Trump Faces Backlash After Report Claims He Used Autopen for Recent Pardons—Despite Slamming Biden for the Same Thing

Remember when Donald Trump repeatedly ripped into Joe Biden for using an autopen to sign official documents? He even suggested that any pardon signed by a machine instead of Biden’s own hand should be considered invalid. Trump went so far as to joke about it publicly and, according to some reports, swapped out Biden’s White House portrait for an actual autopen machine during a ceremony.

Well, fast forward to November 2025, and now Trump himself is in the hot seat over pretty much the exact same issue.

Two forensic document examiners told the Associated Press that several pardons issued on November 7—among them ones for former Mets star Darryl Strawberry, ex-Tennessee House speaker Glen Casada, and former NYPD sergeant Michael McMahon—appeared to have identical signatures. Identical as in pixel-for-pixel the same, which is a classic telltale sign of an autopen or digital copy-paste rather than seven separate hand-signed documents.

The Justice Department at first uploaded these pardons to its public website with the duplicate signatures. Once the story started spreading, the files were quietly replaced with versions showing slightly different signatures.

A DOJ spokesperson, Chad Gilmartin, called it nothing more than a “technical error” caused by “staffing issues” and insisted that President Trump personally hand-signed each pardon. He blamed the mix-up on leftover chaos from “the Democrat shutdown” (a reference to the brief government funding lapse earlier in the year).

White House press assistant Abigail Jackson doubled down, saying in a statement: “President Trump signed every single one of these by hand, just like he always does with pardons. The real story the media should be chasing is the mountain of questionable autopen pardons from the Biden era.”

Critics were quick to point out the irony—especially since Trump and many Republican lawmakers had spent months demanding investigations into Biden’s use of the autopen and even floated the idea that actions signed by machine were legally void without airtight proof of the president’s direct approval.

For the record, the autopen isn’t some shady new invention; presidents from Eisenhower to Obama have used it for decades when they’re traveling or facing huge stacks of routine documents. The difference, critics say, is that Trump built an entire political attack line around calling it illegitimate when Biden did it.

So… hypocrisy, honest mistake, or just another day in 2025 politics? The internet definitely has opinions, and the memes are already brutal.

What do you think—big deal or total non-issue? Drop your take below!

(Original reporting from The Associated Press; additional context from The Guardian and official DOJ statements)