Presidential historian Alexis Coe joined "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss the history of scandalous children of presidents and where Hunter Biden stacks up.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, faces three felony charges tied to the possession of a gun while using narcotics.
00:08 He has pled not guilty and his trial is underway.
00:12 And yet, presidential historian Alexis Coe argues that Hunter Biden is not the first wayward first son.
00:21 Alexis, what do we need to know about the precedent here?
00:27 There's no real precedent for this kind of relentless pursuit of a first son.
00:34 But by no means is Hunter Biden the first son to humiliate his president father.
00:42 And he probably won't be the last.
00:44 But among the 250 years of history of families and their, frankly, ne'er-do-well sons, he's middling at best.
00:55 Middling at best. Now, you've written a lot about this.
00:58 Someone who stands out to me is the son of Abe Lincoln, Robert Lincoln, who committed his own or tried to commit his own mother to an insane asylum,
01:09 which that in and of itself is insane, because I don't think she herself was insane.
01:13 What are some other examples over the course of history that stand out to you as particularly wayward first sons?
01:21 Well, from the very beginning, the founder's sons were really plagued by this generation of ne'er-do-wells.
01:27 There was John Quincy Adams and there was no one else really until Carolyn Kennedy and then Beau Biden.
01:35 But in the beginning, you had sons, for example, James Madison's son, who he raised from a very young age.
01:42 It was technically his stepson, but it was his only son, not him as a full son.
01:47 He was in debtors prison. He was also called upon for different various gun charges and dueling and rowdiness.
01:57 This is someone who was in prison at the time that his father was president.
02:01 You have this going on for generations. They're FDR's sons.
02:06 They almost all traded some kind of attention for influence, for jobs, for anything to do with personal gains.
02:17 What you have here, however, that differs is it got to the level of actual legal action.
02:24 And we have seen that in recent history. We have Neil Bush, who is probably the lesser known of the Bush sons.
02:32 And he stood before Congress two days of being grilled for losing close to a billion dollars as the CEO of a company.
02:41 But even he was allowed to settle out of court. So this is really unprecedented.
02:45 And it's clearly not about Hunter Biden.
02:50 So there's the precedent of bad behavior, but you're effectively arguing that what's different here at this moment in 2024 is the politicization of the trial and of Hunter's behavior.
03:01 Yes. And it's so interesting because we are coming upon in 2026, America's 250th anniversary.
03:09 And at the very beginning, when George Washington, the subject of my last book, left office, he was clear in his farewell address in 1796.
03:19 He wrote that his biggest fear about political parties, he's the only president to have never claimed one.
03:24 His biggest fear about them was that parties would not care about their constituents.
03:31 They wouldn't care about voters. They wouldn't care about local interests.
03:34 They would only care about accruing power and that what that would do is, and this is a quote, sharpen the spirit of revenge.
03:42 And what we see here is I've been calling it an eye for an ear because the Republican Party can't really go after Biden or they've tried and they have failed to go after the president himself.
03:55 And so they have gone after Hunter Biden, who's particularly vulnerable because of his past.
04:00 class.
04:00 Bye!