About a decade ago, two dancers in a Midtown strip club met Hunter Biden for a lap dance in a private room, where he proceeded to play Fleet Foxes on his phone and smoke drugs.
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You may already know this if you’re deep into QAnon. Or if you’re one of the nearly 50,000 followers of a new “hunter bidens is hot” [sic] stan account, which recently resurfaced this piece of lore from court documents—not to humiliate Biden, but to ogle him. In a TikTok slideshow, the folksy “White Winter Hymnal” plays over pictures of Biden that were famously leaked in 2020: topless Hunter in a bathtub, topless Hunter blasting cigs, topless Hunter inexplicably wearing a scarf or sunglasses ins
The man in these grainy images—which are currently re-flooding certain corners of the internet—barely resembles the clear-eyed son of a former president proudly showing me his collection of oil-based paint markers on a balmy evening this May. Biden, now 56 and wearing a button-down, has spent much of the past three years in this modest garage in Malibu, which he’s transformed into a makeshift studio. It’s here, with the door wide open to let in light and a view of the Pacific, that he’s tried to
Meeting any public figure is alarming, as your whole nervous system strains to remember that you don’t actually know them. With Biden, it’s a little different: His celebrity is built largely on terms that denied him the luxury of scripting and editing any kind of persona. “There is no moat between me and anyone,” he says, “because they know all my shit is out there.”
Details
Several months ago, WIRED began a series of wide-ranging interviews with Biden, his first for a mainstream publication in seven years. Those conversations ultimately became a real-time analysis of his return to public life: On May 19th, whatever moat there was between Biden and the rest of us seemed to evaporate suddenly, when he posted on X for the first time in almost a decade. “I’m Hunter Biden,” he tweeted. “You’ve never actually heard from me.”
The shock waves from this self-reveal were bracing. Before late May, @popcultureiscool, the horny proprietor of the aforementioned Biden fan account, barely posted about the former president’s son. They preferred instead to thirst for the likes of Ariana Grande and Zendaya. Since then, they’ve posted over 150 fan edits of Biden with captions like “give me five minutes and a hair tie,” “my dream date,” and “need that old man realllll bad 😩.”
“I’m a social media star!” Biden tells WIRED, with a smile of disbelief. For decades, Biden was the black sheep of the Democratic party, a wayward son in need of rehabilitation. Most online content about him was either revenge porn or nigh-incomprehensible conspiracy theorizing about his board seat on one of Ukraine’s largest natural-gas concerns while his father was vice president. Now, girlies match his tweets with astrological signs, and he gets to enjoy one of life’s simple pleasures: tweeti
Analysis
The new public fascination with Biden has been suffused with a constant “will-he-or-won’t-he” energy—an obvious suspense around his dynastic political prospects. In late May, Biden told WIRED that his return to public life has nothing to do with political ambition. “I hate to talk about myself, I’m not running for office, I’m not running for school president,” he says, “and I’m not running to be the most popular person on Twitter.” His primary goal? He says it’s to help other addicts—a community
Along the way, he gets to dunk on haters: “Do I look like I’m a part of the elite oligarch class,” he responded to one critic on X, attaching a selfie, long since exposed to the world, showing him heavy-lidded and smoking in bed. “This was taken at a Super 8 motel off I95 by the way.”
Biden at least deserves respect for finding poetry in his nightmare: Some of the world’s most powerful people reveled in the near-total violation of his digital privacy, and all they found was a case of illegal gun possession and some unpaid taxes—for which his father pardoned him, oligarch-style—and pictures of a middle-aged man in bathrobes with various women. “I think I benefit more from low expectations than anyone I’ve ever known,” Biden says. “The vast majority of people on both sides, the
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