While Beau grew up to become a successful politician who his father imagined might become president himself one day, Hunter struggled with alcohol, drugs and personal issues. After Beau died of brain cancer in 2015, a distraught Hunter spiraled into repeated bouts with crack cocaine that ultimately destroyed his marriage.
As he wrote in “Beautiful Things,” his 2021 memoir, the younger Mr. Biden would descend into weekslong drug binges, smoking crack as often as every 15 minutes and engaging in erratic and even reckless behavior, including inviting his street dealer to live with him and conducting an extramarital affair with Beau’s widow, Hallie Biden. He described a life of “buying crack in the middle of the night behind a gas station in Nashville, Tenn., or craving the tiny liquor bottles in your hotel minibar while sitting in a palace in Amman with the king of Jordan.”
At one point when he disappeared for nearly a month, he opened his door to find his father, then the vice president, trailed by Secret Service agents. “You need help,” his father said. As Hunter Biden wrote, “He wouldn’t leave until I agreed to do something.” On another occasion the elder Mr. Biden participated in a family intervention, ambushing Hunter to push him into treatment. When Hunter stormed out in anger, his father chased him down the driveway and grabbed him and cried.
In private, the president has stewed over conservative attacks on his son, according to intimates, unwilling to criticize Hunter even for conduct that politically damaged his father. Whenever he has responded to questions in public, the president has strongly defended Hunter, most memorably in a 2020 debate when Mr. Trump attacked the younger Mr. Biden.
“My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people we know at home, had a drug problem,” he said then, his voice suffused with anger over Mr. Trump’s attacks. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud of it. I’m proud of my son.”
Hunter Biden has remarried and said he has turned his life around. He only occasionally shows up at the White House, knowing that whenever he does it will become an issue. He approached Kevin McCarthy, soon to be the Republican House speaker, at a State Dinner at the White House in December and complimented his mother. He traveled with his father to Ireland in April.
But regardless of whether he is there in person, Hunter Biden will continue to be a presence in his father’s presidency, welcome or not, especially as next year’s election draws closer.