PURE, UNDILUTED, UNADULTERATED JOE BIDEN ID. Former President Joe Biden has kept a low profile since leaving the White House six months ago. In May, his office announced that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, which it said could nonetheless be effectively managed. In the past few months, Biden has made a couple of speeches, presumably for big money, but the fact is that the 82-year-old former president, who has been visibly slowing down in recent years, is just not up to a vigorous schedule.
That’s where his 55-year-old son, the notorious former crack addict, influence peddler, and high-priced artist Hunter Biden, comes in. Hunter Biden hasn’t been seen much, either, but now he has given a three-hour — yes, three-hour — interview to popular left-wing YouTuber Andrew Callaghan. More than anything, the interview, sent to Callaghan’s 3.15 million subscribers, is the younger Biden’s impassioned and profanity-laced defense of Joe Biden’s record as president — and an angry, extended bitch session about all those politicos and influencers, especially Democrats, whom Hunter Biden blames for his father’s forced withdrawal from the presidential race last year.
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It sounds exactly like what Joe Biden would say, were he able. In other words, yes, it’s Hunter Biden talking. But it’s Joe Biden talking.
First, the defense. It appears that Joe Biden, who came into office dreaming of being Franklin Delano Roosevelt, strongly believes he was a great president because he was able to push massive spending bills through a closely divided Congress. That, to Hunter Biden, and he was clearly speaking for Joe Biden, was enough to be a good president.
“With the slimmest majority of any president ever, with a 50-50 Senate and, I think, a four or five vote majority in the House of Representatives,” Hunter Biden said, “he passed more legislation in two years than any president has in eight years since Lyndon Baines Johnson, including the Inflation Reduction Act and the Recovery Act, including the PACT Act, which was troops’ healthcare, the first gun legislation that has been passed in over a generation. And the list goes on.”
What’s not to like? It didn’t really matter what the bills accomplished — look at how much money was allotted for building electric vehicle chargers and how few were built. Nor does it matter whether the stratospheric spending fueled the inflation that spread national misery in the Biden years. What mattered, to a man who spent 36 years in the Senate, was to pass the Big Bill. And then pass another one, and another one.
There was a lot more like that. “He got 81 million votes. … Joe Biden got more votes than anybody that’s ever run for president in the United States before by a large margin,” Hunter said. “I mean, just think about it this way. The maximum number of votes that Barack Obama got just eight years earlier was 69 million. OK? Population hasn’t grown that much. They had the highest voter participation of any presidential election since 1901.”
And then: “Joe Biden had the most successful midterms of any president in either party in their first term since FDR in 1932. We won more state legislatures, we won more statehouses, more governorships. We picked up a seat in the Senate, which has never happened since 1932. And we held the Republican gains in the House to an all-time low, lower than even 1932.” The Biden administration, Hunter concluded, was “the most successful administration in my lifetime, and I’m including the Obama administration, I’m including the Reagan administration.”
It was classic Biden — Joe Biden. And it all leads to the big question: Why did a small group of Democratic insiders push such a wildly successful president out of the race in 2024? What followed was a stream of angry, profane resentment at the elites of the Democratic Party who concluded that Joe Biden was too elderly, and too infirm, for another term.
The list of those to blame was long. Nancy Pelosi. Charles Schumer. The Obama team. David Axelrod. James Carville. Anita Dunn. The cast of the podcast Pod Save America. George Clooney. Jake Tapper. And more.
The movement started, of course, after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump on June 27, 2024. Hunter Biden concedes it was bad, but he has a ready excuse. “I know exactly what happened in that debate,” Hunter said. [Joe Biden] flew around the world, basically, the mileage that he could have flown around the world three times. He’s 81 years old. He’s tired as s***. They give him Ambien to be able to sleep. He gets up on the stage, and he looks like he’s a deer in the headlights. And it feeds every f***ing story that anybody wants to tell.”
Biden blames Pelosi, the 85-year-old former speaker of the House, for striking the first blow, even though it was the passive-aggressive blow of being insufficiently enthusiastic about the Biden campaign. “The people who came out against him were who? Nobody — except Speaker Pelosi,” Hunter Biden said. “Speaker Pelosi did not give a full-throated endorsement.”
In Hunter’s telling, Pelosi’s move was the signal to others that it was OK to abandon the president. “The old-school moneyed liberal wing of the Democratic Party … the Schumer people and the Pelosi people and those people — not the rank and file” began to move away from Joe Biden. Even though Biden had won the votes of 81 million people in 2020, the elites thought they knew better.
“The Obama team, or the Obama people, and whoever else, and David Axelrod, and whoever the f*** else, is to go, ‘OK, you know what? We’re going to insert our judgment over yours,'” Hunter Biden said. “We, me and James Carville, who hasn’t run a race in 40 f***ing years, and David Axelrod, who had one success in his political life, and that was Barack Obama, and that was because of Barack Obama, not because of f***ing David Axelrod, and David Plouffe, and all these guys, and the Pod Save America guys, who were junior f***ing speechwriters on Barack Obama’s Senate staff who have been dining out on the relationship with him for years, making millions of dollars. The Anita Dunns of the world, who made $40 million to $50 million off the Democratic Party. They’re all going to insert their judgment over a man who has figured out, unlike anybody else, how to get elected to the United States Senate over seven times, how to pass more legislation than any president in history, how to have a better midterm election than anybody in history, and how to garner more votes than any president that has ever run. And they’re going to replace their judgment for his.”
It was an unrelenting stream of bile. And that was before Hunter got to actor George Clooney, who famously wrote an op-ed for the New York Times suggesting Joe Biden was too old and out of it to serve a second term as president. “F*** him,” Hunter Biden said of Clooney. “F*** him and everybody around him. I don’t have to be f***ing nice. No. 1, I agree with Quentin Tarantino — f***ing George Clooney is not a f***ing actor, he’s a f***ing — I don’t know what he is, he’s a brand. And by the way, God bless him. You know what? He supposedly treats his friends really well. You know what I mean? Buys them things. And he’s got a really great place on 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?”
It was pure, undiluted, unadulterated Joe Biden id. (Wasn’t the “God bless him” a nice touch?) This is what Joe Biden thinks about his party and what happened to him in 2024. Biden himself is too old and feeble and concerned about his presidential reputation to do it. But his son can.
It’s sad and touching and repellent, all at the same time. Yes, it is coming from Hunter Biden, who for years devoted his life to crack and whores and trying to make a buck off his father’s name. When Joe Biden was pushed aside, Hunter Biden suffered, too. After all, when he no longer had White House clout, who would pay tens of thousands of dollars for his paintings? Nobody, it turned out.
But Joe Biden, whatever you think of him, really did serve in the Senate all those years. He really did serve Obama loyally for eight years. He really did get elected president with a huge vote total. Yes, the election happened in the bizarre circumstances of 2020, but it happened. So, of course, a former president resents being kicked to the curb.
The most galling thing of all, for Joe Biden and for his son, is that all of the family’s I-thought-you-were-my-friend betrayers in the Democratic Party were right. Joe Biden was too old, too feeble, too clearly non compos mentis to serve as president for a second term. He wasn’t sharp enough to serve an entire first term, for that matter. “He got old in front of our eyes,” Hunter Biden said, which is indisputably true. Hunter tried to argue that, despite that obvious aging, Joe stayed sharp, which was not true. But the events that followed still hurt, not just the Bidens but their party as well.