Hunter Biden Fed the Trolls, and Everyone Is Eating

[Alana] Hunter Biden fed the trolls,

and everyone is eating.

[mysterious music] Several months ago,

WIRED began holding a series of wide-ranging interviews

with Hunter Biden,

his first for a mainstream publication in years.

Biden has long been the black sheep

of the Democratic Party, a wayward failson

in need of rehabilitation.

Until recently, most online content about him

was either revenge porn or conspiracy theories,

much of which stemmed from the near-total violation

of his digital privacy.

On May 19, whatever distance there was between Biden

and the rest of us seemed to evaporate

when he posted on X for the first time in a decade

with the words, I'm Hunter Biden.

You've never actually heard from me.

A little over a month later,

he has 800,000 followers on X

and has materially changed his image

by not just talking about his struggles with addiction,

but dunking on conservatives every chance he gets.

Now, girlies match his tweets with astrological signs,

and he gets to enjoy one of life's simple pleasures:

posting, Stephen Miller is an ugly fuck.

Why the return to the public sphere?

It's got nothing to do

with any political ambitions, he claims.

His primary goal is to help other addicts.

He says, If I made it back

from that global public humiliation, then you know what?

They can too.

Biden, now 56, has spent much of the past three years

in a modest garage in Malibu,

which he's transformed into a makeshift art studio.

It's here that he's tried to shut out the world,

spending 10 hours a day painting

more than 100 Maximalist compositions of animals,

nature, and symbols.

Biden seems mostly buffered from the chaos

that defined the previous decade.

He wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to paint.

When his six-year-old son, Beau, gets up

at around 7:00 a.m., Biden makes him breakfast.

Then they take a walk or go for a swim.

In the afternoon, he writes.

He says he's finished a draft of a new book

about the laptop scandal and everything that came after,

which he plans to serialize on his Substack.