Former President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, claims Democrats lost the 2024 election because they weren’t “loyal” to his father.
“We are going to fight amongst ourselves for the next three years until there’s a nominee. And then with the nominee, we better as hell get behind that nominee,” Hunter said in a soon-to-be-released podcast interview with Jaime Harrison, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
“And I will tell you why we lost the last election. We lost the election because we did not remain loyal to the leader of the party. That’s my position,” he added, according to The Hill. “We had the advantage of incumbency. We had the advantage of an incredibly successful administration, and the Democratic Party literally melted down.”
Hunter’s remarks were part of a wider interview with Harrison for his new podcast, At Our Table, marking Hunter’s first interview since the Democrats’ crushing election drubbing last November. The show debuts Thursday with an interview with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the former running mate of eventual 2024 Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
Joe Biden ended his reelection bid in the wake of his disastrous presidential debate performance against Donald Trump, following weeks of pressure from Democratic lawmakers. Even before that, the then-81-year-old incumbent faced dismal enthusiasm for a second term, along with polls suggesting he’d lose all key swing states to Trump.
After the crushing 2024 election—in which Harris still lost all seven key battleground states to Trump—prominent Democratic figures pointed fingers at Biden’s decision to run again, then giving his vice president just three months to mount her own campaign.
The debate over whether Biden was mentally and physically fit for another four years in the White House reignited with bombshell claims in Original Sin, a book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson. The book includes allegations that aides even discussed putting Biden in a wheelchair for a second term because of his declining health.
The former president has pushed back on GOP claims that he was not in control of clemency decisions at the end of his time in office, with Trump and others alleging that Biden’s staff used an autopen to mimic his signature to sweeping pardons without his authorization. One pardon was for Hunter Biden after he was found guilty of gun charges in Delaware and admitted tax evasion in California.
Speaking to Harrison, Hunter denied there was any cover-up about his father’s declining mental or physical health, arguing it would have been impossible because the former president lived in a “fish bowl.”
“What sells is the idea of a conspiracy,” Hunter told Harrison, according to The Washington Post. “Every single day, hundreds of people [are around], and you can’t get one of them to go on the record and say, ‘I saw the president do X’?”
