President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who has publicly discussed his struggle with alcohol and crack cocaine addiction, said in an interview published Monday that he often worries about the consequences of a potential relapse on November’s high-stakes election.
“I have something much bigger than even myself at stake. We are in the middle of a fight for the future of democracy,” he told US outlet Axios.
The remark echoes a line repeated by his father on the campaign trail, arguing that US democracy could be at stake if Donald Trump and his hardline Republican allies win the White House.
The rare interview comes just two days ahead of Hunter’s expected testimony in Congress, where House Republicans plan to question him as part of their simmering impeachment push against the president.
Republicans accuse the Democratic incumbent — without yet providing any hard evidence — that he benefited from Hunter’s foreign business dealings while serving as vice president under Barack Obama.
Hunter, 54, discussed his struggles with addiction in detail in a 2021 memoir published shortly after his father took office, and has previously testified that he has been sober since June 2019.
Republicans and right-wing media have gone farther though, repeatedly airing salacious details from his years of addiction, which Biden told Axios he continues to struggle with daily.
“I don’t care whether you’re 10 years sober, two years sober, two months sober or 200 years sober — your brain at some level is always telling you there’s still one answer,” he said.
“Most importantly, you have to believe that you’re worth the work, or you’ll never be able to get sober. But I often do think of the profound consequences of failure here.”
Apart from the impeachment investigation, Hunter also faces several gun and tax charges, which are working their way through court after a plea deal last year collapsed amid intense Republican outrage.
Joe Biden has always strongly defended his only surviving son, whose mother and sister died in a car crash when Hunter was a toddler.
Hunter’s older brother Beau died of brain cancer in 2015.
In his memoir, Hunter wrote that his father’s unconditional love helped him through his addiction.
“He never abandoned me, never shunned me, never judged me, no matter how bad things got,” he wrote.
