The Biden Family Shares the Responsibility for Biden’s Fraud

By Jeffrey Blehar

Saturday, May 24, 2025

 

Once upon a time, back in the hazy mists of July 2023, before the 2024 presidential campaign got fully underway, my esteemed colleague Charles C. W. Cooke wrote a column for National Review about how “Joe Biden Is a Jerk” — actually, er, when you click through to the piece, Charlie tells you how he really feels:

 

President or not, Biden is a decrepit, dishonest, unpleasant blowhard. He’s a nasty, corrupt, partisan fraud. He is, as Shakespeare had it, “a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.” Biden is twice as irritating as he believes himself to be, and half as intelligent into the bargain. From the moment he arrived on the scene — nearly 50 years ago, Lord help us — he has represented all that is wrong with our politics. A century hence, his name will be set into aspic and memorialized under “Hack.”

 

It’s an excellent piece that resonates even more deeply now — in retrospect, its only flaw is that he could have expanded upon it. To support his argument, Charlie cited then-current reporting from Axios’s Alex Thompson, who during those years undermined the myth of “avuncular Grandpa Joe” with multiple stories about Biden’s visible mental and physical decline that cut against the grain of complaisant silence from the media about the issue. Uncoincidentally, Thompson happens to now be the coauthor of the most talked-about political book of the moment.

 

I already wrote once about Original Sin — Thompson’s account, with coauthor Jake Tapper, of the conspiracy to hide President Biden’s collapse into helpless senescence — and largely as a critique of what it omits. (Namely, the media’s role in acceding to this fraud.) But in that piece I also promised a follow-up with my thoughts on its most interesting revelations, and I want to give the book the credit it genuinely deserves: The book marshals an impressive number of previously unheard stories about Biden’s downward slide and helps contextualize the outrageously disturbing success of his “Politburo” in running the presidency as a shadow government — until it all fell apart at the debate, as it was inexorably destined to.

 

Something else emerges, however. The accumulation of anecdotes over a steady chronological narrative is devastating, and at every step of the way it is Joe Biden’s family itself that behaves the most unforgivably — selfishly, foolishly, delusionally — of all. Sister Valerie and daughter Ashley are largely absent from this narrative. (Brother James is nowhere to be found either, which doesn’t make him any less ethically compromised.) This is the story, first and foremost, of Hunter and Jill Biden. They weren’t the ones making the policy decisions during the last four years (neither was Joe, as it turns out) — but it was these two more than anyone else, as Biden’s closest family advisers, who were the engine of Joe Biden’s continuing fraud upon the American people. As those closest to him, they were the truly necessary element to keep the imposture going for as long as it did.

 

You might wonder what more we could possibly learn about Hunter Biden, at this late date, that would make us think less of him. This is a man who already set new historic standards for personal dissolution and depravity as a White House family member, after all, so much so that every reader already knows about them. The crack addiction, the laptop, the illegitimate child he refused to acknowledge, the gun charges, the Comfort Inn-quality art — you have shaken your head to these stories for years now, and you will get a fresh recounting of them in Original Sin.

 

But what you also get is, for the first time, some wonderfully reported insight into just how stupid he also is. For those who are familiar with the classic television comedy Arrested Development, Hunter Biden can be explained as a drug-addicted version of G.O.B. Bluth: For all the shameful and embarrassing things he has done, the genuine tragedy of his life is his unwarranted belief in himself. One anecdote shall suffice: Hunter’s big idea to help the family’s PR struggles was a “redemption tour” of South Carolina black churches promoting his memoir Beautiful Things — his not-at-all-condescending logic apparently being that black people understand crack addicts in a way others generally don’t. (One easily imagines him doing his appearances with a sass-talking black puppet named “Franklin.”)

 

Hunter, as an arrogant, self-entitled screw-up, is arguably a less complicated character than his stepmother. The portrait painted of First Lady Jill Biden, rather, is somewhat sadder. She is portrayed as a woman swallowed by her pretensions, someone who slowly fell in love with the trappings and power of her position even as she believed it to be her mission in life to both protect and validate her husband.

 

Once, according to Tapper and Thompson, she was a reluctant political wife; something changed after 2016, and as Joe Biden’s political aspirations revived, her bearing changed. After he took office, she began speaking and thinking ever more grandiloquently. (Her insistence on being referred to as “Dr. Biden” merits a chapter title.) She also insisted from the start on putting her hand on the staffing rudder: With her universally despised top aide Anthony Bernal, she would divide administration employees into “Biden people” or “not” and freeze them out of access to the president accordingly. Tapper and Thompson describe her “as one of the most powerful First Ladies in history,” in recognition not just of her deep influence on Joe Biden’s political strategy but her determination to use it. (“When the issue was Biden’s age and ability, you’d better not bring it up in front of Dr. B.”)

 

We instinctively understand most political families to be innocent bystanders to even a president’s career. Whatever your opinions of Laura Bush, Michelle Obama, Melania Trump, or their (at the time) young children, all sane people understand presidential spouses and kids to be off-limits as non-political figures. The issue with the Biden family is how they were very political figures and (dys-)functioned as a collective, self-reinforcing unit, each of them propping the other up in recognition of mutual weakness. (Here’s to teamwork!) Original Sin is especially  eloquent on this front, explaining how the defensive Biden family posture — including a quasi-superstitious refusal to speak ugly truths aloud — created such a fixed dynamic of stubborn, mindless denial within the circle of trust. Somewhere in the book a family friend describes their “greatest strength” as “living in their own reality.” Remember, this was meant to be a compliment. It clearly reads otherwise.

 

At one point near the end of Original Sin, as the world is reacting to the disaster of the June 2024 debate, David Axelrod offers this thought about how the Biden family failed the president: “They did such a disservice to Joe Biden and to the country . . . I don’t understand how you could see him in the condition he’s in and think, Yeah you oughta go [run for president again]. To do that to someone you love?” I have no doubt that Hunter and Jill Biden both love Joe Biden, but they also manifestly love themselves, their comforts, and their myth of an indomitable Biden family. And they fell in love with that world, even though it was a fantasy. In the end, they lacked the ability to “create their own reality.” (A man’s got to know his limitations, and none of them did.) I would consider their fatal self-regard tragic were it not shared — indeed inspired — by Joe Biden himself. Instead, it remains contemptible.