Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, went on a series of expletive-laden rants about the 2024 election in a recent interview with YouTuber Andrew Callaghan. According to the former president’s son, it seems that everyone in the world can be blamed for Donald Trump’s victory last November. Everyone, that is, except his father.
Hunter Biden was furious that actor George Clooney called for Joe Biden to drop out of the White House race in the summer of 2024. “What right do you have to step on a man who’s given 52 years of his f—ing life to the services 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?” Biden ranted in the interview.
Hunter Biden, like his father, appears hostile to introspection.
Clooney didn’t take an “ad” out in the Times; he wrote an even-handed op-ed in that paper, in which he expressed “love” for Joe Biden but said his experiences with the president led him to believe that Biden was too old to run again. But Hunter’s questioning of Clooney’s “right” to criticize his father is what makes Hunter’s words unbearably arrogant. Hunter Biden seems to think that a citizen’s expressing his views about the president was in some sense inappropriate or stepping out of their lane. In reality what Clooney was doing was not only his democratic right; it was his responsibility.
The younger Biden also lashed out at influential figures in the party as useless, and named several Obama advisers as undeserving of their success. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod “had one success in his political life, and that was Barack Obama — and that was because of Barack Obama,” he said. He also blamed Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, for his father’s downfall and criticized her for declining to give Joe Biden “a full-throated endorsement” in 2024 (Pelosi didn’t publicly call for Biden to drop out but worked behind the scenes to pressure him to exit).
Hunter Biden’s defense of his father’s infamous debate performance was unconvincing. “He’s 81 years old; he’s tired as s—,” Hunter Biden said. “They give him Ambien to be able to sleep, and he gets up on the stage and he looks like he’s a deer in the headlights.” Even if that explanation were true, it only seems to underscore the underlying truth that Biden was too old to handle the rigors of a presidential run. More importantly, there is, of course, no evidence that Biden’s well-documented decline in communicative abilities as president can be attributed to popping sleeping pills. Undeterred, Hunter Biden expressed disbelief that Democrats didn’t march blindly in lockstep behind his father. “Why do you think that the Republicans have an advantage over us? Because they’re unified,” Biden said. “They will go along with anything.” He apparently thinks cultlike devotion to a leader in a party is a good thing. But that’s not necessarily what voters will go for. Hunter Biden, like his father, appears hostile to introspection and determined to live forever in a fantasy that the country failed the Bidens rather than the other way around. It’s perhaps not surprising coming from someone who, as the son of then-Vice President Biden, landed an astonishingly inappropriate gig paying up to $50,000 a month on the board of a Ukrainian national gas company that he had no apparent qualifications for. Someone whose constant reckless behavior became a political albatross for the Democratic Party. Someone who pleaded guilty to tax fraud and then received a presidential pardon from his father. Out here in the real world, however, we do live in a world with consequences.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy. 
