In foul-mouthed podcast tour, Hunter Biden warns democrats he won’t go quietly
Joe Biden’s son blasts the party establishment and offers details about moments that doomed his father’s re-election.
On January. 20, as Donald Trump was preparing to gild the Oval Office, Joe and Jill Biden made their wistful departure aboard a Marine Corps helicopter out of Washington, DC, and into a post-presidential life in Delaware. The Bidens have since — mostly — obeyed decorum and kept quiet.
But this week Hunter Biden spoke. And the former first son had a lot to say.
During more than four hours of interviews, spread over two different podcasts, Hunter took aim at a Democratic Party establishment that forced his father to abandon his re-election fight a year ago, ending an epic political career. He also scattered tantalising details about some of the pivotal episodes that precipitated the party coup.
Depending on one’s affection for the Bidens, Hunter was either playing the loyal son and brave truth-teller shouting at a cloistered establishment or a ne’er-do-well crying for attention and aggravating the divisions still tormenting the party as it seeks a path forward in the era of President Trump.
One thing upon which all can agree is that Hunter was unsparing. And foul-mouthed.
James Carville “hasn’t run a race in 40 f — ing years,” he said of the Clinton-era Democratic consultant. David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s former campaign strategist, was a one-hit wonder who benefited from a generational talent, he said.
Hunter guffawed at the prospect of Axelrod helming a possible 2028 White House run for “Rahm-f — ing-Emanuel,” Obama’s former chief of staff. “Oh, there’s the answer! Geniuses. Geniuses all.”
Of Emanuel’s supposed feel for working-class white America he added: “He said, ‘We gotta understand that these people are really mad. We gotta appeal to these white voters.’ Rahm! The only people that appealed to those f — ing white voters was Joe Biden.”
Then there were the hosts of the Pod Save America podcast, a group of former Obama speechwriters and senior advisers, whom Hunter savaged as “four white millionaires that are dining out on their association with Barack Obama from 16 years ago, living in Beverly-f — ing-Hills, telling the rest of the world what Black voters in South Carolina really want.”
All that paled, though, beside Hunter’s scorn for actor George Clooney, who — to his thinking — “cut the knees out” of one of the most successful sitting US presidents when he said Biden didn’t even recognise him at the Los Angeles campaign fundraiser the actor hosted last year. In an extraordinary opinion piece in the New York Times, Clooney then urged Biden to step aside.
“F — you! What do you have to do with f — ing anything?” Hunter raged about Clooney to Andrew Callaghan on the Channel 5 podcast. “Why do I have to f — ing listen to you?”
A lawyer representing Hunter said his client wouldn’t comment on the recent podcast interviews nor why he chose to participate.
A representative for Clooney declined to comment. Others named by Hunter didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Also coming in for abuse were the New York Post, the New York Times, Alexandra Pelosi, CNN’s Jake Tapper and “the intelligentsia of the Democratic Party.”
Doug Schoen, the veteran Democratic pollster, spoke for many in the “intelligentsia” this week when he called Hunter’s intervention “completely wrong, misguided, myopic and ill-conceived.”
The “so-called critique,” Schoen added, was a distraction just when Trump was appearing oddly vulnerable due to the blowback from the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories he has touted. Democrats, Schoen advised, should now be hammering the president on the harm his so-called Big Beautiful Bill will do to Americans who rely on Medicaid and nutrition programs.
“Hunter Biden would serve his party and his father’s legacy best by fading quietly into the background,” Schoen concluded.
A bemused Emanuel, meanwhile, told podcaster Megyn Kelly that he appreciated a son “blinded” by love for his father but said of Hunter: “not the first call I’m going to make for strategy.”
Jon Lovett, one of the Pod Save America hosts, was less understanding. “You should be ashamed of the ways in which you made your father’s political life worse,” he said on their show this week. “And, like, the idea that we’re gonna listen to you now. Like, gimme a f — ing break. It’s ridiculous.”
