While the establishment media and those in his orbit are busy producing the first wave of now-it-can-be-told memoirs about former President Joe Biden’s tenure, you may notice that Biden himself has been conspicuously quiet — especially since he revealed his cancer diagnosis in May, just a few days before publication of the most damning of these exposés.
I’m of two minds about this leave of absence. As someone who likes strong leadership in the White House, it makes me happy; we no longer have to hang on Biden’s every slack-jawed senior moment to discern the state of the executive branch.
As a fan of schadenfreude, however, I have to say I miss Scranton Joe.
In that capacity, let me share the good news if you hadn’t heard, what with all the Big Beautiful Bill action and the Fourth of July holiday: Joe’s back, baby, and just as self-unaware as ever!
Most of the attention to Biden’s remarks on Wednesday to the Society for Human Resource Management in San Diego came from his claim, according to Fox News, that he is “getting calls … from a number of European leaders asking me to get engaged” in the fight against President Donald Trump.
He also noted that he was writing a book since “every president is expected to write a memoir,” although one might note that we’d all excuse from that assignment a president we figure has already forgotten most of his term. Nevertheless, Fox reported, he says he’s “working like hell” to get the 500-page book out by “March of this year.” (It’s currently July.)
However, in the coverage of these rare remarks from the doddering ex-prez, so much attention was paid to the fact that Joe Biden is a delusional former president that, arguably, not enough was paid to the fact that he’s a delusional parent, too.
From the close of The Wall Street Journal’s write-up of the event:
Johnny C. Taylor Jr., SHRM’s president who joined Biden on stage after his address, asked him what he would most like to be remembered for.
Are you glad Joe Biden is gone?
“Being a good father,” Biden responded.
Look, I get that people are the best parents in the world … until they have children. And even those who aren’t parents have to concede that some children will be more challenging than others. But at some point, we reach the junction where we can cast aspersions on your skills as a mother or a father. Joe has, to use the parlance of his beloved railroads, blown past that junction, and the station, and derailed at the end of the line.
Joe has had three children who survived to adulthood. Beau Biden, who died at age 46 in 2015, seemed to have turned out all right. As to the other two, Joe’s batting .333 at best.
For instance, there’s Hunter. Oh heavens, is there ever.
I don’t think that there’s much more that needs to be said about Hunter’s problems. What’s problematic is the extent to which Joe Biden’s political career effectively managed to both get Hunter into, and then out of, these problems.
For instance, one nickname that followed Joe Biden around Capitol Hill was “The Senator from MBNA.” That now-defunct Delaware-based megabank financially supported Biden, who routinely scratched its back reciprocally via legislation.
The piece in which that moniker was first applied to him, by conservative commentator Byron York in The American Spectator all the way back in 1998, noted that one of the ways the then-senator was uncomfortably close to MBNA was that the company, according to York, “hired Biden’s son for a lucrative job in which, according to bank officials, he is being groomed for a senior management position.”
Which son? Ding ding ding: It was Hunter. And while hindsight is 20/20, do you really think Hunter Biden was a man who would have been groomed, in other circumstances, for a “senior management position?”
Indeed, as Matthew Yglesias wrote in a Vox article back in 2020, Hunter’s career “never really seems to have quite launched as an independent entity” from his father’s political fortunes. When dad was busy defending Amtrak, Hunter was there, Yglesias wrote. When dad was providing favors for MBNA, Hunter was there to pick up some more crumbs. When dad had accumulated reams of power on Capitol Hill, guess who else was operating primarily on Capitol Hill? The question answers itself.
This connection got exceptionally problematic during Biden’s vice presidency, when Hunter was apparently a low-functioning addict but doing business with some of the richest men and most powerful companies in the world. He was on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma while his dad was point-man on Ukraine — and doing fun things like claiming he got a powerful prosecutor who’d gone after Burisma tossed out the door:
Here is Joe Biden bragging about how he leveraged aid to force Ukraine into firing prosecutor Viktor Shokin.
Shokin was investigating Burisma.
Hunter worked for Burisma. pic.twitter.com/LgtwyAJftx
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 2, 2024
Nor did Hunter stop grifting off pop’s career as Biden aimed for the presidency. By the time his dad was elected to the White House, Hunter had launched a career as an artist, selling overpriced doodles to politically connected Democratic donors.
Joe, again, did less than nothing to stop his son’s nepo-racket.
When federal authorities finally focused on Hunter — for which he has no one to blame but himself, especially since he implicated himself in his own book — Joe first said Hunter wasn’t guilty of any crime (quite a statement to make before the wheels of justice duly turn) and then pardoned him when he was convicted of one set of charges and pleaded guilty to another.
I understand many of us know the heartbreak of a child who ends up addicted to substances, either in spite of or because of our parenting skills. I feel for you. But this is different from actively aiding and abetting not only your son’s addiction but his sense of entitlement — and then sealing it with a pardon.
And then there’s Ashley Biden, Joe Biden’s daughter with Jill Biden.
Ashley is comparatively well-adjusted, but only by comparison to Hunter, so that’s not saying much. She’s still had addiction and entitlement issues, as well, and — in her infamous leaked journal — appeared to blame pops for at least some of her promiscuity, citing “showers w/ my dad (probably not appropriate)” as part of the reason for being “hyper-sexualized [at] a young age.”
If Hunter is a swing and a miss, Ashley is — at best — an easy-out double-play ground ball in the parenting department.
And then there’s the fact that being a good parent also means being a good grandparent, should you be so fortunate to have that fall upon you.
Lest we forget, Joe and Jill Biden refused to even recognize one of their own grandchildren thanks to the fact that she was born out of wedlock via a fling Hunter had with a woman named Lunden Roberts.
Even though a DNA test definitively proved the then-first son had fathered the child, Hunter would go on to write in his memoir that “I had no recollection of our encounter.” (Another salient reminder that how you father a child matters in all aspects, including in how he fathers children.)
It got bad enough that the Joe and Jill were excoriated for not recognizing their granddaughter Navy Jean with a stocking in the White House Christmas display — an unbelievably petty act. Add to this the fact that another grandchild of Joe’s was apparently involved in a kerfuffle with her Secret Service detail — one of the unfortunate don’t-you-know-who-I-am? variety — which led to the first family allegedly retaliating against the agents involved, and you might see why grandparenting doesn’t seem to be Joe’s speed, either.
What Biden doesn’t seem to realize is that his record as a parent in public is just as bad as his dismal record as president — and, indeed, these two vocations are inextricably linked. Yet, here he is, telling the world how European leaders are still calling him and how he really wants to be remembered for just being dad, as if that somehow makes him look any better.
Elsewhere in his remarks Wednesday, he complained that everything he’d worked to do was being undone because of you-know-who, the successor whom he didn’t mention by name, as if the guy we elected to replace him was Voldemort or something.
“Many of the things I worked so damn hard, that I thought I changed in the country, are changing so rapidly,” he said.
Most of us, in fact, find that the legacy we leave will be through our children. The case is different for U.S. presidents, of course, who determine what trajectory this glorious country takes.
What does it say, then, that a little over six months after Joe Biden left office, his achievements in both presidenting and parenting are both, quite sadly, laughable?
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