Hunter Biden, the younger son of former United States President Joe Biden, has offered an update on his father’s cancer diagnosis in a wide-ranging interview that also reflected on some of the more controversial moments of the Biden presidency.
In a Friday night appearance on the BBC show Newsnight, Hunter Biden told host Paddy O’Connell that his father’s condition was “debilitating”.
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“It’s really hard, Paddy, and it’s really sad to watch,” the younger Biden said.
“The only thing that I say about my dad about his health right now is I wish he would complain more because it’s not good. The cancer has spread. It’s metastasized into his bones and further. It’s very painful.”
In May 2025, the former president revealed that, days earlier, during a physical exam, doctors had discovered he was suffering from an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had already spread to his bones.
‘Shocked’ at debate performance
The announcement came approximately 10 months after the elder Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. Biden, the incumbent in the election, had all but secured the Democratic Party’s nomination, sweeping the primaries, but concerns about his advanced age had been mounting.
A turning point came on June 27, 2024, when Biden faced Republican candidate Donald Trump for the first presidential debate of that year’s election season.
Though Trump and Biden are relatively close in age, Biden appeared comparably stiff on stage, walking to his podium with short, uneasy steps. He then appeared to lose his train of thought in the middle of answers.
At one point, he answered a question about national debt by stumbling over his words, then announcing, “We finally beat Medicare.” He was 81 years old at the time.
His wife Jill Biden later said she worried her husband was having a stroke. While she said she has never seen the Democratic leader act like that before or since, Trump has used the lingering questions about Biden’s health to cast doubt on the legitimacy of his policy decisions.
Trump went on to win the 2024 presidential election, earning a second term in office. He had previously lost to Biden in the 2020 race.
Democrats, meanwhile, have continued to speculate how their odds might have been different had Biden dropped out earlier — or not run at all. The topic remains a point of division within the party.
O’Connell asked Hunter Biden whether he watched his father’s now-infamous debate. The younger Biden responded that he had viewed it alone in a room in his house in California.
“Like everybody else, I was shocked,” he said. “I could tell as soon as my father came out that something was wrong. I’ve never seen him with kind of the hundred-yard stare that he had.”
Like his stepmother Jill, Hunter Biden framed the incident as an anomaly: “The reason that was so shocking is because it had never happened before, and it hasn’t happened since.”
He also speculated that the Democratic leader’s cancer diagnosis the following year may have contributed to his debate performance.
“Nine months later, he was diagnosed with stage-four prostate cancer and stage-four metastatic bone cancer, none of which we knew,” he said.
A controversial pardon
Hunter Biden has himself been the subject of numerous controversies during his father’s presidency.
Republicans have long accused the younger Biden of leveraging his father’s political status to further his personal business pursuits.
He has also struggled with drug addiction, and in June 2024, during his father’s re-election bid, he was convicted of three felonies for owning a gun while under the influence of drugs, and lying about his addiction on his firearm application forms. Such charges are typically rare.
That same year, Hunter Biden also pled guilty to federal tax evasion charges, for failing to pay $1.4m from 2016 to 2019.
Though Joe Biden had pledged on the campaign trail not to pardon his son’s crimes, he abruptly reversed course in the final weeks of his presidency.
“From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively and unfairly prosecuted,” Biden wrote on December 1, 2024, with less than two months remaining in his term.
“In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me, and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
Suggesting that his son would be a target for political persecution, Joe Biden granted him a “full and unconditional pardon” for any actions taken from 2014 up to that point.
It was part of a spate of unconventional pardons Biden granted before leaving office. His brother James Biden was also pardoned, as was his former chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and the Congress members involved in the investigation of the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021.
Biden suggested that his pardons were motivated by the fear the incoming Trump administration would launch a campaign of political prosecutions against perceived political rivals.
Observers, however, have questioned the broad nature of the pardons, and some critics, particularly on the right, have suggested they amount to government corruption.
O’Connell presented that allegation to Hunter Biden in their interview. In response, the younger Biden acknowledged that the pardons were controversial.
“Was it good for our Constitution? Was it good for the American people? Was it good for my dad’s legacy? No, on all counts,” he said. “It’s something that is easily criticised and for good reason, and I can’t pretend otherwise.”
But Hunter added that his father’s fears about Trump have been borne out.
“I think that Donald Trump has proven to be exactly who my dad thought he was going to be, as it relates to the revenge and retribution that he would seek on his political enemies,” he said.