Friday’s Morning Jolt included what struck me as the just about least controversial point imaginable — that instead of callously insisting he has six grandchildren and not seven, President Biden could and should tell his son Hunter, “Son, that little girl is your child, and you have a responsibility to help raise her. We’re inviting her and her mother to Camp David or the Delaware beach house this weekend. You don’t get to just walk away from a commitment like that. Children are a blessing, even if they come into this world in difficult circumstances. Don’t punish that little girl for your disagreements with her mother.”
Unsurprisingly, the usual suspects were much more angry at me for bringing up the issue than Biden for his decision making, and contended what an idiot I was to even suggest such a thing.
And then the White House’s Friday evening news dump was President Biden giving an exclusive interview to People magazine, revealing that he and Jill intend to develop a relationship with the four-year-old girl living in Arkansas with her mother.
“Our son Hunter and Navy’s mother, Lunden, are working together to foster a relationship that is in the best interests of their daughter, preserving her privacy as much as possible going forward,” President Biden said in a statement provided exclusively to PEOPLE.
Navy, one of the president’s seven grandchildren, has recently been the subject of headlines as Republicans have criticized the president for previously touting his “six grandchildren.”
“This is not a political issue, it’s a family matter,” President Biden’s statement continues. “Jill and I only want what is best for all of our grandchildren, including Navy.”
Good for Biden for belatedly doing the right thing, and hopefully everyone who insisted Biden’s previous stance was correct will realize that blind partisanship drove them to insist that disowning a grandchild was the morally right position. But Biden doing the right thing, four years late, does not dispel the gargantuan contradiction between his folksy, family-comes-first image and rhetoric and his callous insistence that an innocent four-year-old girl does not count as one of his grandchildren.