Earlier this week Hunter Biden struck a deal with the Department of Justice, pleading guilty to tax and gun charges in return for probation.
The deal received widespread attention, including severe condemnation from Republicans and right wing media about light and unfair treatment of President Biden’s son.
There is no doubt that Hunter will continue to be a Republican talking point as we approach the 2024 election, so it’s appropriate to take a moment to put Biden the Younger into appropriate frames of reference.
Fairly or not, Hunter Biden is generally assigned to the group “failson,” a term which has come to describe children born to immense privilege who nevertheless manage to botch their lives in ways that bring enormous embarrassment to a prominent family. This idea recently enjoyed rich cinematic treatment on HBO’s Succession, where Kendall Roy and Roman Roy vied with one another to be the least useful son of mogul Logan Roy. Hunter is also part of two other families; that of embarrassing Presidential relatives on the one hand, and targets of the GOP scandal machine on the other.
Presidential Relatives
Hunter Biden is not the only wayward relative to embarrass a Presidential family. President Obama’s half-brother Malik lurked at the edges of the Obama presidency for several years, eventually coming out in open support of Donald Trump’s fraudulent claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
The three Trump children largely managed to keep out of the most dangerous legal waters during his administration, despite their close involvement in matters of policy and family business. They may still feel some heat from the general investigation of the Trump organization, but this is more of a case of the father implicating the children than the children embarrassing the father.
George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush had to deal with the legal problems of Neil Bush (brother and son, respectively) as he navigated the treacherous shoals of financial and sexual impropriety. Probably the closest analogue of Hunter Biden, Neil Bush managed to avoid serious legal charges despite involvement in the Savings and Loan crisis and a number of other global influence operations.
Donald Nixon took money from Howard Hughes; Billy Carter took cash from Libya; Roger Clinton was his own species of party animal. The deep history of the Presidency is littered with similar figures, all the way back to Charles Adams, a committed alcoholic who died during the extended process that would determine the election of 1800, and Thomas Adams, who struggled with mental illness and a gambling addiction through the Presidencies of both his father and brother.
The Scandal Machine
Hunter’s legal troubles are because of his prominence in another and possibly more relevant political family. The investigation of Hunter Biden is the latest in a long series of over-hyped scandals stretching back to the Clinton administration. Since the 1990s, the GOP has developed a well-oiled network for generating noise about minor Democratic scandals. These scandals provide grist for right wing media outlets (originally Fox but now an entire eco-verse of reactionary websites and organizations) but also for mainstream media in search of something to fill time.
These scandals rely on the principle “if so many people are paying attention then there must be something important” in order to find their way into the national conversation, and in so doing to encumber Democratic political candidates. They include Whitewater, the Paula Jones investigation, “travelgate,” investigations into the death of Vince Foster, inquiries into Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and the greater part of the Benghazi inquiry.
These inquiries serve no useful legal purpose (a GOP Senate staffer once told me point blank to no one in his office took Benghazi seriously), but they do serve the political purpose of associating the names of major Democrats with some sense of vague impropriety, an association that right wing media can lean on and amplify in order to improve the GOP’s political prospects.
Hunter Biden: What Happens Now?
The machine isn’t yet done with Hunter Biden. There will be Congressional investigations and any number of amateur “detectives” looking to make their names in the right-wing media sphere. Much of this has to do with the ongoing legal troubles of Donald Trump; it is necessary for right-wingers to make parallels between Trump and Biden in order to distract from the former’s alleged years of criminal activity.
The contrasts are also important; one of the key differences between Hunter Biden and Donald Trump cases is that Hunter has never been and will never be President. A second key difference is that Donald Trump has been or will be indicted on serious financial, political, and national security charges across a range of jurisdictions, while Hunter Biden inappropriately made a bunch of money off his dad’s name. One of these things is notable in the history of the American Republic, while the other is not.
Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005. He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020), and most recently Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Across the Ages (Lynne Rienner, 2023). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.
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