As former Trump chief strategist Steven Bannon said, “I don’t care about Hunter’s feelings. This is war.” Hunter is treating it as such and has been preparing a legal counteroffensive in the form of his own threats of prosecution and defamation lawsuits against prominent conservatives. With these opening moves, the battle lines of the 118th Congress have been set, and Americans can expect to hear more and more about Hunter and his laptop (and all its tawdry contents) in the months ahead. Whatever else Joe Biden hopes to accomplish in the second half of his term, his administration will now be weighed down by the need to fight a daily rearguard battle against a Republican House determined to illustrate just how far his second son has fallen from grace.

Occasions like this may help to remind Americans of how their forebears came to found a government rooted, at least in theory, in a rejection of monarchical and aristocratic principles. Members of the founding generation apparently even rejoiced that the father of the nation, George Washington, could not father any children of his own. Many, including Washington himself, saw his infertility as a providential blessing on America’s republican experiment, lest the general’s heirs form the basis of a new kingly dynasty or, more likely, trade in the prestige of the Washington name for personal profit. Which is precisely the charge that today’s Republicans have levelled against the Bidens and the Clintons, and what Democrats have, in turn, accused the Trump children and in-laws of doing.

What Tolstoy wrote about unhappy families rings truer still for political families. Though patricians and political dynasties are — despite its professed ideals — as old as America itself, no one among them has yet written a manual for how to manage the merciless pressures of public life, which inevitably strain the bonds that are supposed to hold families together as well as keep them grounded. Furthermore, the often grossly uneven distribution of talent within such dynasties (which may produce an abundance of leadership traits in one child and a total absence of them in another) leads to expectations that are impossible to fulfil and throws the inadequacies of the “failson” into even starker relief. Indeed, the term “failson” may be a recent coinage, but the archetype it describes — “an incompetent, unsuccessful middle-class or upper-class man who is protected from… duress by his family’s wealth or influence” — is an all too familiar sight in the annals of American politics. Hunter Biden may be its ultimate Platonic form but presidential history furnishes plenty of examples of this dynamic.

Theodore Roosevelt had to deal with the alcoholic excesses of brother Elliott (father of Eleanor), whom he called “a maniac, morally [and] mentally” before his untimely death; the Kennedys had one fabled generation with Jack, Bobby, and Ted, only for Camelot to be inherited by a largely mediocre and often no less controversy-prone successor generation. Among George H.W. Bush’s sons, it was widely assumed that Jeb would take the mantle of leadership while eldest George W. was “the family clown” who threatened to disgrace the Bush name with beer-fuelled antics (to his credit, George W. overcame his alcoholism, became the 43rd president, and managed to disgrace the Bush name while sober). Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, and the Rodham brothers, all with their own questionable business ventures, can similarly stake a claim to being their family’s designated failsons.

More from this author

Is George Santos a Machiavellian prince?

By Michael Cuenco

But perhaps the most poignant historical parallel to the current president’s dilemma vis-à-vis his deeply troubled son can be found in Joe Biden’s predecessor as both vice president and president, John Adams. Like Biden, Adams had one son who excelled in all the virtues of statesmanship, John Quincy, and another who utterly failed in the race of life, Charles. While the former went on to succeed his father as president and became a political titan in his own right, the latter, a rakish drunkard and philanderer, was disowned by President Adams (a dramatic rendition was performed to heartbreaking effect by Paul Giamatti in the 2008 HBO miniseries John Adams). Charles Adams died a broken man not long after.

In the case of the Bidens, the part of the natural leader belonged to Joe’s firstborn, the late Beau Biden, who was said to have had all the father’s virtues and none of the flaws, very much the John Quincy to Hunter’s Charles Adams. The contrast between the two could not be clearer: when Hunter flailed in business, sunk into addiction, and began to meet with foreign oligarchs (around the time Joe Biden became vice president), Beau built a profile in Delaware as Attorney General, served in the Iraq war, and was considering a 2016 run for governor just as he was felled by cancer in 2015. He died aged 46.

This was the crowning tragedy in the life of a political family defined by the concurrence of tragedy and triumph. Four decades previously, in 1972, Beau and Hunter survived a car crash that killed Joe’s first wife Neilia and their infant daughter; the accident took place just weeks before the beginning of Joe Biden’s first term as senator. When Beau died, the path opened for Joe to run for president for a third time and win, although the ex-vice president always felt that he was a placeholder for his dead son: the day before his own inauguration, Joe reportedly said: “We should be introducing him as president”.

