How much grace should we extend to people who screw up—like, really screw up? After many years as an addict and a general failson, Hunter Biden’s history includes felony gun convictions, tax evasion, smoking crack, and smoking Parmesan cheese that he thought was crack. But in the past few weeks, the son of the former president has launched a new career as—a sober counselor? A life coach?
Since reviving his dormant X account on May 19, the younger Biden has fully embraced a persona he soft-launched last year, when the Gen Z influencer Andrew Callaghan interviewed him about his past drug addiction. His strategy is not to deny his past transgressions, but to flagellate himself so thoroughly for them that no one else can land a hit. “I was definitely a degenerate crackhead, 100 percent,” the 56-year-old recently told Soft White Underbelly, a YouTube channel that encourages sex workers, homeless people, and drug users to tell their stories in their own words. His addiction had been a form of “suicide,” but he was saved by his current wife, Melissa, who “erased every other phone number from my phone. Literally, if it didn’t have the last name Biden in it, she took it out.” His Substack bio reads, “Artist. Author. Recovery Advocate.”
In focusing so hard on his addiction, Biden presumably hopes to connect with others who have had similarly troubled lives. As I wrote when he spoke with Callaghan, “One of the most upvoted comments on the YouTube video is from a poster saying that the interview prompted him to go to rehab.” But on X, he mixes recovery with politics, sometimes within the same post. When someone posted an image of him with a crack pipe in his mouth and called his family a “disgrace,” Biden noted that the critic’s profile picture was of Johnny Cash, who recovered from addiction and “spent the rest of his life singing for prisoners and addicts and the people the country threw away because he knew he was one of them.” Biden concluded solemnly, “You picked his picture. You did not pick his message. Try listening to the words.”
[Helen Lewis: Finally, a Democrat who could shine on Joe Rogan’s show]
Many of his X posts contain these jarring tonal shifts. One day he is offering sympathy to a woman hooked on vodka, telling her that “alcohol is the worst drug of them all.” Another day, he is dunking on a guy who called him a “meth head faggot.” (“You mean crack head faggot,” Biden shot back.)
Because of Biden’s long history of reckless and self-serving behavior, my first reaction to his recent publicity blitz was not: What a heartwarming story of personal growth. It was: What’s the endgame here? Many of his posts about addiction evoke the slick faux-profundity of ChatGPT. Item No. 8 on his list of “things the recovery industry will not tell you” declares, “The greatest sin was not the chaos. It was the absence. Being unavailable to the people who needed you.” His mean zingers, on the other hand, sound like his own work. He frequently refers to Jake Tapper, the CNN host who co-wrote a book about the cover-up of Joe Biden’s fading presidency, as “Brick Tamland,” the idiot weather forecaster Steve Carell played in Anchorman.
Does that matter? A wise person once told me that the best activists are all narcissists—they identify themselves with a cause and then are never tired of talking about it, because they’re also talking about themselves. Hunter Biden has partially acknowledged this possibility. He was, he told one critic on X, “a recovering crack addict that has now found a new addiction—it’s apparently called shit posting.”
As well as appearing on Soft White Underbelly, Biden sat for an interview with the commentator Candace Owens, whose favorite conspiracy theory—that Brigitte Macron, the wife of France’s president, is a man—is so unhinged that even the country’s far right thinks it’s a bit much. “Hope resides in real conversations like these, finding the humanity in each other first,” Biden said of his interview with Owens. “That’s how we cross the divide.”
[Matt Viser: What is Hunter Biden doing?]
What actually happened is that Owens announced up front that she would politely put aside any awkward questions about his father: “I’m not going to make you say anything bad about your father, because that would just be completely demonic.” This allowed her and her guest to stick to their areas of agreement, which include the sins of the Democratic Party and of Israel. Biden also got into one of his other favored subjects, which is how small-bore his corruption was compared with the wholesale plunder currently being undertaken by the Trump family. You can agree with Biden on some or all of this and still wonder why he chose to speak with an extraordinary loon such as Owens. The answer came about 90 minutes into the interview, when Owens apologized to Biden for her previous treatment of him, which she described as “shitty.” He’s not going to get an apology like that from Jake Tapper.
Hunter Biden has taken up residence in what I think of as America’s Post-Shame Paddock, the home of those who have bulldozed through accusations of serious misconduct and refused to retreat from public life. Fellow occupants currently include Donald Trump, the born-again mom-upsetter Pete Hegseth, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Senate hopeful Graham Platner of Maine, and another allegedly reformed degenerate, Russell Brand. Not all of the shame heaped on Biden has been fair. Private, explicit photographs and videos of him were blasted across the internet. The dissemination of the images from his laptop was like revenge porn—except that his critics were getting revenge on his father, with Hunter as collateral damage.
His aggressive approach to his detractors feels far more organically suited to 2026 than “When they go low, we go high.” Like California Governor Gavin Newsom, he has made the calculation that civility will not be restored to American politics anytime soon, and that Democrats have to accede to the trollish new normal. Just look at Texas: A Paxton-aligned group recently posted an AI-generated video of the Texas attorney general’s Democratic opponent, James Talarico, dressed as Maria in The Sound of Music and singing about giving hormones to kids. The implication is that he is weird about children—a dog whistle to a conspiratorial right that portrays its political opponents as pedophiles. Liberals are spreading manipulated footage too. About once a week, I see a viral video implying that Trump has soiled himself. That, plus Biden’s renewed notoriety, suggests that many voters revel in taboo-busting for its own sake.
[David A. Graham: Why the public is gravitating toward the Hunter Biden approach]
What happens when Biden’s latest high, from all of this viral attention, wears off? I’m worried about how neatly he has packaged his recovery story into a pat little tale: He finally met the right woman, and—what do you know?—he was cured of his desire to smoke crack. (Nothing else in his biography suggests that quitting is so easy.) Interest in his artwork slumped even before his father left office. His memoir has also been slow to sell. Many signs suggest that what people want from him is the novelty value of a president’s son mud wrestling on social media, rather than anything more substantive. For the mildly infamous, the attention economy is full of dangerous temptations: launching a memecoin, running for elected office. (He has already said that “our next leaders need to truly understand the value and potential utility of cryptocurrency.”) Any such moves would immolate all of the goodwill that he has recently earned.
Still, people deserve grace when they’ve screwed up, if they are sincere in their desire to change. If Hunter Biden can use his celebrity to help other people in recovery, he should post away. Just as long as he stays away from the crack den, corrupt crypto schemes, and Congress.
The post Hunter Biden’s Life After Shame appeared first on The Atlantic.
