He Was One of Trump’s Biggest Targets. His Comeback Just Took a Depressing Turn.

Users Hunter Biden’s Redemption Tour Was Always Going to End Up Like This His latest venture makes him much harder to root for. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Nitish Pahwa? Sept 09, 20265:13 PM Jack Gruber/USA Today Network via Reuters Connect Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. For the past few months, Hunter Biden has been inescapable on social media and the podcast circuit, engaging with talking heads as far right as Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson while offering something of a reckoning with his highly public personal life and his now-cancer-stricken ex-president father (whom Hunter still believes would have won in 2024). For his part, Biden has claimed, it’s an attempt to reclaim the narrative—to have the people finally hear from him, specifically, instead of leaving them to whatever impressions they gained of this political scion from legal filings, tabloid reports, and terrible movies. He likewise has a lot to say about leaving his drug addictions behind, getting into visual art, and helping others by publicizing his recovery process, which is certainly a noble and admirable effort. That also led, this week, to an unveiling of what the younger Biden is really selling: a cryptocurrency token, themed around the device that brought him such notoriety. As of Wednesday morning, the new meme coin $LAPTOP has been officially minted on a blockchain developed by Coinbase and made available for users to buy and trade across exchanges like Pump and Fomo. Per Biden, even this is one more chapter in the life story he wishes to own himself. And when you compare the high-minded mission he’s set forth for $LAPTOP with the effects it’s already had, you do actually learn something useful about Hunter Biden—mainly, that his rehabilitation tour might be a little less transparent than his fawning audience would like to think. Biden’s team first teased the coin with a Labor Day video montage—consisting of media clips where conservatives like President Donald Trump brought up the laptop—and a Wall Street Journal exclusive, which mentioned that 1 billion total $LAPTOP tokens would be issued. Half of those tokens would be reserved for specific purposes; of those, 300 million will remain under the ownership of $LAPTOP’s founders for now. Another 200 million will be distributed exclusively to users among three different channels: subscribers to Biden’s Substack, members of Channel 5 influencer Andrew Callaghan’s email listserv, and buyers of the chief executive’s $TRUMP meme coin who lost money from their investment. In an X post shared on Tuesday, Biden stressed that still more of these tokens would either go to charity or get taken out of circulation so as to prevent the $LAPTOP team from unduly profiting. “The symbol they used to try to end me is now a symbol of resilience, redemption, and recovery,” Biden tweeted, referring to the titular laptop. “You should not expect me or anyone else to make this token more valuable for you. $LAPTOP isn’t just about owning something, it’s about saying something.” That’s not quite how others are perceiving this “symbol.” Coinbase may be providing the underlying infrastructure for $LAPTOP, but the company’s executives famously opposed Hunter’s father, having spent millions of dollars in the 2024 election to boost Trump and influence his eventual crypto policy. For Coinbase leaders, who’ve continued to sponsor myriad Trump 2.0 events, $LAPTOP is likely just another source of trading fees rather than a concerted effort to support a recovering addict. Notably, Callaghan’s team has also excluded themselves from Biden’s reclamation narrative, claiming to have prevented all its mailing-list members from receiving any $LAPTOP promotion. Meanwhile, just seconds after it launched, $LAPTOP earned enough trading volume to see its valuation multiply exponentially, shooting up from $37 to over $200. That momentum didn’t last: As of this writing, the token has dropped precipitously from its peak valuation to a bottom-feeding price of $1.30. As is common in such currency-debut cycles, it appears that a few amply moneyed investors drove most of the hype, with a handful of anonymous accounts splurging hundreds of thousands of dollars on several hundred coins. As no other high-value traders have picked up the slack, the drop of $LAPTOP coins isn’t going to relieve any $TRUMP victims from their financial holes: A recent analysis estimated that $TRUMP traders lost a total of $3.81 billion when that meme coin’s value also plunged sharply after its market debut. If even 50 million $LAPTOP tokens made it out to former $TRUMP holders, they will (as of this writing) have only recovered a collective value of $65 million. That’s not a shabby amount—but if the holders in turn want to actually realize that value by selling their tokens, it doesn’t seem apparent that other folks are now too willing to buy them. The pump-and-dump fun is already over. Biden also has a personal interest in crypto beyond “resilience, redemption, and recovery.” On X and on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, Biden has consistently touted crypto as the future, denigrated the currency system as we know it, and talked about putting all his visual art on the blockchain. (Essentially, bringing back nonfungible tokens. Remember NFTs???) Meanwhile, Biden himself has a lot of debts to pay off, thanks to various legal cases that have played out in public view for years now. Last year, he admitted to a federal judge that he couldn’t afford to keep up his own lawsuits against certain right-wing influencers because he was already broke from other court battles, and had failed to sell enough paintings or memoir copies in order to make up the difference. That indebtedness seems to have persisted into this year: A deposition from earlier this year demonstrated that Biden owes his former legal team up to $17 million—and still doesn’t have the means to pay it off. “I don’t even have any other assets at all—stocks, bonds, anything like that, savings accounts,” he proclaimed under oath. “I don’t have any assets. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a phone.” But he does, now, have crypto. Unfortunately, that has also been undermined by a massive flop of a debut that doesn’t appear like it will go anywhere—in spite of the media tour that preceded it. Maybe it would have gone better had he just admitted he was trying to make a little extra cash all along the way. Cryptocurrency Donald Trump Joe Biden Hunter Biden