Biden is assailed for ignoring his grandchild: In a new column by Maureen Dowd, Joe Biden is ripped for handling a dispute involving his son Hunter.
Joe Biden Under Pressure
President Joe Biden is being ripped in the press for another story involving his son Hunter – but this one has nothing to do with overseas business deals, bribery schemes, or cocaine in the White House.
There has been a wave of media attention in recent weeks on the dispute between Hunter Biden and the mother of one of his children, who lives with the mother in Arkansas.
The Times reported on July 1 that the 4-year-old has not met her father or grandfather, but is aware that she is the granddaughter of the president of the United States.
The story followed the resolution of a dispute between Hunter and the mother of the child, in which he agreed to provide paintings, as well as a monthly support payment. The agreement was reached prior to a potential trial this summer. Hunter Biden has since remarried and had another child; he also has three children from his first marriage.
“I had no recollection of our encounter,” Hunter Biden said in his 2021 memoir, of the mother of his child. “That’s how little connection I had with anyone. I was a mess, but a mess I’ve taken responsibility for.”
Times columnist Maureen Dowd weighed in on the story over the weekend, and the column has two things long associated with Dowd: It’s much tougher on a Democratic president than Dowd’s reputation would suggest, and she lets one of her Republican-identifying relatives write a large chunk of it.
“It’s Seven Grandkids, Mr. President,” is the headline of the piece.
“I watched as you told the nation that you had six grandchildren and you loved each one of them,” Dowd quotes her sister as having written to the president. “I believe that. What I cannot believe and what I find unconscionable is that you refuse to admit or accept the fact that there is a beautiful little 4-year-old girl living in Arkansas by the name of Navy Joan who is your seventh grandchild.” The earlier Times piece did not share the granddaughter’s first and middle name, but Dowd’s column did include it.
Both stories cite a line that says “In strategy meetings in recent years, aides have been told that the Bidens have six, not seven, grandchildren,” although it’s not clear if staffers have been told specifically not to acknowledge the granddaughter in Arkansas.
“Mr. President, many years ago, you lost your daughter in a horrendous car accident,” Dowd’s sister continues, skirting well past the edge of bad taste. “I know you still carry that pain with you every day because I have watched your face when you speak about her. Please do not throw away your granddaughter.”
Hunter Biden having an out-of-wedlock daughter, and being embroiled until recently in a bitter legal dispute with the child’s mother, would be an awkward situation for his father, even if he wasn’t the president of the United States, heading into his re-election campaign. He likely did not want to get involved until the legal case was settled, which it now has been.
“The president can’t defend Hunter on all his other messes and draw the line at accepting one little girl,” Dowd writes, having reclaimed the column from her sister. “You can’t punish her for something she had no choice about. The Bidens should embrace the life Hunter brought into the world, even if he didn’t consider her mother ‘the dating type.’”
Michael Tomasky, in The New Republic, defended Biden.
“We live now in a political culture where the party that is trying to uphold some standards and values gets judged and punished because it sometimes falls short of those standards and values, while the party that makes no effort along those lines gets away with everything because no one expects any better of it in the first place,” he wrote.
“The point is this. Biden is getting dinged, as by Maureen Dowd on Sunday, because he has made family and biography, and empathy so central to his public identity, and this seems to contradict that. That criticism is fair enough—to a point… But here is its corollary: There are no such expectations of Donald Trump. If we discovered that Trump had an unacknowledged grandchild, the media would cover it, certainly, but I doubt Dowd would be writing any columns accusing Trump of hypocrisy. Trump’s personal behavior is so low, so crude, so immoral, so rife with tawdriness and sin and misogyny and you name it that nobody expects him to behave in any other way.”
Expertise and Experience
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
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