Many Americans, presumably, would prefer it to be talked about less Hunter Biden. The president’s troubled son has been a pervasive topic of conversation since 2019, when his misadventures inspired Donald Trump’s extortion attempt against Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president. Since then, we’ve dug through Hunter’s laptop, read piles of his swear-heavy texts, examined the stumps of his ruined teeth, and spotted him in the shower with a blowjob and a friend. His dodgy paychecks, IRS woes, paternity dramas, and nude selfies constitute a tragi-comic monument to human frailty, one that seems out of place even in the White House’s ne’er-do-well parents’ lobby—your Billy Carters , your Roger Clinton. Perhaps the closest Hunter to a trailblazer is turn-of-the-millennium Robert Downey, Jr.: a painfully public avatar of squandered privilege, a darkly hilarious thug spewing sparks of pathos and omens of doom, the bag of America’s favorite trash.
House Republicans believe there is more dirt to be thrown around and their constituents should know it. In November, Kentucky Congressman James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, issued a subpoena to impeach Hunter as part of the committee’s ongoing impeachment investigation into President Biden. Hunter agreed to testify, during a session scheduled for December 13, but only during a public hearing. His lawyer, Father Lowell, wrote to Comer: “We have seen you use closed sessions to manipulate and even distort facts and misinform the public. We therefore propose to open the door. A few days later, Comer and Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, rejected the request. The dispute seemed like a surprising reversal: Unfettered access to Hunter Biden’s inner world is something his opponents have conditioned us to.
Their argument for Hunter as an agent of intergenerational corruption was enabled by Trump’s narcissistic obsession with his co-beneficiary of nepotism and shady dealings. Hunter’s most Trump-y public decision ever was also his biggest: He accepted a jackpot offer in 2014 to become a board member of Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company, which paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. at the time when his father, then vice president, led the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy. Taking Burisma’s money is exactly the kind of thing Trump would do, and that’s why it made him so furious. If he weren’t hooked on Hunter, Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney David Weiss surely wouldn’t have spent years pursuing tax and gun charges against a first-time offender. Maryellen Noreika, a federal judge appointed by Trump, surely would not have reached a plea deal on these charges on July 26. The child of a sitting president would not have been charged, as Hunter was on September 14, with illegal possession of an unloaded gun eleven days ago, when “Shallow” entered the the charts, nor for tax evasion and filing a false declaration. as Hunter was on December 7.
Joe Biden has said virtually nothing publicly about this, which is both okay and strange. Like law professor Kate Shaw wrote In Atlantic, in June, the president “went out of his way to uphold essential bipartisan standards of law enforcement independence and insulation from political interference” in his son’s case. “Biden’s silence and discretion are admirable,” Shaw continued, although they also risk being “misunderstood as inaction or passivity.” (His discretion also takes on a certain irony when juxtaposed with Hunter’s recent insistence on a public hearing.) Silence, despite its political value or necessity, may be the only appropriate response when your primary political opponent has let hear that your son should receive death. punishment for his transgressions, as Trump did on July 11. Or when, say, a congresswoman allied with your main political opponent risked breaking Washington’s revenge porn laws during a House Oversight Committee hearing by showing still images of your sex tapes. son, as did Marjorie Taylor Greene, July 19.
But President Biden’s reserve on matters relating to Hunter appears to extend beyond his fidelity to impartial justice and procedural standards. Writing in this magazine in 2019, Adam Entous request whether voters saw “the controversy over Hunter’s business dealings” as “the product of Biden’s resistance to having difficult conversations, especially those involving his family.” In a report published in August, the Washington Posts Tyler Pager cited the elder Biden’s reluctance to “strategize or even discuss his son as the political issue he has become,” noting that “most aides categorically avoid discussing the issues of Hunter with the president, believing that their contributions and ideas would not be welcome.”
