Hunter Biden returns to X with provocative posts about drugs, Epstein, and a possible 2028 run

Hunter Biden has spent the past month flooding X with nearly 500 posts, cracking jokes about his crack pipe, taking shots at the Trump family's business dealings, and racking up hundreds of thousands of likes in what amounts to a one-man rehabilitation campaign for a name that was, until recently, political poison.

The former first son, now 56, began posting on his X account last month after years of dormancy, and the account quickly amassed nearly half a million followers. By Friday morning, he was posting what read like a campaign platform. And President Trump, asked in the Oval Office about speculation that Hunter Biden could run in 2028, gave an answer that stopped short of dismissal.

The question for conservative voters is simple: Are we really doing this?

Sobriety, cocaine jokes, and a charm offensive

Hunter Biden posted Monday that he was marking his seventh year of sobriety. The post was earnest, and then the rest of his feed was anything but.

When a user accused him of being the owner of a bag of cocaine left in the West Wing during the summer of 2023, Biden fired back with a one-liner that got more than 242,000 likes:

"It most definitely was not. I would never have forgotten my drugs."

On Thursday, he responded to a photoshopped image showing him with a drug pipe in his mouth. His reply earned another 146,000 likes:

"I know this may sound petty, but I can't stand it when people photoshop a meth pipe in my mouth. A crack pipe doesn't have that little bowl at the end. This is why we can't trust AI. Please make the appropriate edit. Thank you for your attention to this matter."

The self-deprecating humor is clearly calculated. Biden also posted a longer, more sober reflection on his addiction:

"There was zero glory in my addiction. It was truly the most excruciatingly humiliating and degrading experience you could possibly imagine. I wanted to commit suicide almost daily, but didn't have the courage for even that."

He continued: "Instead I'd reach for the pipe or the bottle. The cowards way out. The guilt. The shame. The hurt. The absolute misery of it. Yet here I am. And I am not alone. There are millions upon millions of us. We don't all agree on politics or people or who we root for on Sunday. But we all have the shared experience of walking through that fire and surviving. I chose to live. That's not a joke."

Give the man credit for candor about addiction. But candor about one's past is not the same as accountability for it, and the charm offensive is plainly designed to make voters forget the parts of that past that have nothing to do with a crack pipe.

Throwing stones at the Trump family

Biden didn't limit himself to self-deprecation. He used his platform to launch pointed attacks at the Trump family's business interests, framing them as worse than his own well-documented scandals.

In one post, he targeted Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Don Jr., and Eric Trump in a single thread:

"Jared and Ivanka are building a private island paradise on Albanian protected land. Don Jr married the daughter of Epstein's banker, and a startup his fund backs just got a record $620M Pentagon loan. Eric is taking an Israeli drone company public for $1.5B in the middle of a war with Iran that nobody wanted. And I know: 'But what about your paintings, Hunter?' Please."

The reference to paintings concerns Biden's sale of artwork for six figures at a New York City gallery while his father was president, a controversy driven by critics who argued buyers were purchasing access to Joe Biden, not art. Biden's post attempted to recast that episode as trivial compared to the Trump children's financial entanglements.

It's a familiar move from the Democratic playbook: when your own record is indefensible, change the subject. Biden claimed Don Jr.'s new wife, Bettina Anderson, is the daughter of the late Palm Beach banker Harry Loy Anderson Jr., whom Biden described as Jeffrey Epstein's personal banker. He claimed Eric Trump is involved in a $1.5 billion merger between Israeli drone maker XTEND and Florida-based JFB Construction Holdings. These are Biden's own claims, and the source material does not independently verify them.

What's telling is the framing. Biden wants voters to weigh his scandals against the Trump family's business deals as though they're equivalent. They aren't. Biden's legal troubles included federal charges. His laptop became a national story. His business dealings in Ukraine and China drew congressional scrutiny for years. Selling paintings and cracking jokes on X doesn't erase any of that, it just repackages it.

The 2028 question

The social media blitz has generated enough buzz that someone created a mock "Hunter 2028" campaign poster with the tagline "Let's smoke the competition." Biden responded, calling himself "this crackhead" who "has a lot to say."

President Trump weighed in Thursday after being asked about the speculation in the Oval Office. His response was measured:

"You would think that the past has something to do with winning an election. And I would say his past is not the greatest."

He added: "Hey, if the guy from Maine can do well, I guess Hunter could do well", a reference to Graham Platner.

Biden then responded to the "checkered past" remark with another barb:

"Did he just say checkered past? I'm 28 felonies, 6 bankruptcies, and an Epstein bromance short of his checkered past."

By Friday morning, Biden posted what resembled a political platform. He wrote that groceries cost too much and that tariffs "suck and make no sense." He added: "The border should be secure, but legal immigration is good. Endless wars are stupid, especially ones that nobody wants and have never been explained. Americans are exhausted."

The border line is worth pausing on. It's the kind of empty nod to enforcement that Democratic politicians have perfected, say "secure the border" while opposing every concrete measure to do so. Biden offered no policy specifics, no acknowledgment of the crisis his father's administration presided over, and no explanation of what "secure" means to him. It's a bumper sticker, not a position.

The tariff complaint, meanwhile, reads like standard Democratic messaging repackaged in populist language. Whether Biden actually believes any of this or is simply testing lines that poll well is an open question, but the pattern is familiar enough. Democratic figures routinely wrap spending programs and policy failures in feel-good language designed to obscure the details.

The broader strategy

Hunter Biden has also started a Substack and recently sat down for an interview with Candace Owens, described as formerly one of his biggest critics. He has styled himself a "MAGA Whisperer" on X. He has used his platform to defend his parents, including going after CNN anchor Jake Tapper after Tapper criticized Jill Biden's memoir.

The strategy is transparent. Biden is trying to rewrite his public image from scandal-plagued liability to irreverent truth-teller. The nearly 500 posts, the half-million followers, the six-figure like counts, all of it is designed to create a new narrative before the 2028 cycle begins in earnest.

And it may work, at least with a media class that has always been more interested in rehabilitating the Bidens than holding them accountable. The same press corps that spent years dismissing the laptop story, downplaying the foreign business dealings, and treating Hunter Biden as a sympathetic figure rather than a subject of legitimate scrutiny will be only too happy to cover his "comeback."

But the facts haven't changed. The federal charges happened. The laptop was real. The paintings were sold to anonymous buyers while his father occupied the Oval Office. No number of witty posts about crack pipes alters the underlying record.

What voters should remember

Hunter Biden is good at this. He's funny on social media. He's disarming. He knows how to turn his worst moments into punchlines that make critics look humorless. That's a genuine political skill.

But political skill is not the same as fitness for office, and a charm offensive is not the same as a clean record. The question isn't whether Hunter Biden can get likes on X. The question is whether the Democratic Party is so depleted that a man whose name is synonymous with influence-peddling and personal scandal is being floated, even semi-seriously, as a future standard-bearer.

If that's where the party is headed, conservatives should welcome the conversation. Let voters compare records. Let them weigh the Biden family's history against whatever platform Hunter Biden assembles between jokes about drug paraphernalia. Transparency is supposed to be the point of democracy.

Just don't mistake a good posting streak for a clean slate. The internet has a short memory. The voters who pay their own grocery bills don't.