Hunter Biden is sitting in an inner room of Trinity College Dublin’s exam hall with his five-year-old-son, Beau (named for his brother, who died of brain cancer in 2015). He has just been awarded a gold medal by TCD’s College Historical Society for his “outstanding contribution to the public discourse”.
During his speech, he railed against the bullying instincts of Donald Trump, spoke emotionally about his addiction to crack cocaine and alcohol, and said that Israel is guilty of “mass murder” in Gaza.
Outside, a crowd of Pro-Palestine demonstrators are still clearly audible, having protested and thrown milk cartons at his father, former US president Joe Biden, who was a surprise guest.
A pair of TCD officials are hovering nervously, trying to engineer Hunter Biden’s exit from campus while avoiding the crowd. “We’ll walk,” he suggests to the clear discomfort of the officials, “or I’ll call an Uber.”
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He is untroubled by the prospect of meeting protesters – and also of calling out the man who preceded and succeeded his father in the Oval Office. Donald Trump relentlessly targeted Hunter Biden for years, most memorably a saga about an abandoned laptop alleged to belong to him, which provided fodder for conspiracy theorists but also an uncomfortable insight into his personal life and business dealings.
With Trump at a low ebb after a midterm humbling, Biden is in no mood to hold back – telling the TCD crowd that his father “beat [Trump] like a drum” when they faced off in 2020. “People are done with Donald Trump and his brand of politics,” Biden told The Irish Times after his address. “It was the most resounding repudiation of a single political figure that I know of.”
But knowing how Trump operates, how does Biden think the US president will react? “I think that he is going to become even more draconian and authoritarian,” he says.
“We all should be concerned about that because he’s done it in the past, he’s pressed at the weaknesses in the walls of our democracy and he knows where those weak spots are now.”
The midterm results, he says, also contain a “huge challenge” for Democrats, who can use the machinery of Washington to gum up the wheels of Trump’s administration, but can’t use executive power to “turn the page”, or to focus on things like affordability or the conduct of foreign policy. The future of those areas is a matter for after the next presidential election, he says, but he predicts a rancorous two years in between. “The question is, how effectively will Republicans blame all of the things that are going to ensue ... on the Democrats?”
During the Q&A session in Trinity, Biden insisted on taking a question from a pro-Palestine protester, telling the room that what is happening in Gaza is “absolutely and completely wrong”.
“There is no excuse for it,” he said, calling it “mass murder”. Public sentiment, he says, has shifted on Israel across the world, rather than just in the US. He urged the Trinity crowd to pressure the current US administration. But he is defensive, even evasive, on whether his father’s administration enabled or encouraged the Netanyahu government in how it prosecuted its war.
“I know that he more than anyone, attempted to curtail and stop [Israel].” Speaking afterwards, he rejects the idea that he is giving his father’s administration a pass. “I do not want to engage in a defence of the policy of my father’s administration based upon information that I don’t have,” he says. “And I don’t feel like I have the right to be critical or to defend something that wasn’t mine.”
He is, however, fiercely defensive of his father, whose clear decline on the campaign trail in 2024 consumed Democratic politics before Biden snr stepped aside. He is scornful of Original Sin, a 2025 book by US journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson that chronicled the decline of Biden and the implosion of his campaign.
In the book, the authors relay incidents from Joe Biden’s 2023 trip to Ireland, days before he launched his 2024 campaign against Trump – including one in Áras an Uachtaráin, when two democratic congressmen travelling with him believed he was showing signs of decline – while Hunter Biden was actively encouraging him to slow down, to take a nap.
Biden jnr “100 per cent” remembers urging his father to pace himself, but is adamant that he saw no signs of cognitive decline. “Not in any way mentally,” he says, challenging anyone to point to an instance when his father made a poor policy call due to mental decline. Asked if he felt the issue of age-related impairment affected the campaign and the outcome in 2024, Biden jnr pivots to a full-throated attack on Trump.
“I watch a president of the United States who literally falls asleep in the Oval office with the cameras on,” he says. “I believe the current president is in cognitive decline, has been in cognitive decline, and the reason that I believe that is because of the evidence before our eyes and the decisions he makes and the erratic nature in the way in which he acts,” he says, describing Trump’s output as “certifiably insane”.
Hunter Biden had a months-long social media moment earlier this year, trolling Republicans mainly with studs-up retorts and takedowns. It led to speculation that he could be planning a political push – but he is unenthusiastic about the prospect of an electoral career – if ever so slightly caveated, telling The Irish Times: “I don’t say never to anything.” But he says his political ambitions are more in line with running for mayor of his small hometown.
Throughout his address in Trinity, Biden’s devotion to his father and wider family was a constant theme – as well as a public self-flagellation over the damage he had wrought as he struggled with addiction. Often pausing to compose himself, he spoke of a family intervention which went south, leading Biden jnr to flee the family home, pursued by his father, who held him and said, “I just don’t know what to do.” It is a raw, very human story, hinging on the Biden constancy which also formed a core part of his father’s political brand.
Before leaving office, Joe Biden pardoned Hunter, who was facing a range of tax and gun charges. Biden jr’s view now is that Trump would have viciously pursued him otherwise, but he is frank about the “damaging precedent” it set.
He remains grateful, he says, but honestly admits to being “the sole privileged beneficiary. No one else could have received what I received, a pardon from their father. And I don’t forget it every day.”
