FOR HUNTER, THE BIDEN BUSINESS GOES BUST. It looks like Hunter Biden is facing a new problem: Being the son of a former president is a lot less lucrative than being the son of a sitting president.
In 2023, the younger Biden filed a lawsuit against Garrett Ziegler, a former aide in the first Trump White House, over Ziegler’s role in disseminating information from the notorious Hunter Biden laptop. This week, Biden asked a judge to withdraw the lawsuit. The reason: He doesn’t have the money to go on.
“Since late 2023 and through today, my income has decreased significantly,” Biden said in a court filing. “Prior to that, my income primarily came from sales of my artwork and sales of my memoir entitled ‘Beautiful Things.’” Since then, roughly corresponding with the time his father faltered and then withdrew from the 2024 presidential race, the younger Biden’s income has fallen through the floor.
Biden wrote that in 2021, 2022, and 2023, he sold 27 pieces of art. The average sales price was $54,481.48. That would equal $1,470,999.96 in income for Biden. But since the start of 2024, Biden has sold exactly one work of art, for $36,000. While that is still a lot of money — many artists would love to be able to sell a painting for $36,000 — it’s nothing like what Biden made when his father was at the peak of his presidency.
Likewise, Biden’s book sales have tanked. In mid-2023, he sold 3,161 copies of his book, but after that, only 1,100 copies have sold.
Finally, there is the speaking and public appearance income Biden had hoped to have. It hasn’t materialized. “Given the positive feedback and review of my artwork and memoir, I was expecting to obtain paid speaking engagements and paid appearances,” Biden wrote, “but that has not happened.”
Biden has also suffered some bad luck. He is a resident of the Los Angeles area, and his house, a rental, was damaged by the Pacific Palisades fire. “Like many others in that situation, I am having difficulty in finding a new permanent place to live,” Biden wrote. For all those reasons, Biden concluded that he just did not have the money to continue the lawsuit.
We should all feel compassion for people who have suffered from the terrible fires. But Biden’s much larger problem is that he built his career, his way of making income, on the fact of having a powerful father. He’s done it all his life because his father was powerful for all his son’s life. Joe Biden was a senator for 36 years, a vice president for eight years, and president for four years. All that time, there was money to be made by being closely related to the powerful man.
But now, Joe Biden, 82 years old, is no longer president. He left the White House an unpopular leader, particularly so with many in his party who blame him for the Democrats’ defeat in 2024. He has also been succeeded by a man who, while only four years younger than him, has shown incredible energy and drive in his first months in the White House — a stark contrast to Joe Biden’s quiet exit.
Finally, Hunter Biden also has to live with the fact that he is, and will always be, a recovering drug addict. One only has to look at some of the contents of the laptop to see the depths to which he sank while addicted. People should wish him well in overcoming that.
But the fact remains, Hunter Biden, for all his other problems, chose to go into the Joe Biden business. It made him a lot of money over the decades. Even when he evaded paying taxes on millions of dollars in income, a new friend who just happened to be a big supporter of Joe Biden appeared on the scene to “loan” Hunter millions of dollars to pay his back taxes and maintain a lavish lifestyle. And, of course, Joe Biden gave his son an unusually broad pardon in the final days of his term. There were a lot of benefits.
But now, the Joe Biden business is closing down. The paintings and books aren’t selling. The speeches aren’t happening. The friends aren’t as generous. It’s time for something new.
