It appears that this holiday season, the Bidens are warming up to Navy Joan Roberts as a (Quasi?) member of the family. That is a notable difference over the course of the past five years. A quick review of the history may be informative.
In 2018, Lunden Roberts gave birth to a daughter and named her Navy Joan Roberts. Nothing newsworthy EXCEPT that she claimed it was President Biden’s son, Hunter, who fathered the child when Lunden was only 16 years old.
Initially, Hunter treated little Navy like his laptop – firmly denying that it was his. It was only after Lunden sued Hunter for child support in 2019 that a DNA test confirmed his paternity. Despite that fact, Grandpa Biden did not recognize the existence of his granddaughter until 2023 – five years later.
Back in 2022, three years after Navy’s birth, Grandpa Biden had this to say in a SmartLess podcast. Referring to his grandchildren, the President said: “They’re crazy about me and I’m crazy about them. Every single day, I contact every one of my grandchildren.” Every one of them except Navy.
For four years, Joe and Jill Biden referred to their SIX grandchildren – omitting any reference to little Navy. There was no seventh stocking hung by the mantle with care during those intervening Christmases. There were no birthday celebrations or gifts. Navy was not considered part of the Biden family for most of her life. She was nothing more than a point of contention in a bitter child support lawsuit between Lunden and Hunter.
Even after conceding that Navy was his daughter in the face of the DNA evidence, Hunter insisted that he could not afford to meet the demands of child support. He simply did not have the money.
Now let us put that in context. At the same time Hunter was pleading poverty, recent criminal indictments show him spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on fancy cars, expensive hotels, hookers, porn sites and illegal drugs – among other things. And the senior Bidens are multimillionaires. Money was not an issue.
But alas! It appears that the Biden family – Hunter, Joe and Jill – are accepting Navy as a Biden – if not a full-fledged call-every-day grandchild. I have not heard of the stocking count on the White House mantel this season, but Grandpa Joe made his first public statement regarding Navy last year, saying “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.”
Incidentally Hunter was either lucky or smart to have hooked up with a 16-year-old girl in Arkansas where the statutory rape age is 13. Not so lucky in that Lunden did not get an abortion. I bet Hunter would have found the money for that.
The Bidens refer to this as a private family affair, but when you are President of the United States, virtually everything about you is fodder for the press. The birth of Navy – and the responses of the Bidens – has been a major news story on virtually every media platform for five years. It is because a significant part of every public figure is character. The Navy issue undermines Biden’s well-crafted image as strong loving family man. It also reinforces his propensity to maintain a separation between what he says and what he does.
I relate to this portion of the Biden story because of my own experience in bringing into our family a teenager who had fathered a child. There was the question of paternity – settled by a DNA test. There was the issue of child support. But there were no delays in making that little one part of our family in every way – celebrating holidays and birthday, and occasional family trips..
I just see a coldness and a political calculus in how the Bidens are dealing with a similar situation even as they portray themselves otherwise. I see a President in whom politics trumps almost all other considerations. Just my opinion. And it is looking exclusively at Biden without any what-about comparisons – positive or negative – to President Trump.
Regardless of the past, I sincerely hope that the Bidens, Lunden Roberts and little Navy will have a very merry Christmas.
So, there ‘tis.