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Hunter Biden Is the Chaotic, Horny Failson We Deserve

His dad would be a terrible president — but he’s the ideal black sheep

Joe Biden — and I cannot stress this enough — should not be president. He’s creepy, out of touch, not the working-class guy he pretends to be and can’t ever seem to find the end of a sentence. His appeal, such as it is, lies in a meme-like construction of his persona. And yet, none of this appears to be as great a threat to his White House ambitions as his son, Hunter.  

Hunter Biden has emerged as a crucial target for Republicans as they gear up for what they imagine will be a general election showdown with his doddering dad. Because the guy served for five years on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company, Trump allegedly pressured the country’s president to investigate the family, on the false pretense that Joe had intervened to halt a corruption probe against Hunter while vice president. That, more or less, is why impeachment has gone forward, and why the right wing continues to push smears and conspiracy theories about Hunter — it’s counterprogramming to the Trump Crime Circus.

But the funny thing is, while there’s no real evidence of the Hunter scandal the GOP wants to tease apart, Hunter is a deeply chaotic presence who deserves the national stage, far more so than Trump’s children. A history of substance abuse culminated in his 2013 dismissal from the U.S. Navy Reserve, one month after his father had presided over the ceremony in which he became a direct commissioning officer, when he tested positive for cocaine. He suggested that this was the result of unwittingly smoking cigarettes that had been laced with the drug. The latest headlines on Donald Trump Jr. described how he fled from white nationalists who showed up at his “stop silencing free speech” book event, after letting his girlfriend try to shout them down. The latest on Hunter? A 28-year-old Arkansas woman, Lunden Alexis Roberts, is suing him for child support and health care, with a motion that contains a DNA test she says proves his paternity.

Ask yourself: Which nepotism-enabled failson is the true American here? 

Oh, and we can’t forget to mention that back in May, Hunter married a South African woman, Melissa Cohen, only 10 days after they met, this being especially big news given that over the three years prior, he’d dated his late brother Beau’s widow, Hallie Biden. It was also during his partnership with Hallie that Roberts’ purported child with Hunter was born. Whew! You scarcely have to wonder if there’s any merit to the claim his first wife, Kathleen Buhle, made in her 2017 divorce filing — that he’d squandered a fortune on drugs and sex workers. This, keep in mind, is just the stuff that’s public. We can attempt to imagine the rest of his secrets, but we’d surely fail.

I don’t mean to revel too much in what the New Yorker politely called Hunter’s “tumultuous personal life,” and again, I don’t want Joe Biden running the country. All the same, I have to marvel at what we’ve seen of Hunter so far, and I think we can all agree that any first family needs a wild card to spice things up. Bad tweets from Eric and Don Trump Jr. aren’t cutting it, even if they did kill Donnie’s marriage. In a perfect world, a more progressive Dem candidate would adopt Hunter on their way into office and keep him around as the avatar of America’s ultra-horny, push-it-to-the-limit id. That way, whenever politics aggravates us, we’d have the option to flip to Page Six and learn what mischief he’s gotten into this time.

Yes, the stories of coke and sex are fun in a way the transcript of a phone call to the leader of the Ukraine never will be, but they’re also refreshingly quaint. I guess what I’m saying is: let’s bring sexy back.