David Shuster asked Hunter Biden a question I ask carefully, because a lot of people in recovery have told me the same thing: that it never really leaves you. That there is always a compulsion underneath, always a pull, and the work is managing it. Is it a daily struggle for you too?
He did not give the answer I expected.
“I am no longer an addict. I’m not an addict anymore. I am in recovery, but I will always be vulnerable to anything that is a mind-altering substance.”
Then he laid out what that means in practice. He can never again let himself take anything that lifts his mood, or changes how he behaves, or quiets his anxiety, unless a doctor knows about it. Not once. Not ever. He said it without drama, the way you would describe managing any other disease.
I have talked with a lot of people about this. I have never heard anyone put it that precisely. He is not claiming to be cured. He is refusing to be defined forever by the worst chapter of his life while also refusing to pretend he ever gets to relax. That is a hard place to stand. He stands there in public, while a president and an entire propaganda operation use “crack addict” as a punchline about him roughly once a week.
That clip is free. Watch it. Send it to somebody who needs to hear it.
The whole conversation is not free, and today is the day I have to tell you about that.
We went well over an hour, and he did not dodge a single question.
He walked me through the money. His paintings brought in about $200,000 a year, and every single person who bought one was hauled before Congress to testify under oath about the purchase. Set that against $3.9 billion in defense contracts steered to Don Jr.’s private equity outfit, formed weeks before his father took the oath of office. “But meanwhile,” he said, “what about my paintings?”
He said Bibi Netanyahu is a ghoul, and then built an argument about Pharaoh and the Jewish people that I have not stopped thinking about since. He told me what he actually thinks about Kamala Harris distancing herself from his father, which he could have skated past and did not. He talked about going on with Tucker Carlson, a man who was once his friend, and about the tanning session Tucker offered him. I am not going to explain that one here.
That is what a paid subscription to Blue Amp buys you. Not the clip. The whole thing—every full interview, every Tequila Talk, the Deep Dives, the archive, the comment threads where the sharpest people I know go at it with each other, and the survival of a small independent shop with no network, no billionaire, and not one advertiser who gets to tell us what we may not say.
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—Cliff
