President Donald Trump Says He Only Uses Autopens on Very Unimportant Papers

There is so much hypocrisy around President Donald Trump's second presidency that one can hardly keep up. One of the first things he did upon taking office the second time was sign an executive order demanding federal employees stop working from home. Since that time, he has flown to Mar-a-Lago multiple times, which many have described as working from home.

Speaking of trips, when President Trump went to the Super Bowl in New Orleans, no one questioned that decision. However back in 2009, after former President Obama took First Lady Michelle to dinner in New York to celebrate his win, Republicans couldn't stop complaining about the taxpayer dollars used for this single night. In March 2025, President Trump accused former President Biden of using an autopen to sign the Jan. 6 pardons. Has Trump used one? Here's what we know.

As the song goes, after midnight, we're gonna let it all hang out. Unfortunately when midnight hits, that's when President Trump usually unloads some of his wilder posts on Truth Social. Take the one from March 17, 2025, posted at 12:35 a.m., where Trump wrote that the pardons given by "Sleepy Joe Biden" to members of the January 6 committee were "VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT," because they were done using an autopen.

According to NPR, the first commercially-used autopen was designed by Robert De Shazo Jr. in 1942. A precursor was invented in the 19th century and was used by none other than Thomas Jefferson. Essentially it's a device that allows someone to mimic their own signature, which is useful if one has to sign a large amount of documents. Trump is suggesting that Biden's potential use of autopen renders his pardons illegitimate as it wouldn't have been done using a pen held by the former president's hand.

Mere hours after posting to Truth Social about Biden's alleged use of an autopen, Trump was at the Kennedy Center where he was taking questions from reporters, per Fox News. Someone from NBC asked the president if he has ever used an autopen. "Only for very unimportant papers," he replied. "And I don’t call them unimportant if you do letters where people write in, and they’d love to have a response." He then said what Biden used the autopen for was "terrible" before dismissing the reporter.

Word on the street is, Harry Truman and Gerald Ford used autopens but the public wasn't made aware of their use in the Oval Office until Lyndon B. Johnson let the cat out of the bag. Apparently, he allowed one to be photographed in the White House, per the Shapell Manuscript Foundation. It was used for a cover story for The National Enquirer titled, "The Robot That Sits in for the President."

Speaking of robots and presidents, John F. Kennedy used an autopen so often that a book was written about it. In The Robot That Helped to Make a President, author Charles Hamilton claimed that Kennedy's dependence on his autopen made his authentic signature extremely rare. Ask now what your autopen can do for you, but what you can do for your autopen.