sand flies.
Perhaps the only pardon that won’t be null and void is Hunter Biden’s, which is one we can be sure Joe Biden actually meant, since it was given to protect himself, primarily, from the consequences of his dodgy dealings with Ukraine and China.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey recently wrote to the DoJ asking for a “full investigation into President Biden’s mental capacity in his final days in office,” with a particular view to the “legality of presidential actions in light of President Biden’s decline.” Needless to say, this is a whole can of worms, with implications touching every single decision made by the Biden administration over the last four years.
Here’s a second thing Trump just did. He just ignored a court order by an Obama activist judge who wanted to stop him using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan gangbangers. Tren de Aragua. The literal scum of the earth: rapists, robbers, drug-dealers, pimps, murderers.
Within hours of Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act on Friday, which he said he’d do in his inaugural address, judge James Boasberg revoked the President’s order and said all deportations under the Act must stop. He even said that planes in the air must be turned around.
Judge Boasberg did that knowing at least one plane was winging its way to El Salvador, which has agreed, for a price of $6 million, to house 300 members of Tren de Aragua in one of its hell-prisons for a year.
But instead of complying, the Trump administration did what would have been unthinkable just weeks ago: They simply said “no.” The planes continued on their way, and the White House put out a defiant statement saying the judge’s order hadn’t been broken, because the flights were already over international waters.
“The written order and the Administration’s actions do not conflict,” the statement said. “Moreover, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear—federal courts generally have no jurisdiction over the President’s conduct of foreign affairs, his authorities under the Alien Enemies Act, and his core Article II powers to remove foreign alien terrorists from US soil and repel a declared invasion.”
“This is headed to the Supreme Court, and we’re going to win,” a senior White House official told stunned reporters from Axios.
And so instead of a depressing climbdown, we got three more minutes of prime Bukele kino, as the President of El Salvador treated us to a video of the Tren boys arriving at the Centre for Confinement of Terrorists (CECOT) and receiving the rudest welcome of their lives. If you haven’t seen the video yet, you really should. It’s quite something.
The importance of this swerve can’t be overstated. Given their own way, activist judges will totally paralyse the Trump administration and frustrate its agenda. They did more than their fair share of that during Trump’s first term, but now the President has a more radical mission, and organized resistance from the left has evaporated, it’s clear the judicial branch sees itself as the sole bulwark against Trump and MAGA.
Liberal fags are saying this act of defiance marks the beginning of the first “true constitutional crisis” and that Trump could be impeached, but frankly I don’t think so. Liberal judges are siding with foreign gang members—career criminals who shouldn’t even be in the country in the first place—over American citizens. Good luck spinning that one in a way that doesn’t make the judiciary, and their leftist allies, appear to be active enemies of the American people. Which they are.
Wisely, that’s the exact line the White House is running with.
“If the Democrats want to argue in favour of turning around a plane full of rapists, murderers and gangsters back to the United States, that’s a fight we are more than happy to take,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
So yeah, you can just do things. Who would have thought?