Joe, Hunter and the whole damn thing

Father's Day can be awkward or painful for many, the Bidens included.

Happy Father’s Day to the dads out there. In case you missed my latest piece at The Bulwark, it’s about possibly the most prominent father-son pair in America—Joe and Hunter Biden.

There is a lot of steel along with love in how Biden is handling his son’s troubles. As I wrote, it is one example of many that reflects a toughness polls are not picking up.

In a CBS News/YouGov poll this month, 66% of registered voters nationally described Trump as “tough” versus 28% who described Biden that way.

Maybe things would be different if Biden had been posting all-caps abuse and insults on social media for the past nine years, if he had encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol, if his loyalists understood “fight like hell” and other cues to threaten and attack perceived enemies, or if he’d been convicted on 34 felony charges and torched the justice system, the judge and the jury for daring to find him guilty.

The difference between Trump’s jurors in the New York hush money/election interference trial and those in Delaware who were on the Hunter Biden jury was stark, as others have noted. In New York, jurors were advised to keep their identities and identifying information secret, the judge lectured the media for disclosing too many details, and one juror was dismissed before the trial started because she feared she had been identified.

Trump jurors have not publicly discussed their deliberations, and with good reason. When the trial ended with his conviction, his supporters made violent threats against jurors and others involved in the case. In Delaware, several jurors spoke to the media about how they reached their guilty verdict against Hunter Biden.

The younger Biden’s legal trials and accompanying tribulations are not over, and they are just one stressor in a literal world of pain for his father.

As I wrote about the president:

Don’t mistake Biden’s empathy for weakness. The major challenges he has confronted in his first term have required focus, discipline, and strength—from the death, destruction, and global destabilization of two raging wars to his own son’s prosecution on gun charges and the jury’s guilty verdict Tuesday.

Persistence, restraint, forcefulness, forbearance—these qualities speak to an underlying toughness, and Biden has demonstrated them all during his presidency. The Hunter Biden saga is no exception.

Read the whole thing, as they say. There’s no paywall.

I’ll leave you with this, one of nicest and most unexpected exchanges I’ve had on social media in the 15 years I’ve been on various platforms. It happened when I decided to engage with a critic I’d never met or even encountered before online, and try to explain why I wrote what I wrote.