It’s been quite the journey for Hunter Biden. In the space of a few weeks, the former first son has gone from a man seen as a political liability to an unlikely galvanizing force within the Democratic party, through his emergence on social media as a mental health advocate, razzer of Republicans, and working-class whisperer.
In the process Biden has switched from the GOP’s bete noire to, actually, someone that a fair number of Republican voters seem to like.
His self-deprecating posts, including one where he told Playboy magazine he would not pose nude for them, and another where he engaged in some campy wordplay over a phallic misspelling of the word “election”, are mixed in with serious messages about addiction recovery. And his populist posts about politics even have some calling for him to run for US president in 2028.
Frequently, his honest, human responses to trolling have seemed to win over critics.
Take his response to an X user called Ashley, whose username is @TeamTrump47. Ashley, whose bio says she loves Jesus, responded to a post from Biden by writing: “I’d rather live under a rock than smoke it.”
“Me too. It was awful,” responded Biden, prompting a mea culpa from Ashley.
“Well damn, Hunter, that makes me sad,” she wrote. “You live a better life than you were living. Good luck.”
Biden’s rise on X, where he has amassed more than 780,000 followers, has attracted the attention of Trump himself. Last week the president was asked for his thoughts on Biden’s chances in a hypothetical 2028 primary.
“You would think that, you know, past has something to do with winning an election. And I would say his past is not the greatest,” Trump said.
Biden was right there with a response. “Wait…Did he just say checkered past?” Biden wrote. “I’m 28 felonies, 6 bankruptcies, and an Epstein bromance short of his checkered past.”
In 2024 Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in a criminal hush-money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. That year, Biden was convicted of three felony tax crimes. He was previously found guilty of three felony charges related to an illegal gun purchase.
Biden has since seemed to warm to the theme of a 2028 run, if only to troll conservatives on X. “Just saying… No Democrat has won the White House this century without a Biden on the ticket,” he wrote on Friday morning, in a post seen by almost half a million people.
When a man called Tyler replied, telling Biden he was “very good” on the app, Biden wrote: “It’s so easy to bait them Tyler. It’s hilarious. Ha!”
He also appears to believe Democrats facing intense scrutiny of their pasts should not be prevented from running for the party – and recently defended Graham Platner, who last week scaled a mountain of personal controversies to win the party’s nomination for US Senate in Maine.
Most Americans would fail a “show me your phone” test of their past behavior, Biden told California Gavin Newsom in a podcast, according to Politico. “If that’s the standard by which we are going to judge people, particularly people in elected office,” he is said to have told Newsom, “then I don’t think we’re going to have many people in elected office.”
Biden doesn’t just bait Republicans. Frequently, he dabbles in politics.
“Things most Americans agree on: Groceries cost too much. Tariffs suck and make no sense. Congress and Presidents shouldn’t trade stocks. The debt is a mess. The border should be secure, but legal immigration is good. Endless wars are stupid, especially ones that nobody wants and have never been explained. Americans are exhausted,” he wrote in early June. “Things we’re told to fight about: Me. Laptop. Vaccines. Transgenders in sports. Pronouns. That’s the joke.”
And while his father failed to appeal to Republicans or Trumpers in the 2024 election, Biden seems to have managed to strike a chord. “3 X Trump voter here, I think I love Hunter Biden,” a user called @PeteJurg responded.
“I think I love Pete!” Biden replied.
Biden has posted some solutions, too. Asked what would be the first thing he would fix if he became president, Biden answered: “Rent. Not housing policy. Not the abstraction. Rent. The check that goes out the first of every month before the food, before the medicine, before the gas, before the kid’s shoes.
He added: “Cap the algorithmic price-fixing the landlord cartels have been running in plain sight. End the corporate purchase of single-family homes. Tax the institutional ownership of residential property at a rate that makes it unprofitable. Use the revenue to build. Not vouchers. Build.”
But perhaps Biden’s most important posts and interactions have been about addiction and recovery. A former crack cocaine addict, he has been sober for seven years, and he has posted several videos sharing his experience. They have clearly had an impact.
“I believe @HunterBiden is leading an unknown number of folks here on X to recovery,” a user called MissChaos wrote. “I’m a recovering addict, was hooked on alcohol, then crack, and then I graduated to opiates,” another person posted. “You inspire me to stay clean. I have been ‘talking myself into using’ or bargaining on using oxycodone again. I was thinking one or two times won’t hurt, thanks again!”
In a video on Thursday about how people can support people in “early recovery”, Biden suggested seeking out Al-Anon resources. In a moment that humanized his former president father, he added: “The other thing that I can say is this, is that the one thing I know – that I don’t believe is true – is that you just have to let them hit rock bottom. You know I always say to people that the people that I know who hit bottom are either dead or in jail. And the one thing that I know helped save me is that my dad never stopped reaching out, never let go.
“And just the realization, the knowledge that there was always someone up there with a lantern shining a light down, reaching a hand down into the hell that I had put myself into gave me the strength to make the long climb out. So what I would say is never give up on them, and just keep loving them.”