I should care more about Hunter Biden. Here’s why I don’t.
Iknow I should care about Hunter Biden’s shady overseas business deals. I know I should be outraged by foreigners trying to buy influence, and by the news media’s negligence in having dismissed the story as Russian misinformation because it sprung from a possibly stolen laptop.
Yet I find it hard to get too worked up over all this, the way I did over the egregious conflicts of Donald Trump’s family during the last administration. And I’m asking myself why that is.
Perhaps it’s because, at bottom, the whole affair seems like less of a public scandal than a family tragedy — the sad story of a lost son careening recklessly through public life, and of the anguished father who couldn’t bear to stand in his way.
I’m not saying there isn’t reason to investigate the younger Biden, who might yet be charged with tax evasion or other crimes. By now it’s clear that Hunter traded on his father’s power to win lucrative deals with Ukrainian and Chinese businessmen, for which he provided pretty much no service of value.
It is serious business when a president’s family member enriches himself through relationships with foreign actors. If it’s not illegal, then it’s clearly wrong.
But there’s really no evidence to suggest that President Biden had any hand in the schemes of his son, and it doesn’t ring true. Biden has spent an astounding half-century in public office, with only a four-year hiatus before becoming president, and for all the flaws that have made themselves manifest in that time (verbosity, handsiness, the occasional falsehood), greed and venality are nowhere among them.
To the extent that the president has any culpability in enabling his son’s shenanigans, it probably stems more from guilt and wishfulness than from any criminal impulse.
I’ve known a lot of career politicians from both parties over the years, and if there’s one common theme that emerges when you get past all the talk about politics, it’s the anxiety they feel over how their careers have affected their kids.
It’s easy to be cynical, with all the debate these days over “nepo babies,” about this idea that the entitled children of fame get special treatment. Politicians’ kids are often lavished with opportunities that the rest of us labor for years to create. It’s why so many of them end up running for office themselves.
But, in my experience (and, admittedly, I’m no one’s idea of a therapist), they’re often haunted by crippling insecurity, too — the understanding that when every door magically opens for you, it’s never really possible to know which ones you might have been able to open all by yourself. They’re befriended by people with agendas, adored and ridiculed by people they’ll never meet. It is not a normal life.
In Hunter Biden’s case, all of it was harder. He lost his mother in a car accident, lost part of his father to the Senate, grew up in the shadow of a more capable older brother who died tragically young. He battled addiction and depression, even bought himself a gun. Judgment is the first casualty of self-loathing.
It’s not hard for any parent to imagine what all of this must have done to Joe Biden. The only thing more painful than watching your child stumble through life has to be knowing, on some level, that you put up a lot of the obstacles — that the public stage on which you forced him to live was a consequence of your ambitions and not his.
How much must a parent feel he owes in that situation? How do you tell your kid that he’s become a liability?
After Hunter signed his deal in Ukraine, then-Vice President Biden told him, according to a 2019 report from the New Yorker’s Adam Entous, “I hope you know what you are doing.” Which sounds like a way of saying: “You clearly have no idea what you are doing, but I just can’t bring myself to stop you.”
It must gall Biden to know that his predecessor, who never served a day in public service before becoming president, not only shrugged while his already-rich children enriched themselves further, but actually installed his dilettante daughter and-son-in-law at the highest level of policymaking. (Jared Kushner is still profiting mightily from his favors to the Saudis, which none of the Republicans savaging Hunter Biden seem to mind very much.)
That’s real corruption, and if we had any genuine sense of outrage, we’d be passing a law right now to make it illegal for relatives to serve in the West Wing, just as they’re not allowed to serve as Cabinet members.
Biden didn’t let his son anywhere near the center of power and decision-making. Instead, it seems he looked the other way while Hunter spun himself into an ever stickier web, using his father’s good name.
That’s a parenting decision Biden almost certainly regrets now. You can imagine it’s not the only one.