Hunter Biden’s expletive-filled diatribe against almost every senior Democrat was the kind of rant people answer ironically with, “Why don’t you tell us what you really think?”
Talking to YouTuber Andrew Callaghan, the former president’s son demonstrated the same lack of impulse control that made him a drug addict in the past. He lacerated former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), former President Barack Obama and his acolytes, Anita Dunn, James Carville, David Axelrod, and others.
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His ripest words were aimed at Hollywood star George Clooney, one of the regicide Democrats who toppled former President Joe Biden in 2024 after the octogenarian’s precipitous mental and physical decline and his inability to govern had been made obvious by his catastrophic debate performance against Donald Trump on June 27.
Hunter said of Clooney, “F*** him and everybody around him. I don’t have to be f***ing nice. … He supposedly treats his friends really well. You know what I mean? Buys them things. And he’s got a really great place in Lake Como, and he’s great friends with Barack Obama. F*** you, what do you have to do with f***ing anything? Why do I have to f***ing listen to you? What right do you have to step on a man who’s given 52 years of his f***ing life to the service of this country, and decide that you, George Clooney, are going to take out basically a full-page ad in the f***ing New York Times to undermine the president?”
Profanities interspersed with boasts about unmatched achievements are exactly the modus operandi of Biden senior. Like father, like son. Hunter’s performance was equal measures of bragging and bile that Byron York describes as expressing the undiluted and unadulterated id of the embittered former president.
If, a year after his father’s ouster, Hunter was channeling Joe’s expletives, his hatred of the party he’d led, and his detestation of former colleagues who elbowed him out, it helps explain what the former president has felt for the past year and what motivated his key decisions in his final months in office.
He was surely at his most resentful and bitter in the weeks when he saw former political friends turn against him and found that he was powerless to stop them. His resentment and bitterness would have come to a boil at the moment he dropped out and immediately afterward, when it sank in fully that all was lost and his career had been forcibly ended in ignominy.
What did he do at that moment? For 27 minutes after his 1:46 p.m. post on X announcing that he was leaving the race, he did nothing. Then, at 2:13 p.m., he tweeted again to say he was backing former Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement.
Hunter has presented this in his recent podcast appearance, among others, as the most selfless act in Joe’s storied career of public service. But surely, it was the biggest “Eff you!” of his long career.
Some people say the 27-minute gap was strategically smart because it did not let the endorsement overshadow the huge news of Biden stepping aside. But that assumes the rest of the Democratic Party bigwigs were already all-in for Harris and wanted maximum effect for the announcement.
That notion, however, is surely belied by two things: First, Harris was a terrible candidate and was known to be a terrible candidate. She had become vice president not because of any achievements but only because Biden wanted a black woman in that position. She’d bungled her own campaign for the nomination despite being an early favorite, and then bungled her assignments as vice president or buried them under a heap of word salad.
Biden’s endorsement stuck the party with a candidate it could not repudiate. It made her the inevitable replacement. She was the outgoing president’s instant revenge on Democrats who’d betrayed him. He’d lumbered them with a leader whose haplessness was a matter of public record.
Second, some political analysts say Obama’s five-day delay in endorsing Harris was tactical and due to his wish to avoid making her nomination look stage-managed. But a simpler explanation is probably more accurate; he knew she was a loser. He’d have loved to replace her with someone with a better chance of winning and whom he could control for the next four years. But after agonizing for five days, racking his brains for a way to get someone better, he knew it couldn’t be done. His former vice president had skewered his old boss and the party that had ditched him.
Joe Biden’s implicit message to Democrats in endorsing Harris was the same as Hunter’s message to Clooney: “What right do you have to step on a man who’s given 52 years of his f***ing life to the service of this country?” And then, “So you can run with this loser. F*** you!”