Not everyone saw it that way in a party that is increasingly riven across generational lines and mired in an escalating conflict between moderates and progressives. Some younger, left-wing voters, in particular, seemed energised by Hunter’s rant — and said so on social media.
“Hunter Biden said every single word I’ve been screaming into the void for a year,” Zackory Kirk, a self-described activist and “thought-fanatic,” posted on X. “The Obama holdovers. The Clooney consultants. The Pod Save mediocrities.”
Dash Dobrofsky, who writes a politics newsletter geared toward younger Gen Z voters, agreed. “Hunter Biden just cooked for 5 minutes straight calling out the Democratic Establishment for turning its back on Joe Biden despite him having an incredibly successful presidency and the backing of progressives, Black voters, and rural voters,” he posted.
A former Biden official suggested that a plain-spoken — often profane — Hunter might be instructive for how to connect with voters in an era in which authenticity seems to trump message discipline and carefully controlled candidates. This person cited the success of Zohran Mamdani, a once-obscure socialist now on the cusp of New York City’s mayoralty, as an example.
Having been a punching bag for the last five years, the official added, Hunter was at last free to hit back.
As Hunter himself on Monday told Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, on his new At Our Table podcast: “For a very long time, I did not want to sit down to do things like this because I did not want to become a distraction.”
Hunter’s lurid behaviour when he was addicted to crack cocaine has been amply chronicled by the media — and in his own memoir — and seized on by Trump and his allies. In a criminal trial last year — in the midst of his father’s re-election campaign — he was found guilty of lying about his drug use on a gun application. His former sister-in-law recounted how she became romantically involved and smoked crack with Hunter after his brother, Beau Biden, died of brain cancer.
Hunter, who was later pardoned by his father, has been sober, he said, for the last six years, and told the podcasters he was now living his best life as a father, son and brother who was determined to support others struggling with addiction.
He chose sympathetic figures for his interlocutors: Callaghan, a 28-year-old YouTube personality and independent journalist, didn’t challenge his guest on his controversial business dealings — or any of his other claims. At one point Callaghan remarked: “Why is George Clooney always saying s—?”
Harrison, meanwhile, is a Biden family loyalist who has said he believed the former president shouldn’t have been removed from the ticket. He hails from the Black wing of the party that revived Biden’s fortunes in the 2020 Democratic primary with a victory in South Carolina — and then remained a stalwart source of support last summer.
Beyond the barbs, Hunter’s interviews did supply a few nuggets for those still scrutinising those tumultuous days. President Biden, he said, had been given Ambien, a sleeping aid, before his infamous debate with Trump last June because of a harrowing travel schedule that preceded that contest.
Harrison, meanwhile, sought to explain another pivotal episode: when President Biden appeared to freeze on stage at the end of a fundraiser and had to be led away by Obama. In fact, the host said, Biden had stuck around trying to hear protesters in the audience shouting about the situation in Gaza.
“He was listening to see what they were saying — and that’s when Obama grabbed his elbow and got him off so he didn’t engage in that,” Harrison attested. “It wasn’t that he … didn’t know where the hell he was.”
Then there was Clooney. He complicated Biden’s travel plans, and sleep schedule, by repeatedly threatening to pull out of the event, according to Hunter, because the president wouldn’t honour the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The reason is because his wife” — Amal Clooney — “was one of the principal architects of that warrant,” Hunter said. In a withering aside, he added, Clooney wasn’t the event’s host — merely “the entertainer.”
Those who listened to the entire four hours, 20-minutes and three seconds will have garnered some fresh Biden minutiae. Hunter described himself as “a bit of a history geek” and held forth on the chemical variations of crack and powder cocaine. “The only difference … is sodium bicarbonate and water and heat,” Hunter said. “I don’t want to tell people how to make crack cocaine, but it literally is a mayonnaise jar of cocaine and water.”
He uttered the rarely-heard phrase: “The interesting thing about Delaware is …”
Hunter also expressed misgivings about whether he should be speaking at all. “I don’t know when is the right time or not the right time,” he told Callaghan at one point. “I don’t know how interested people are in my take on why the world has gone crazy.”
Wall Street Journal
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