6 days ago
Hunter Biden: Trump won the election because Democrats weren't loyal to my dad
Donald Trump won last year's US presidential election because Democrats failed to rally around Joe Biden, the former president's son has claimed.
Hunter Biden claimed the Democrats 'literally melted down' when they turned on his father, forcing him to drop his re-election bid following a disastrous debate performance.
Mr Biden, who last year was convicted of buying a gun while addicted to crack cocaine, also said he kept 'as far away' as possible from the White House.
Speaking on a podcast hosted by Jaime Harrison, the former head of the Democratic National Committee, Mr Biden said: 'We lost the last election because we did not remain loyal to the leader of the party.
'That's my position. We had the advantage of incumbency, we had the advantage of an incredibly successful administration, and the Democratic Party literally melted down.'
Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race in July last year, after a dire debate against Mr Trump in which he often lost his train of thought and was frequently incoherent.
Democrats, with the backing of the former House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi and other senior figures, quickly turned on him, piling pressure on him to bow out of the race until he eventually endorsed Kamala Harris as his successor.
Original Sin, a book released earlier this year by the journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, reported extensively on Joe Biden's alleged mental decline in office, claiming he forgot the names of aides he had known for decades.
However, Hunter Biden dismissed the claims, suggesting they had been inflated to sell copies.
'What sells is the idea of a conspiracy,' he said, adding that the chances of keeping a secret in Washington were 'zero'.
Mr Biden predicted on Mr Harrison's At Our Table podcast that the party would spend most of Mr Trump's second term consumed by internal fights.
'We are going to fight amongst ourselves for the next three years until there's a nominee. And then with the nominee, we better as hell get behind that nominee,' he argued.
Mr Biden was widely seen as an influential member of his father's inner circle, reportedly urging him to keep going with his beleaguered re-election campaign as the rest of the Democrats turned on him.
However, he told Mr Harrison that he 'stayed as far away as I possibly could' from the White House, adding that it 'broke my heart'.
The admission underscores how Mr Biden, who was the subject of multiple probes by congressional Republicans for allegedly trading access to his father for business deals, could have proved a political liability.
Mr Biden consistently denied wrongdoing.
During his father's term, he was convicted on three counts of lying on a federal firearms application, in which he declared he was not addicted to drugs while buying a revolver. In a separate case he pleaded guilty to tax evasion and filing fraudulent returns.
In December, Joe Biden pardoned his son for any crimes he may have committed in the last decade in the broadest clemency agreement since that of former president Richard Nixon.
