PROJECTION: Hunter Biden Blasts Jake Tapper Because He Can't Admit What He Did to His Dad
He went after Tapper for five minutes and never named one thing the book got wrong. That is the tell.
Hunter Biden is on a bit of a reputation reclamation revenge tour, and he did not hold back on his remarkably harsh assessment of Original Sin co-author Jake Tapper.
Biden sat down with Don Lemon this week and called the CNN anchor “a complete and utter asshole,” adding that Tapper is a poor journalist, an indecent human being, and “the Brick Tamland of his generation,” a reference to the cognitively deficient Steve Carell character from Anchorman. Then he explained why he felt free to say so. “I’m not running for anything.”
At least he was being honest, I guess. Not in his insults of Tapper, but that he isn’t running for anything. Democrats have spent a year doing the careful dance about Original Sin, and I guess there is something unique and almost refreshing about a man with nothing left to lose.
He went on for five minutes about the book that documented his father’s decline and never once identified something it got wrong. It’s notable, if not revealing, that since he could not attack the testimony, he attacked the witness. Anyone who has spent time in a courtroom knows what that move means.
Hunter Biden comes across as very angry, and it doesn’t take much digging to realize why the rage runs this hot. The book reported that Joe Biden’s cognitive decline got much worse at the end of 2023 and into 2024. Anyone following the news then could see it happen before their eyes. This happens to be the same period when Hunter’s legal crisis peaked, and his father lived in real fear of losing a third child, this time to an overdose or worse. The former president has already buried a daughter and a son. Hunter’s crisis put crushing weight on an aging father at the moment the country needed him sharpest. The book stops short of blaming him for the decline itself. It can afford to. Nobody knows that timeline better than Hunter does.
It’s genuinely the most humanizing passage in the book, describing a father’s love and what it cost him. Hunter could have owned how his disastrous spinout negatively affected his dad. He could have told Lemon, yes, my crisis wounded my father, I carry that, and here is what I learned. That would have been the interview of the year and honestly made Hunter Biden far more likable. Americans largely like to forgive.
Instead, he called Tapper an “asshole.” Which to me? Reads far more like a guy describing what he sees in the mirror and putting Jake Tapper’s name on it than a media critique.
And once you see it through that projection lens? The whole tour reads differently. The Lemon appearance was one stop on a longer itinerary. Since spring, Hunter has sat with Candace Owens, done Gavin Newsom's podcast, launched a Substack, reactivated his X account (NPR counted roughly 23 posts a day), and met Nick Fuentes in a Philadelphia hotel room for Andrew Callaghan's Channel 5, a sit-down that reportedly nearly turned physical. A podcast of his own with Callaghan is said to be next.
Some grace is in order here, and I mean it. Hunter is a man in recovery who was hunted for a decade by people who wanted to hurt his father through him. His intimate photos were obtained and circulated without his consent, a grotesque violation with a victim no matter what you think of the victim. His gun prosecution was unusual, and the entire case became inseparable from politics. His addiction was an illness, and he survived it, which most people in its grip do not. If this tour were about telling that story, I would be rooting for him.
This tour Hunter is doing is trying to accomplish something else. Every self-promotional interview produces a new and different villain. The Republicans who weaponized the laptop. The prosecutors who overcharged him. The insiders who abandoned his father. The media that covered all of it. And now, of course, Jake Tapper. The confessions are always in the past tense. The blame is always in the present tense, and it always belongs to someone else.
The record does not help him. Original Sin was built on more than 200 interviews, most of them with Democrats, and its sources spoke on background. Hunter waves that around as a weakness. He has it backward. People withheld their names because, as the authors tell it, the Biden orbit punished candor, and anyone wondering what happened to those who crossed the family can just watch the Lemon clip. Hunter spent this week demonstrating why nobody went on the record.
The book’s core judgment has held up, too, and from the unlikeliest corners. Kamala Harris has since written that leaving the reelection decision to Joe and Jill Biden alone was recklessness, and that the people closest to him should have known better. Hillary Clinton called the reelection attempt a terrible mistake for Biden, his legacy, and the country. When those two sign off on your book’s central judgment, calling the author names starts to sound like surrender.
Tapper is not beyond criticism here. He has acknowledged the press, himself included, did not push hard enough on Biden’s condition while he was in office. Fair, and a debate worth having. It is not evidence that anything in Original Sin is false, and Hunter offered none.
Hunter demands limitless compassion for the wreckage his addiction caused while extending none to the journalists whose job was to document what that wreckage did to everyone around him, including the president of the United States. That is the whole tour, really, and the content is performing well enough that he seems to have made it a career.
He is right about one thing. He is not running for anything. He owes no one message discipline or the fake gracious answer he mocked on Lemon’s show. He is free to tell the whole truth.
He still won’t tell the one story that matters. The one where he was persecuted, exposed, and exploited, all true, and where he was also one of the people who broke his father’s heart at the moment his father could least withstand it. Until he says that out loud, the tour is just a man yelling at mirrors and calling them Jake Tapper.