Just a couple of days after my new book Breaking Biden made the New York Times bestseller list, it finally dawned on the Grey Lady that Hunter Biden might actually be cool. I doubt this is a coincidence.
Most people think they know the Bidens all too well. One of the reasons I wrote the book is because I believe, in general, people know relatively nothing about the Bidens. Hunter is as misunderstood as any of them. I note in the book that despite his grifting, drug use, and reluctance to perform basic paternal responsibilities, sometimes “I think he might be the only cool Democrat and one of the few ‘fully realized’ Americans who are openly living their lives as their true selves.”
My colleague Emma-Jo Morris, who knows Hunter’s true self better than almost anyone in journalism, has been making the same point for some time.
All of a sudden, after Hunter has spent nearly a decade in the spotlight, the New York Times is starting to get it. Over this past weekend, they ran an article with the headline: “Hunter Biden, Ironic Icon.” “A tongue-in-cheek group that includes meme-loving Leftists, frat boys and women who like troubled men, has turned the president’s son into an antihero,” reads the lede sentence.
In Emma-Jo Morris’s words, “All Hunter Biden mostly does is get wasted and do lines, usually with multiple women hanging out, paid for by random oligarchs, who he gets on the hook for millions of dollars, and never goes to jail for any of it. Genius, and also, chill, as we have long said.”
Well put.