Hunter Biden is basically Kendall Roy. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty)
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 specializes 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 program, 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 benefiting from it.
Hunter’s apparently spontaneous return to social media coincided with the release of his stepmother’s much-criticized 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.” Ventriloquizing 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.
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-glamor: “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 recovery provides all the Real Boy cover he needs: like his HBO hologram Kendall Roy, Hunter tells himself he’s more authentic than his privileged peers because he’s been a junkie.
And just like Roy, Hunter sees the revelation of the “real him” as an important moment for a waiting America. In a tweet from Sunday — one of many, by the way — he addresses his “haters”, promising “total transparency. Finally on my terms. Not yours.” Yet Biden is one of the most tragically overexposed figures of the 21st century — compromising material allegedly from his laptop was leaked to Maga figures and the New York Post in 2020, and chaotic images of drug use, sex and other humiliating acts have circulated ever since (the scandal has a strange afterlife as a feature on gay X, where posters thirst over his nudes). All this lends him a strange nihilistic freedom: the worst is surely already out there — and besides, he was pardoned on gun and tax cases by his father shortly before he left office, meaning he is immune from related federal charges between 2014 and 2024. Go nuts!
Hunter’s sense of injury has long family roots; his personal struggles lie along a continuum of clan tragedy. Joe Biden’s political story began with catastrophe: in December 1972, just weeks after being elected to the Senate at 29, his first wife Neilia and infant daughter Naomi were killed in a car crash. His sons Beau and Hunter survived but were badly injured; Biden was sworn into the Senate from Beau’s hospital bedside. The widowed young father commuting home from Washington to Delaware every night became the picture of resilience, of moral authority. Then, in 2015, Beau died of brain cancer at 46. He was the golden son: attorney-general of Delaware, Iraq vet, the natural political heir. Hunter was the surviving son under impossible pressure; he was the anti-Beau: a damaged addict, a liability. Since then, like the Roy boy, he has veered between rebelling against the family empire and identifying as its chief victim.
All this pulls focus from the bone-dry Democrats because unlike them, Hunter isn’t bloodlessly boring: his persona is not focus-grouped but fuming. This enfant terrible aside, Maga has mainly had a monopoly on wildcards: its streamers, memers and reply guys have always snubbed the institutional sobriety of professional Dems. Hunter provides the chaotic charisma otherwise seen as copyrighted by loose-cannon Trump kids, or Hillbilly Vance, or the million digital demagogues who n-word their way into the social-media rage cycle every day. Hunter is a drop of deranged water in the desert, precisely because his tirades reek of 2am.
For Hunterheads, who appear to skew young, Dem and male, Biden isn’t a political force as much as a fandom object — endlessly quotable and beyond embarrassment. These guys don’t love Hunter as straightforwardly as Maga fans love Trump; “loving” Hunter isn’t about endorsing or agreeing with him, just thinking he’s hilarious. Hunter’s fanbase fetishizes his damage and laps up his anti-pious spirit. But this distance poses a new danger: detachment and the wafting away of accountability. “Did Hunter cash in from his father’s power” is not being asked; “did you see his last tweet” is.
Meanwhile, Hunter’s return to social media has perturbed Republicans, who have come to see him as a malign symbol of Democrat decadence and corruption. But in terms of real political influence, they surely have nothing to fear from this slightly mad scion spitting facts to the lounge lizards of X. As a Washington dynasty, the Bidens are donezo; Hunter may be gunning for the Trumps on the Epstein scandal but as an effective court jester he is unlikely to shift the dial in the midterms.
If Hunter Biden is Kendall Roy, what does that make us? Well, spectators. Fans. “He got me feeling like Lana Del Rey,” said one. This is not the mentality of a voter. Voters expect outcomes from Washington — lower taxes, abortion rights, border control, healthcare etc. Fans, however, demand only drama: continued installments, villainous turns, betrayals, quips, catchphrases. We want our politicians to resemble HBO prestige-television characters. We enjoy the parasocial sense that we know Hunter Biden intimately, we like following his self-flagellation and watching him pants his enemies. Politics is slow, procedural and boring; becoming fans prods us awake with plot twists. The reason the public keeps up with Hunter’s mental X timeline is that these days nowhere does the drama of wounded heirs, ailing patriarchs, revenge, secrets and humiliation play out better than in real-life politics. Well, not unless Succession gets another season.
And what of it? Well, in time we might watch the Democrats reorganize themselves around the sordid appeal of figures like Hunter, lauding charisma, humiliation and narrative propulsion above expertise and competence. This has already happened within Maga. The Biden boy, like second-term Trump, is enacting a revenge fantasy; both, to the watching “fans”, are not ridiculous but iconic. This should worry us. My advice to Hunter: remember how Kendall Roy gets on. It’s not pretty.
