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Forget the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fight being held on the White House lawn, if you want to tune in to a far more amusing brawl, may I suggest Hunter Biden v Jake Tapper? The CNN anchor is categorically unimpressed with Jill Biden’s new memoir, View from the East Wing, and has joined a chorus of voices accusing the former first lady of rewriting history and dodging accountability for the 2024 loss. In response, Hunter has accused Tapper of having the wrong priorities.
“So let me get this straight,” Hunter wrote on Twitter/X on Wednesday. “Jake Tapper is focused on attacking my Mom. Jared and Ivanka are building a private island paradise on Albanian protected land. Don Jr married the daughter of Epstein’s banker, and a startup his fund backs just got a record $620M Pentagon loan. Eric is taking an Israeli drone company public for $1.5B in the middle of a war with Iran that nobody wanted. And I know: ‘But what about your paintings, Hunter?’ Please.”
Hunter is absolutely right about the Trump-Kushners and their laundry list of shady dealings. However, that doesn’t mean that his family should be immune from criticism. Jill Biden decided that now was a great time to write a book and go on a book tour. Of course people are going to scrutinize it! What did you think was going to happen?
It doesn’t help that Jill Biden has made some very dubious claims in her memoir. She writes, for example, that if Joe Biden had exhibited cognitive impairment, neither she nor her staff would have hesitated to do something about it: “But he was nowhere near that point in the summer of 2024.” As Tapper writes in response: “All of that is very difficult to believe, if not just downright false.”
And then there’s the disastrous debate with Donald Trump, which ended Joe Biden’s re-election campaign. Jill has said that she thought Joe was having a stroke during the debate, and was “scared to death”. Trump, ever the opportunist, has seized on this, asking on Fox News why the pair then went to a Waffle House after the debate. He quipped that, even in good times, his wife wouldn’t let him near a Waffle House.
Jill Biden isn’t the only person who can’t seem to be honest with themselves about 2024 or take accountability for what went wrong. Kamala Harris’s memoir, 107 Days, was an exercise in self-delusion. And look at the disastrous Democratic National Committee (DNC) 2024 autopsy report, which was shelved for a while then, after a backlash, released along with a statement by the DNC chair, Ken Martin, about how he was “not proud” of the report but put it out there because people need “to trust the Democratic party”. Which is rather hard to do considering there were two glaring omissions from that report. The first was Biden’s age. The second was Gaza.
“In an autopsy of close to 50,000 words, not one of them is ‘Gaza’, or ‘Palestinians’ or ‘Israel’ or ‘genocide’,” Norman Solomon wrote in the Guardian last month. “Yet credible accounts tell of meetings where the autopsy’s author, the Democratic consultant Paul Rivera, privately acknowledged that Harris’s stance on Gaza hurt her election chances.” The Democrats seem convinced that growing anger about unconditional US support to Israel across the political spectrum is a messaging problem for them, not a policy problem.
Jill Biden’s memoir also largely sidesteps Gaza. Writing in Slate, Scaachi Koul notes Jill Biden “spends just two and a half pages talking about Palestine and the conflict that helped torpedo her husband’s reelection efforts”. These pages are largely self-congratulatory. Jill recounts how, after World Central Kitchen workers were killed by the Israeli military in April 2024, she left a Post-It note on her husband’s mirror saying: “Net has to stop.”
Not exactly Martin Luther King, is she? I’ve put more effort and passion into trying to stop my neighbours from putting their trash out early. Still, you’d think that scribbled note made her courage personified. News of her telling Biden the killing had to stop leaked, prompting White House officials to issue a statement clarifying: “The first lady was not calling for Israel to end its efforts against Hamas.”
“What a lesson in the price of speaking up!” Jill Biden writes in her memoir. “Ten words on a Post-it urging peace and I was in trouble?” It’s a breathtakingly out-of-touch statement considering that a record number of journalists in Gaza are being killed for speaking up.
While Jill Biden’s new book isn’t going down particularly well, there is some good news for the Bidens. Everyone suddenly loves Hunter, who has started a Substack and has been doing a lot of writing and opining of his own. Along with his jabs at Tapper, the former president’s 56-year-old son has been joking on X about his former crack cocaine habit and railing against “the Epstein class” on far-right personality Candace Owens’s podcast. Now some people are musing that Hunter Biden might run for president in 2028. Reacting to a question about that on Thursday, Donald Trump said: ““Hey, if the guy from Maine [scandal-riddled Graham Platner] can do well, I guess Hunter could do well, too.”
Hunter, meanwhile, has been enjoying his viral fame. “WTF timeline are we on,” he wrote on X. “Someone called me the MAGA whisperer and I’ll gladly take the title. Left, right, D or R we all want the same things. We’re being divided on purpose by the Epstein Elite Oligarch class…The second we figure out we agree on more than we disagree, they’re done.” I don’t know WTF timeline we’re on either, but I can certainly get behind that.
The EU has invited Taliban office to Brussels
This news “is a slap in the face to every Afghan woman and girl who has fought, suffered and resisted Taliban oppression”, writes Fawzia Koofi in the Guardian. “Engagement without accountability risks legitimising oppression. It sends a dangerous message: that the international community’s promises to Afghan women can be abandoned for political convenience.”
Renowned Iranian-French artist and Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi dies at 56
“It is no exaggeration to say that Satrapi’s books brought me (and many women like me) out of hiding and taught us to stop apologising for ourselves (for our trauma, our loudness, our rage, grief, desire,)” writes Dina Nayeri in the Guardian, following Satrapi’s death. In a statement relatives said she “died of sadness” after her husband passed away. A great loss for us all.
‘This sort of match needs a man,’ says tennis player
Adolfo Daniel Vallejo has been given a $65,000 fine by the French Open after throwing a tantrum and saying he shouldn’t have a woman umpiring his match against a French opponent. “This sort of match needs to be umpired by a man, it’s very difficult for a woman to do it,” the Paraguayan player said after losing to the French teenager Moïse Kouamé. “[I]t’s a very demanding crowd, and you need a lot of strength to go against the crowd.” You also need a lot of strength to lose gracefully.
Acceptance for same-sex marriage and trans people in the US has flattened
Happy Pride month! For the past two decades, support for same-sex relationships in the US has steadily risen. Now, support has stalled among Democrats and independents and is dropping among Republicans, according to Gallup. The poll also found about four in 10 Americans think it’s morally acceptable to change gender, which is a drop from nearly half in 2021.
New drug for chemotherapy-resistant ovarian cancer to be approved in England
NHS England said the approval of the drug mirvetuximab soravtansine “represents the most significant breakthrough in NHS treatment for these hard-to-treat ovarian cancers in over two decades”.
The week in pawtriarchy
As Shakespeare sort of said: hell (quarantine at a theme park) is empty, and a Tasmanian devil is here (wandering around Queensland’s Gold Coast). A search is currently under way in Australia for a missing Tasmanian devil called Mary who, possibly through “an abnormally large leap”, escaped her secure enclosure on Tuesday. She’s been spotted on CCTV but is still on the run. Authorities may need to re-examine that CCTV: the devil is often in the details.
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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
