Hunter Biden, son of U.S. President Joe Biden, departs the House Rayburn Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Jan. 10.Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Last week it was payoffs to a porn star. This week it is illegal possession of a Colt .38 firearm and the use of crack cocaine.
The first criminal trial of the child of a sitting United States president swiftly follows the first criminal trial of a former president. The legal travails of former president Donald Trump and presidential son Hunter Biden are trials of the American political system.
The two trials have become brickbats in the 2024 presidential election. Whether the trial of Hunter Biden on drug and gun charges, which begins Monday, is seen by voters as an antidote to the Trump trial or an analogue to it, remains to be seen. Will it neutralize Mr. Trump’s political liability? Or increase President Joe Biden’s political vulnerability? Or both? Or neither?
“The Republicans are convinced that the Bidens are crooked and the Democrats think the Hunter trial will be nothing but bad political theater,” said Daniel Shea, a political scientist at Colby College in Waterville, Me. “The undecideds could conclude that the Bidens are corrupt or that the President just wants to protect his kid. It’s just another example of the divisiveness and ugliness of our politics.”
One way or another, the Hunter Biden trial in Wilmington, Del., is an affirmation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s sad but sober conviction that “one of the worst things in the world is being the child of a president.”
Hunter Biden has experienced both the heights and depths of the presidential-child experience. His critics believe he has profited by the use of the family name in business – a charge that followed Ulysses S. Grant Jr. a century and a half ago. Mr. Biden’s supporters speak of the terrible burden that presidential children carry.
In truth, the record is mixed.
For every Lyon Tyler (son of John Tyler, president from 1841 to 1845), who became the president of the College of William and Mary, there is a John Tyler Jr., an alcoholic who spent most of his years in poverty and was for a time buried in a public vault. For every James Hayes (son of Rutherford B. Hayes, 1877-1881), who became the founder of the Union Carbide Corporation, there is a Chester Arthur II (son of Chester Arthur, 1881-1885), a profligate womanizer who never held a job. For every Margaret Truman (daughter of Harry Truman, 1945-1953), once a popular writer of mysteries, there is a John Van Buren (son of Martin Van Buren, 1837-1841), who became known for his drinking and financial recklessness.
But eight presidential sons were elected to Congress, two (John Quincy Adams in 1824 and George W. Bush in 2000) to the presidency. While several presidential children had stable marriages – Ms. Truman to The New York Times managing editor Clifton Daniel, and Caroline Kennedy, twice an ambassador, to the designer and author Edwin Schlossberg, for example – the five surviving children of Franklin Roosevelt had a cumulative total of 19 marriages.
When George H. W. Bush was elected president, his aide Doug Wead produced a 44-page report for Mr. Bush’s son, George W. Bush, on the history of presidential children. He found higher-than-average rates of divorce, alcoholism and premature death. “Being related to a president,” he wrote, “brought more problems than opportunities.” Later, in a 2003 book, All the President’s Children, Mr. Wead, who died in 2021, added presciently that “Some presidential children seemed bent on self-destruction.”
That description seems to fit the younger Mr. Biden, who in his 2021 autobiography, Beautiful Things, wrote that “I had no plan beyond the moment-to-moment demands of the crack pipe.”
But drug use is only part of the focus of this spring’s trial, and accounts for but a fraction of the barrage of criticism from the Trump team, which argues that the younger Biden – sometimes with the subtle or even overt support and involvement of his father – engaged in questionable business practices. Mr. Trump has repeatedly charged that Hunter Biden leveraged the family name to win contracts in Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan and China, an echo of the post-presidential years of the Grants.
The Biden family has denied the accusations, which in the case of Ukraine were the basis of the first impeachment of Mr. Trump, when Democrats argued that the 45th president tried to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Biden family’s business involvement in his country.
The Biden administration and friends of the Bidens argue that the President is exceedingly devoted to, and protective of, his family. Mr. Biden lost his first wife, Neilia, and infant daughter Naomi in an automobile crash shortly after being elected to the Senate in 1972 and then lost his oldest son, Beau, to a glioblastoma brain tumor almost exactly nine years ago.
“Family for him has always been number one,” Democratic Governor John Carney of Delaware, who has known the Bidens for decades, said in an interview. “It’s partially the result of losing his wife and baby daughter just after he was elected to the Senate, and then losing his son Beau. He has held tight and hard to his family. The love he has for his son is boundless, endless, unconditional.”
The younger Mr. Biden testified in U.S. District Court in July that he had not used drugs or alcohol since 2019. He also faces charges of tax evasion in a separate case, set to go to trial in September.
The Trump rhetoric about the “Biden crime family” also relates to the President’s younger brother, Jim Biden, who has been accused of invoking the family name to benefit his work with an American health care chain.
Jim Biden is not the only presidential sibling to face public scrutiny.
Billy Carter, the younger brother of Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), was known for clownish behaviour and later went into alcohol rehab.
Donald Nixon, a younger brother of Richard Nixon (1969-1974), came under fire for accepting a $205,000 loan from the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, a factor in Mr. Nixon’s unsuccessful 1960 presidential and 1962 California gubernatorial campaigns. “It wasn’t a preoccupation of his,” said Kenneth Khachigian, a longtime Nixon aide. “He never complained about him, never said he caused pain. Of all the things that were troublesome to Nixon, from Vietnam and Watergate to the economy and gas prices, Don Nixon was the least of his problems.”