Biden’s first book, Beautiful Things, a memoir published in 2021, “ties up in a really super neat bow” with him getting married and sober. In some ways, that’s when the story began: Biden says he’s finished a draft of a new book about the laptop scandal and everything that came after. He says he’ll start publishing it in serial form on his Substack in July. “It’s about the plot against me, the conspiracy that was led by figures like Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon. They called it the ‘Manhattan Project,’ assembling all of my digital life through phones and laptops and iCloud hacks,” he claims. (Biden also made this allegation in a lawsuit he filed against Giuliani in 2023, which was dismissed the following year.)
Even when he’s tried to stay out of the spotlight, Biden says, his every move—from the innocuous to the questionable—has been exploited by the right regardless. “No matter what I do, there’s no privacy. I’ve been told for seven years, eight years now, that ‘this will go away. They’ll stop focusing on you.’ That hasn’t happened.” In 2024, while Biden’s father was president, 10 buyers were reported to have spent more than $1.5 million total on his paintings, prompting House Republicans to probe for possible ethics concerns. (One of the buyers was a family friend, another a Democratic donor, but the majority were anonymous.) The drama led to him being dropped by his gallerist, Georges Bergès, who coincidentally has a history of donating small amounts to Trump and affiliated PACs.
The circus around Biden was becoming a “distraction,” Berges tells WIRED. He says he received torrents of death threats, required 24/7 security, and spent hundreds of thousands on legal fees. “I didn’t know about the political world. It was naivete on my part.”
The goal of painting was never to make money, Biden claims. As his friends see it, he just needed something to occupy his brain, keep him off the internet and on the wagon. “When the entire world is seemingly attacking you, where do you place your attention? Do you just obsessively read article after article about all these MAGA people calling you the Antichrist, or do you go into your studio and make paintings and hang out with your smart, beautiful wife, and your delightful son, and get on the phone with some friends, and get coffee?” asks the musical artist Moby, who helped Biden with his sobriety seven years ago and has since become a close friend. “I think that’s it for him—that challenge of saying, ‘Your quotidian existence is actually fine.’”
The simple life may be enough for Biden, but is it enough for everyone watching? “Someone once told me I was, like, the dirtiest, most well known public figure in the world,” Biden admits. “And I never spoke. I literally didn’t do an interview.” In that silence, he’s become an American Rorschach test. Depending on who you ask, he’s the ultimate privileged failson; a “crackhead” who is somehow capable of manipulating foreign policy; the empathetic embodiment of his father’s best qualities; or an ordinary addict—your brother, or friend, or even you.
