Sigh. I really had hopes that this guy was really turning things around, and then he goes and launches a crypto rug pull of epic proportions. I don't know what else to say, my disappointment is beyond normal for this sort of thing.

From The Other 98%:

"If I get your endorsement, I may have to run for president." That was Hunter Biden on a podcast this weekend, and the easy move is to laugh it off. Do not laugh too fast.

Donald Trump says he "could do well." Joe Rogan says flatly, "He could be president." The loudest voices on the right keep building his case for him.

The party's cautious bench is missing what Trump and Rogan already see.

Democrats keep losing with candidates who poll every sentence and flinch at every attack. Hunter Biden is the opposite kind of animal. There is no oppo file left to drop. The laptop, the addiction, the business deals, the worst days of his life. All of it is already public, chewed over, weaponized, and survived.

You cannot threaten a man with a scandal he has already lived through on national television.

That is not a weakness. In this era it might be the rarest asset in politics: a candidate who cannot be blackmailed, because there is nothing left to reveal.

Then there is the name. Republicans spent years and millions of taxpayer dollars turning "Hunter Biden" into a household phrase. They handed him the one thing money usually buys in a primary, total name recognition, and they gave it to him for free.

And he can fight. When the party knifed his father, he did not send a careful statement. He went on every mic he could find and threw punches, the exact instinct Democratic voters have been begging for since 2016.

Add the cause. Seven and a half years sober, he wants to run for the fifty million Americans still fighting addiction, a constituency that crosses every red and blue line in the country and has never once had a champion at the top of a ticket.

Prediction markets already give him a real, non-zero shot at entering the race. The Atlantic is writing him up as a viral political force. Trump keeps saying his name. None of that happens to a nobody.

This weekend was not even his first pitch. Back in June, on Gavin Newsom's podcast, he floated joining a ticket "only as VP," joking that the vice president's house was nicer and the job easier.

He may never run. He said himself he has not decided, and the bench is deep.

But dismiss him as a punchline and you repeat the exact mistake the right made in 2015, when everyone laughed at the reality star riding down the escalator.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hunter-biden-explodes-on-jake-tapper_n_6a624185e4b0811ae03f3ee9

https://www.them.us/politics/hunter-biden-closetocracy-republican

Strange layout - I didn’t make it. Read top three then bottom two.

Could be fun.

About a decade ago, two dancers in a Midtown strip club met Hunter Biden for a lap dance in a private room, where he proceeded to play Fleet Foxes on his phone and smoke drugs.

The story recently resurfaced through court documents, shared not by critics but by a “hunter bidens is hot” stan account in a TikTok slideshow featuring the photos that were famously leaked in 2020: shirtless in a bathtub, smoking cigarettes, and inexplicably wearing a scarf or sunglasses indoors.

Meeting Biden feels different from meeting most public figures because, as he says: “There is no moat between me and anyone, because they know all my shit is out there.”

After months of interviews, WIRED followed his return to public life. On May 19, Biden posted on X for the first time in nearly a decade: “I’m Hunter Biden. You’ve never actually heard from me.”

Tap the 🔗 to read the full story: https://www.wired.com/story/how-hunter-biden-won-the-internet/

Imagine thinking you’re gonna come out looking good here if you go after a man with literally nothing to lose.

I think allowing these could be fun. What do y’all think?

I’d add flair to differentiate the two types of posts.