Suggested reading

Joe Biden's false optimism

By Ruy Teixeira

Beau had also been a caring and attentive brother to Hunter who made sure he stayed on the wagon and attended Alcoholics Anonymous. Beau’s death only accelerated Hunter’s decline. His involvement with Ukrainian and Chinese energy firms and various tax troubles, for which he is under investigation by a US attorney, as well as the more lurid accounts of his drug and alcohol addictions have been reported on extensively and need not be repeated here. Twitter’s rash decision to censor the New York Post report about “Hunter’s laptop” (which, like “Hillary’s emails”, is now a rallying cry for Republicans) in the middle of the 2020 election campaign turned what could have just been a personally embarrassing story into a far more politically compromising affair. The tragic lot of Hunter Biden, especially in the shadow of his brother’s death, was given expression by Hunter himself when he said to a friend after having just purchased a new .38 handgun, “I know you all think the wrong brother died.” Unlike the Adams’s family, it was the future president who perished and the failson who lived.

Republicans have yet to prove that Joe Biden had any complicity in the suspicious business activities of his son. It is more likely the case that, rather than being the “chairman of the board” and mastermind of a criminal outfit, as the Republican narrative holds, the President’s pitfall, if it can be called that, is in being too doting a father to his delinquent son. There is not enough of the stern Puritanism of John Adams or the cold Victorianism of Theodore Roosevelt in Joe Biden for him to be able to say to his flesh and blood what Adams said to his: “I renounce you.” The excerpt of a call released last year in which Joe Biden offered some tender words of support to his son (which was mocked on conservative media) was simply what any loving American parent (who didn’t subscribe to John Adams’s colonial-era social values) would say to a child, no matter how far lost or broken.

More from this author

Biden can win on immigration

By Michael Cuenco

Do the unwholesome actions and overpriced artworks of Hunter Biden warrant the attention and scrutiny of the press and — where evidence for potential criminal wrongdoing exists — of the relevant authorities? Absolutely. Should the House of Representatives (as all the evidence indicates is the plan) now spend the bulk of its political energies over the next two years on revisiting every sordid twist and turn of the Hunter Biden story before the American public? Absolutely not.

If Republicans were smart, they would know to focus their fire on the President’s policy record, not the human frailties that afflict his already scarred family. A discerning opposition would know how to separate the personal from the properly political, the petty issues from the truly meaningful ones, and this goes for Democrats obsessed with Trump’s tax returns just as much as for any Republican. While the instinct to remain vigilant against corruption is a sound one, taken too far, it can devolve into desperate conspiratorial scandalmongering.

Keeping the focus of politics on actual issues around the functioning of government, instead of on such personality-driven tabloid stories at least helps to make sure that the American people are well-served at an everyday institutional level by their elite, whatever their personal failings or vulnerabilities. For in spite of what Americans have been telling themselves since 1776, “the iron law of oligarchy” ensures that all societies must have an elite composed of elite families, whether it be the Adamses, the Clintons, the Trumps, or the Bidens. And if the country is to have a ruling class, at least make them rule well. Failsons and all.

It’s also a tradition that extends beyond the halls of government. Members of famous political families who don’t run for office still tend to crop up in other influential positions: the upper tiers of journalism, or the media or the arts. Jenna Bush Hager, one of George W.’s daughters, has, since 2009, been an anchor for NBC — which counted Chelsea Clinton among its special correspondents between 2011 and 2014. In 2017, Malia Obama interned at The Weinstein Company. Even the also-rans bestow a certain kind of dazzle on their children: Meghan McCain, daughter of the John, who lost out to Malia’s dad, has had a prolific career as a TV host.

And historically, Americans have always been fairly fine with this — we keep voting them in and watching their shows and buying their books. Despite being founded on the explicit rejection of hereditary monarchy — on the notion of power conferred by birth — we are also a nation that thrives on the inherited wealth of self-made men. As long as you can trace your family dynasty to the hardscrabble origin story of an enterprising striver, who built something from nothing and then passed it down the line to his children and grandchildren, that’s not nepotism: it’s the American dream.

And if your family business is politics, there’s still the spectacle of public elections to offer the pretence of fairness: even with all the money and name recognition in the world, the only way to hold elected office is for the people to put you there. It’s perhaps because our leadership has to regularly win the hearts of the public in a nationwide popularity contest — with the most expensive, most televised, most exacting campaigns in the world — that the U.S. has always conferred a sort of second-tier celebrity cachet on its presidents. And, by extension, on their families.

More from this author

Make way for the first female President

By Kat Rosenfield

The latest presidential progeny to make headlines by cropping up in a position of cultural prominence is Hunter Biden, who announced earlier this month that he’d be showing — and selling — his paintings in a solo exhibition at a New York gallery in October. The elder of the President’s two surviving children, Hunter has no formal artistic training. He had also been keeping a relatively low profile since October 2020, when emails from an old laptop of his surfaced under mysterious circumstances that threatened to torpedo his father’s shot at the presidency.

