Hunter Biden sat down with billionaire grocery chain owner John Catsimatidis on WABC's "Cats Roundtable" this weekend and, when offered an endorsement, responded with five words that should terrify every sober adult in the Democratic Party: "If I get your endorsement, I may have to."
He was talking about running for president in 2028.
Let's establish the resume. Hunter Biden was convicted on federal gun charges for lying on a firearms purchase form in 2018. He was convicted on federal tax charges. His father, President Joe Biden, issued him a full and unconditional pardon in December 2024 — covering, in the elder Biden's own framing, anything Hunter might have done. The laptop that half the media establishment spent three years calling "Russian disinformation" turned out to be very real, very his, and very full of material that would disqualify a person from managing a Wendy's, let alone the nuclear codes.
That's the guy eyeing the Oval Office.
Hunter told Catsimatidis his qualification was his father. "He is my qualification for becoming president, if you believe in the Constitution of the United States of America that you swear to uphold and protect," he said. Which is a fascinating interpretation of the Constitution — that the presidency is inherited like a beach house in Delaware.
He also claims seven and a half years of sobriety, which he apparently felt the need to verify publicly. During an appearance on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" back in August, he told the audience they could "check and see if I relapsed." Inspiring stuff for a stump speech.
The broader context here is the Democratic 2028 bench, and it explains why something this absurd is even being discussed out loud. The party's serious contenders — Andy Beshear, the Governor of Kentucky; JB Pritzker, the Governor of Illinois; Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia — haven't exactly set the world on fire. An August Emerson College/The Hill survey showed the field is wide open, with no dominant frontrunner. Kamala Harris flamed out. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez generates clicks but not coalitions. Pete Buttigieg ran the Transportation Department into a ditch.
Hunter, for his part, said "I love Gavin Newsom, personally" — which tracks, given that both men have a talent for failing upward in ways that would land an ordinary person in a halfway house or a courtroom.
The Democratic establishment will wave this off as a joke. Not serious. But the fact that he's doing national radio interviews floating the idea — and that nobody in his orbit apparently told him not to — tells you something about where the party is. They spent 50 million dollars and four years propping up a candidate who couldn't finish a sentence, and now the son who got the pardon is out here workshopping a campaign pitch on AM radio.
The 2028 Democratic primary now has a potential entrant who has a federal firearms conviction, a tax fraud conviction, a presidential pardon that had to be broad enough to cover crimes that hadn't even been charged yet and whose most famous accomplishment is a laptop filled with videos of him doing drugs and banging hookers he abandoned at a repair shop.
That's not a campaign announcement. That's a cry for help from a party that's run out of options.