Hunter Biden’s emergence shadows his father’s presidency

Every day, Hunter Biden calls his sponsor three times, trying to keep his drug and alcohol addiction at bay. Every night, by his own account, President Biden calls him before he goes to bed — and, if Hunter doesn’t pick up, a string of texts follows. And almost every minute, he says, he realizes how tenuous his life still is.

“I’m concerned. I really am. In the sense of, I have a healthy fear,” the president’s only living son said at the end of a 90-minute discussion with Marc Maron on his “WTF” podcast. “I’m not living in that. But you know, I’m leaving here and I’m going straight home.”

Over the past two weeks, after two years of being a largely silent character in an explosive narrative at the center of a presidential campaign, Hunter Biden is increasingly emerging, with a new book and interviews. The story he tells is in a sense familiar to the Biden family — trauma, tragedy and a deep well of grief, followed by redemption and a return from improbable odds.

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