Meet the Hunterheads

Let’s play a game: who said it, Hunter Biden or Kendall Roy? “I am interested in becoming a meth head”; “I would never have forgotten my drugs.” “He’s protecting his donors without question”; “The dinosaur is having one last roar at the meteor before it wipes him out.” “Do you think I look like I am part of some elite oligarch class?”; “You’re hate-sponges. And I’m a nice guy.”

Be honest: you can’t tell. Hunter, the former-addict son of Sleepy Joe Biden, is Succession ’s failson made flesh. In the HBO series, Kendall (played by Jeremy Strong) is another damaged and furious second son, a meme-literate ex-crackhead who specialises in spectacular curtain-pulls, exposing the soiled halls of power to the hate-watching public. Biden, who resurfaced on X last week to celebrate seven years of sobriety before embarking on a trolly tirade against the Trump administration, is experiencing his KRoy rebellion moment: after holding a patricidal press conference calling his father Logan Roy a “malignant presence, a bully and a liar”, Kendall sets about plotting a sick social-media persona for the PR battle to come. His vision: “Good tweet, bad tweet, cool tweet, get-on-the-right-side-of-history tweet.”

The purpose of Kendall’s too-online self-image is to broadcast edgelordy, trauma-inflected truth, dine out on family mythology and turn acrimony into audience capture. This, too, is the instinct of Biden: he too has no independent role, no electoral mandate and no coherent programme, only his identity as the weirdly magnetic fallen son. His natural medium is not the Burisma boardroom (the Ukrainian natural-gas company to which Biden was accused of selling access to his father in exchange for an executive role) or the courtroom (he graduated from Yale Law and worked for the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner before an extensive lobbying and business career). It’s the internet, that great hospice for aggrieved nepo babies with axes to grind. X rewards crashouts — posters by turns pathetic and lucid. Hunter, like Kendall, is confessional, vindictive and showmanlike, looking to expose the corruption of his father’s Washington world while benefitting from it.

Hunter’s apparently spontaneous return to social media coincided with the release of his stepmother’s much-criticised memoir View from the East Wing , in which Jill details the fraught final stretch of Joe’s cursed presidential campaign, his prostate cancer diagnosis and ailing cognitive condition. In the memoir, Hunter’s role is as an exposed nerve for parents under pressure; his addiction and legal troubles are subsumed in the earnest Biden tableau, part of a family’s struggle. The X Hunter comes from a less stage-managed and more chaotic place — perhaps in huffy response to the media clucking around Jill’s book. It began with a mic-tap on 19 May : “I’m Hunter Biden. You’ve never actually heard from me.” Get in, losers: next stop Truth Town. Then came the aforementioned tweet on 1 Jun celebrating his sobriety, to which one Xeeter responded with the infamous conspiracy theory that Hunter left a bag of coke in the West Wing in 2023 during his father’s presidency (a Secret Service investigation never found its owner). “It most definitely was not [mine]. I would never have forgotten my drugs,” was his banger reply ; it has 246,000 likes and counting, making a bigger splash than any official or dignified confession — such as his 2021 addiction memoir Beautiful Things — ever could. Several Hunter Home Truths followed, with a focus on the Trumps. On 5 June, he posted : “[Jeffrey] Epstein didn’t hang himself. The Trumps and Epstein were best friends for decades.” Ventriloquising Kendall, he explained his MO : “Be yourself. Radical honesty. No fucks given, no fucks taken. Everything else is just noise.” Realtalk straight from Little Guy Lane.

“Hunter, like Kendall, is confessional, vindictive and showmanlike, looking to expose the corruption of his father’s Washington world while benefitting from it.”

Along the way he cuts through with serious Recovery Realness : “I smoked crack. I would never have wasted cocaine by putting it up my nose.” When a user reassuringly called “Least Retarded Liberal” accuses him of being “part of the Epstein class”, he pleads to the “ exact opposite ” with a Bukowski-worthy grope for anti-glamour: “I wasn’t on a private island smoking crack. I was at the Super 8 off I95 in West Haven. Very different class of people, and with more integrity than any of those people.” Like any white-bread Yalie ironically slumming it with the povvos at Popeyes, Hunter thinks he’s communing with the Real America; he doesn’t get that with the click of his fingers he could have switched the strip lighting of a budget motel for the tinkling pianos of a Georgetown steakhouse. Searching for crack rocks on the soiled floors of Super 8s isn’t the flex you think it is when the deep-pile carpets of DC were a phone call away. But the often-insufferable language of recove…