It’s no mystery why President Biden, who has been so open about discussing the grief and heartbreak he’s faced in his life, might want to establish a no-go zone around Hunter, who, at almost three years old, survived the events of December 1972, a car crash that killed Biden’s wife Neilia, thirty, and their one-year-old daughter Naomi, and seriously injured their son Beau, who was almost four. But Hunter’s 2021 memoir, “Pretty Things“, also suggests that Biden vigorously avoids discussing Hunter’s issues with Hunter. According to the book, after Wall Street Journal reported upon Hunter’s appointment to the Burisma board, his father called him to say, “I hope you know what you’re doing.” » Even if this terse and gnomic message was hardly congratulatory, Biden Sr. – as vice president and US anti-corruption official in Kiev – could have changed the course of recent US history. -United simply by saying no to his son. At a time when Biden’s famously unfiltered persona could have been most fruitfully deployed, the door obviously remained closed.
“Beautiful Things” is one of several memoirs that members of the extended Biden family have released over the past six years. The others are those of Joe Biden”Promise me, daddy» (2017); “Growing up Biden» (2022), by Valerie Biden Owens, sister of the president and consigliere for life; And “If we break» (2022), by Kathleen Buhle, Hunter’s first wife and mother of three of his children. A policy of not commenting on Hunter’s business activities — and, to some extent, on Hunter in general — extends to the elder Biden books. “Promise Me, Dad” devotes long passages to the Obama administration’s work in Ukraine without acknowledging Hunter’s role at Burisma, and “Growing Up Biden” alludes to it only in a brief aside. Even Franklin Foer recently published “The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Fight for America’s Future” which was written with the cooperation of the administration, mentions Hunter only once. He mentions Hunter’s older brother Beau, who died five times from brain cancer in 2015.
In “Beautiful Things”, when Hunter recalls caring for Beau during the last months of his life, he writes that they “could communicate through a kind of nonverbal frequency that we had developed through previous setbacks and tragedies . Saying much more risked breaking the spell and going somewhere neither of us wanted to go. It’s a poignant and revealing moment. Reading the four memoirs in succession, silence becomes the underlying current that pulls at a voluble and demonstrative family brand. The silence is linked to what the books describe as an extraordinary closeness between the Biden siblings that borders on telepathy. (“We understand each other intuitively,” Valerie writes. “We can finish each other’s sentences.”) Again and again, retention is described as a show of love and connection, a quiet display of strength. Many memoirs are frustrating because of what they leave out or elide. Biden’s books, with striking consistency, demonstrate a pride in how much can be left unsaid.
In these four stories, Hunter’s existence is defined by Beau’s, and Valerie’s is defined by Joe’s. In “Beautiful Things”, Hunter remembers waking up in the hospital, after the car accident, to see Beau looking at him and repeating “I love you”; Beau was her “star star from those first practically conscious moments in my life,” Hunter writes. Their father, then a newly elected senator from Delaware, took the oath of office in the boys’ hospital room. Following the accident, Valerie, who had managed Joe’s campaign, resigned from her teaching job and moved in with the broken family, becoming, for a time, their housekeeper and the boys’ primary caregiver. . Even later, when Valerie and her new husband returned from their honeymoon, Joe, Beau and Hunter were waiting at the airport and the five of them moved in together.
Aunt Val, Hunter recalled in “Beautiful Things,” was “as warm and tender and emotional as a mother figure could be.” It also commemorates “her father’s heroic gathering of his family to surround us and envelop us in unbroken love.” But the result of these efforts, he concludes, was bittersweet: “Beau and I never really grieved the loss of our mother and our little sister. » “Beautiful Things” is often fragile and defensive, but these passages are moving in the way they carefully acknowledge, without resentment or blame, the way this outpouring of love for two little boys may have inadvertently stifled or crowded out a part of the necessary work. of mourning. “We were almost ashamed to admit the sadness we might have felt,” he wrote, adding: “It felt almost like a betrayal to say that we missed our mother.”
