Voices: Sean Hannity’s attempt to shame Joe and Hunter Biden is a slap in the face for millions of Americans

You have to hand it to Fox News: Just when you think they couldn’t go any lower, they somehow find it in themselves to keep digging. This week, it was Sean Hannity who took care of this particular mission. On Monday, the host dedicated a segment to Hunter Biden. And since he was apparently wanting for material, much of the sequence focused on a 2018 phone call in which Joe Biden expressed support for his son Hunter, who at the time was dealing with substance abuse.

“Tonight, we are learning even more about Joe and Hunter’s interactions, including this voicemail obtained by The Daily Mail from October 2018, where Joe Biden is allegedly begging Hunter to get help for his substance abuse,” he said. “Take a listen.”

Hannity paused while the audio clip of Joe Biden played. And what scandalous words did the president utter to his son? What did he say that was so terrible, so attention-grabbing it apparently deserved an incendiary segment on one of the most watched cable news networks in the country? Well, it was this: “It’s Dad. I called to tell you I love you. I love you more than the whole world, pal. You gotta get some help. I don’t know what to do. I know you don’t, either.”

Once the tape was done playing, Hannity uttered a laconic: “It’s sad” – and, lest there is any doubt, it was not the kind of “It’s sad” one utters in compassion. Rather, Hannity used the phone call to do what Republicans have sought to do for years when it comes to Hunter Biden’s history of drug addiction: use it as some kind of rhetorical strike against his father.

It remains unclear what part of that call Fox News thought was so richly deserving of a call-out. Was it the very human fact that Hunter Biden, like tens of thousands of Americans, found himself struggling with substance abuse – a fact he and his family have addressed openly multiple times, including when Hunter detailed his road to sobriety in his 2021 memoir? Or was it that Joe Biden – the US president, the commander-in-chief – dared speak to his son with genuine love and sentiment? Or was it a bit of both?

It’s far from the first time that Republicans have attempted to portray Hunter’s substance abuse as a perceived moral failing of sorts, or as something that reflects poorly on himself and his family – including, of course, the Democratic president they’re trying to undermine. What a giant slap in the face to the millions of people who experience substance abuse in the US, and to the loved ones who have sought to support them.

It’s a well known fact in the world of substance abuse advocacy that substance abuse is a disease, not a moral failing – not that you would know it watching Fox News. We’re all vulnerable to it. Almost 92,000 people died of drug overdoses in the US in 2020, and they are now the leading cause of accidental deaths in the country. How could anyone think that a president responding with open love and compassion to his son’s struggles is in any way shameful? If anything, I hope it might make others feel less alone, and possibly provide them with a template to communicate their own support to their own loved ones.

Joe Biden’s words strike me as especially powerful due to their simplicity, and the acknowledgment that in that moment, even he, the concerned father, the would-be president, didn’t know what to do. But he was there, and he made sure to let his son know it. I think there’s a pivotal idea here: that you don’t need to know how to solve a problem in order to support the person experiencing it. That if all you can offer in love, that’s already plenty. Hunter himself has acknowledged how instrumental his father’s support has been for him. “He never let me forget that all was not lost,” he wrote in his memoir Beautiful Things. “He never abandoned me, never shunned me, never judged me, no matter how bad things got.”

But of course, leave it to Fox News to sneer at an exemplary moment sure to resonate with thousands of Americans. Leave it to them to twist it into a low-level attempt at a political jab. This is the real disgrace. Not Hunter Biden’s substance abuse, and not his father’s words.