The former president’s son is trading silence for airtime, using podcasts and essays to talk about his past and share grievances
By Maggie Severns, Erich Schwartzel, and Natalie Andrews
He has hung out with Nick Fuentes, ridiculed former Attorney General Merrick Garland and suggested that former President Joe Biden’s health is worse than the public knows.
The opinions may sound like the regular rotation of a right-wing pundit, but they come from an unlikely—and recently ubiquitous—source: Hunter Biden.
After years of hearing his darkest secrets discussed by others, the president’s 56-year-old son has been on a nonstop media tour across podcasts, news shows and Substack essays with interlocutors as varied as California Gov. Gavin Newsom and record producer Benny Blanco.
The topics range from the challenges of his sobriety to the addictive nature of smartphones, Israeli politicians and congressmen he said were closeted. One family acquaintance, invoking a word used by Joe Biden’s onetime vice president, described him as “unburdened” now that his family is out of the public’s constant glare.
He quickly responds to invitations from online personalities to share his views, people who have interacted with him said. He has taped interviews with Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, two at times controversial commentators who have publicly dissected his darkest moments in explicit detail.
Last month he did an interview with Channel 5 News’ Andrew Callaghan and Fuentes, who said he wanted to moderate his views after making antisemitic comments.
Now, Hunter Biden talks freely about those moments too. Life in the White House and a prior life in budget motels smoking crack appear equally within bounds.
He has unleashed foul-mouthed rants about members of President Trump’s family and journalists he thinks unfairly covered his father. He has even weighed in on the controversial pardon his father bestowed on him, telling the BBC: “Was it good for our Constitution? Was it good for the American people? Was it good for my dad’s legacy? No. On all counts.”
He at times makes fun of himself on X (“Quit the crack. The trolling I’m keeping.”) and strikes a playful tone. When an X user said they bet he was grateful for his presidential pardon, he replied: “I sure am.”
Joe Biden didn’t comment for this article.
Those who have spent time with him say the public is now meeting the Hunter Biden they have known for a long time: a sharp observer of politics and media who has had his own life dragged through the mud.
Biden took a breezy, unscripted approach with Vlad Lyubovny, whose “VladTV” interviews with rappers and actors have an audience of millions. Lyubovny booked Biden on his show through a social-media direct message earlier this summer. Biden replied quickly with contact information and didn’t seek to limit what topics could be discussed in an interview, Lyubovny said.
Biden had a reputation in the White House for going his own way—during his father’s 2020 presidential bid, staffers were surprised to learn he had a memoir set to publish the next year, people familiar with the matter said. Its details of buying crack cocaine on Washington, D.C., streets and relationship drama were the kinds of things campaigns would normally prepare a response to in coordination with the first family.
While his dad was president, Hunter Biden became a complicated subject for allies and employees. His continuing legal dramas weighed on the president, so much so that aides cautioned one another not to mention his name and risk upsetting him with a reminder of the challenges his son faced, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Former Biden White House aides said that Hunter was kept quiet in the White House because he was under federal investigation for much of his father’s time in the presidency. Former aides are now abuzz about what they considered to be a strong showing, and there is some regret they didn’t unleash him earlier, some said.
“The world needs a righteous bad boy willing to call out and take on the bulls—,” said Ashley Etienne, a former adviser to Joe Biden.
Friends say Biden’s emergence in public as his 83-year-old father is being treated for prostate cancer has much to do with him wanting to punch back against critics who pored over salacious details of his personal life.
After Hunter Biden’s laptop was found and its contents leaked, his online history was made public, including nude photos of himself doing illicit drugs. The scandal prompted years of investigations and conspiracies, often spread by some of the podcasters Biden is now choosing to sit with.
“In that total exposure, there was nowhere to hide,” Biden told Carlson.
In his recent appearances, Biden defends his father, who many Democrats still blame for Trump’s second term. Many have criticized him for deciding to run again rather than pass the torch, only to step aside just months before the election. Podcasters said the only times Biden has asked for items to be cut from interviews were short clips about his family.
He has been critical of Trump and the MAGA movement, but also called Garland, his father’s attorney general, the “greatest mistake” of the administration. (Garland appointed a special counsel to oversee the federal investigation into Biden.)
In another recent interview, Hunter Biden provided the most substantive update on his father’s health in some time, saying the cancer was “very painful” and “very debilitating.”
Not only is Hunter Biden talking, he is writing. His Substack has more than 65,000 subscribers for essays on sobriety and other topics. He offers paid subscriptions to his Substack that range from $10 a month to $750 a year. It couldn’t be learned how many of his subscribers have opted to upgrade from the free option.
Biden still paints and sells his abstract kaleidoscope-esque paintings using alcohol ink and metal straws, but has said that financial difficulties loom. He testified under oath that the focus on him during his father’s presidency left him in a deep monetary hole.
As investigations into Biden mounted, he made a consequential decision in late 2022 to stop using a lawyer closely aligned with the Biden White House and hire Abbe Lowell, a defense attorney known for taking on high-profile clients and who, according to documents later filed in court, charged Biden $1,510 an hour.
Lowell would represent Biden during several legal disputes, including the congressional investigation. Biden took an unconventional approach at times, including January 2024, when he sat quietly in the audience during a House Oversight Committee contempt hearing about him.
Lowell’s firm later sued Biden for fees in a continuing case, at one point indicating he owed close to $5 million.
For now, in addition to painting and Substack posts, Biden has taken a role as an adviser at a luxury addiction center, Peak Path Health. And his audience is expanding, including to everyday users on social-media platform X, where he has said he is speaking “finally on my terms, not yours.”
