Hunter Biden’s funny, honest X posts win fans

Hunter Biden outside court in Wilmington, Delaware, in June 2024. Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Hunter Biden outside court in Wilmington, Delaware, in June 2024. Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Analysis Hunter Biden’s funny, honest X posts win fans – even Republicans Adam Gabbatt in New York Self-deprecating jokes and mental health advocacy have gone viral, and his political commentary is proving popular It’s been quite the journey for Hunter Biden . In the space of a few weeks, the former first son has gone from a man seen as a political liability to an unlikely galvanizing force within the Democratic party, through his emergence on social media as a mental health advocate, razzer of Republicans, and working-class whisperer. In the process Biden has switched from the GOP’s bete noire to, actually, someone that a fair number of Republican voters seem to like. His self-deprecating posts, including one where he told Playboy magazine he would not pose nude for them, and another where he engaged in some campy wordplay over a phallic misspelling of the word “election”, are mixed in with serious messages about addiction recovery. And his populist posts about politics even have some calling for him to run for US president in 2028. Frequently, his honest, human responses to trolling have seemed to win over critics. Take his response to an X user called Ashley, whose username is @TeamTrump47. Ashley, whose bio says she loves Jesus, responded to a post from Biden by writing: “I’d rather live under a rock than smoke it.” “Me too. It was awful,” responded Biden, prompting a mea culpa from Ashley. “Well damn, Hunter, that makes me sad,” she wrote. “You live a better life than you were living. Good luck.” Biden’s rise on X, where he has amassed more than 780,000 followers, has attracted the attention of Trump himself. Last week the president was asked for his thoughts on Biden’s chances in a hypothetical 2028 primary. “You would think that, you know, past has something to do with winning an election. And I would say his past is not the greatest,” Trump said. Biden was right there with a response. “Wait…Did he just say checkered past?” Biden wrote. “I’m 28 felonies, 6 bankruptcies, and an Epstein bromance short of his checkered past.” In 2024 Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in a criminal hush-money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. That year, Biden was convicted of three felony tax crimes. He was previously found guilty of three felony charges related to an illegal gun purchase. Biden has since seemed to warm to the theme of a 2028 run, if only to troll conservatives on X. “Just saying… No Democrat has won the White House this century without a Biden on the ticket,” he wrote on Friday morning, in a post seen by almost half a million people. When a man called Tyler replied, telling Biden he was “very good” on the app, Biden wrote: “It’s so easy to bait them Tyler.