While the serious allegations of corruption that emerged from the laptop scandal ultimately amounted to nothing, the incident was still embarrassing to Hunter, who has always been a bit of a black sheep. Before his foray into painting he was a lawyer, investor, lobbyist and, briefly, naval officer (he was discharged from the position after less than a month, after testing positive for cocaine). Harsher critics have accused him of being a shady businessman and shameless grifter, using the Biden name for his own benefit. And indeed, the asking prices for Hunter’s paintings are astronomically high for an unknown artist — which only serves to highlight his peculiar brand of celebrity. His work will fetch a high price for the same reason that people pay thousands of dollars to own a teacup stained with Lady Gaga’s lipstick or a jockstrap once worn by Russell Crowe: the little thrill of knowing that a famous person touched it first.

Hunter Biden’s foray into art has been met with some criticism, including a subdued but disapproving editorial in the Washington Post. But the media response to him stands in stark contrast to that received by the large adult Trump children, whose every foray into public life was met with generalised outrage, breaking the age-old tradition of accepting that the ambitions of presidential progeny will always be supported. From Ivanka’s fashion line to Don, Jr.’s books, nobody wanted the Trumps to become as culturally and politically ubiquitous as the Kennedys.

Suggested reading

What haunts Hunter Biden?

By Tanya Gold

But that’s only because nothing about the Trump administration, including this, was business as usual. Trump’s first family was in itself unprecedented: never before had a U.S. president boasted five children from three different marriages, most of whom were already at least a little bit famous by the time their father took office. By the standards of previous presidents, it was semi-scandalous if not outright trashy — and worse, Trump’s audacious offspring seemed to share their father’s sensibilities: a hunger for global influence, a contempt for elites and a narcissistic sense of entitlement. It wasn’t just the nepotism; it was that they were so obvious, so shameless, so transparent in their expectations.

Ivanka, especially, seemed to believe that her mere status as presidential progeny meant that she should enjoy a position of influence in national affairs. But here too, it was the entitlement (and the Trump name) rather than the notion of a politically-involved First Daughter that raised hackles. In fact, the latter is something of an American tradition: Maureen Reagan moved into the White House during her father’s presidency and informally advised him on women’s issues. Woodrow Wilson’s daughter, Margaret, took over the role of First Lady after her mother died. Alice Roosevelt once led a diplomatic tour of five Asian countries in 1905 while her father, President Theodore Roosevelt, was trying to negotiate a peace between Japan and Russia.

And yet, Ivanka’s involvement in the Trump administration was seen as so embarrassing, so outré, that her presence at the G20 conference sparked not just wall-to-wall negative media coverage but a viral meme. “How Much Did Ivanka Embarrass Herself at the G20 Summit?” asked The Cut, rhetorically, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “It may be shocking to some, but being someone’s daughter actually isn’t a career qualification.”

Suggested reading

America attracts the wrong immigrants

By Justin Webb

In light of all this, it was easy to imagine that Trump’s presidency represented some sort of turning point — that however much nepotism and corruption and power-grabbing cruelty were once par for the course in American presidential politics, they wouldn’t be once the bad orange man was gone. Indeed, for as long as Donald Trump was in office, the notion persisted that everything would change for the better, and the classier, if only we could vote him out.

The candidate who could remake the presidency into something better, brighter and more noble would have been a game-changer. There was just one problem: in 2020, nobody wanted that. They just wanted to Make America Normal Again — and nothing is more normal, and more American, than a good old-fashioned dynasty from a known and trusted brand. It’s why we embraced Meghan McCain as a media figure in the wake of her father’s death. It’s why nobody finds it especially weird that almost every presidential race since 1992 has included a Bush or a Clinton in the mix. It’s why Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter walked away from the Inauguration with a cult following and a modelling contract.

And it’s why, as sketchy as it might seem, nobody is going to get too upset about Hunter Biden’s new surprise career turn as an in-demand contemporary artist.

That would require dismantling the longstanding American tradition of blurring the lines between politics and celebrity, of being fascinated by, even obsessed with, the families who live in what Jackie Kennedy once called “the People’s house” (in the way that Brits obsess over the residents of Buckingham Palace but can rarely name the children of Prime Ministers). It would also require us to confront some deeply uncomfortable truths about how even in a democracy, dynasties are inevitable. Power pools and cascades down, inter-generationally, always landing in the lap of someone with a familiar last name — giving the lie to the all-American notion that hard work and big dreams are all it takes to succeed. And all of us go along with it, but all of this is familiar.

Hunter Biden’s play for art world grandeur won’t provoke that kind of reckoning. It’s too much business as usual. But the appearance of Donald Trump, Jr. as a top contender on the 2024 Republican primary ticket? Yeah, that might do it.