It finally happened. 

Hunter Biden, the formerly drug-addled son of the former President Joe Biden, signed up for an account on the Elon Musk pain palace formerly known as Twitter. He’s been tweeting, relentlessly, in the throes of what can only be described as a dopamine-fueled binge for the better part of the week, and it’s been glorious. You know the big problem with big politics in the Year of Our Lord 2026? Authenticity, or the lack of it. Before he was president (and for most of his first term), Donald Trump had it, and now, many years later, the mantle has fallen to Hunter. As Kash Patel might say, “Rest now brother, we have the watch, and I’ll see you in Valhalla.”

I get it, I’m not supposed to like Hunter. In fact, I’d wager that my name is on some list in the catacombs of an FBI vault for purchasing the Marco Polo hardcover copy of Hunter’s laptop files in 2022, the darkest days. But what can I say? I do like Hunter. And I’m certainly not the only one. On X, many right-wing accounts, which usually spend their days defending the sleepiest of Sleepy Don’s final days, were mesmerized by the younger Biden’s fever dream this week, liking and resharing his honest accounting of the sort of drug addiction and degeneracy that was once used to attack the elder Biden’s shivering and quivering administration.

While the younger Biden was smashing away at a keyboard on Thursday afternoon, Trump was struggling to remain conscious as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin basked in the warm glow of the White House press corps. And who can blame Trump? These are literally some of the *dumest (without a B) and most boring (with a B) humans to ever exist. If I had to listen to any of these benchwarmers careen on and on about my own greatness, I too would willingly subject them to the sort of humiliation ritual that Trump puts these sandworms through on the daily. 

Hunter embraced his role as the new hype man for the sort of brazen, unconstrained stream-of-thought posting that dominates the online social ecosystem that once supercharged Trump’s own political trajectory. When one account suggested a bag of cocaine found at the White House in 2023 during Biden’s presidential administration belonged to Hunter, the younger Biden flipped the tables, asserting on X that he would “never have forgotten” his drugs. 

“Someone called me the MAGA whisperer and I’ll gladly take the title,” Hunter proudly wrote on Thursday morning. “Left, right, D or R, we all want the same things. We’re being divided on purpose by the Epstein Elite Oligarch class because as long as we’re at each other’s throats, they get fat and rich off of our misery.”

Hunter’s unabashed style has helped grow his account to more than 700,000 followers as of this writing. And don’t you get it? Can’t you see why he has become such a spectacle? Do you not hear the willing cheers of feeble men, imploring the reformed drug addict to seek out a longshot bid for the presidency in 2028? America has become one long-running joke and, for many, all there seems left to do is laugh and enjoy the showmen on the stage. Whether Trump or Biden, whether left or right, the audience demands a good show, knowing full well we’re all of five seconds away from cooked—or, as Gen X might prefer, the car-crash ending of Thelma & Louise. 

The French philosopher Guy Debord saw this all coming. In his seminal 1967 text The Society of the Spectacle, Debord argued that authentic social life would be replaced entirely by its representation. That, in essence, social life would become a spectator sport filled with all-consuming images of living rather than living itself. What he couldn’t have predicted was that the spectacle would eventually eat its own critics, and that the only way to win inside the new arena of false idols would be to simply out-spectacle the spectacle. Trump understood much of this instinctively. Hunter also appears to understand it. And Debord, to his credit, would probably note that there’s no difference in that “authenticity” inside the spectacle is just a more seductive image of authenticity, not the real thing. The American artist Andy Warhol, who was far less tortured about the whole arrangement, would note that everyone gets 15 minutes of fame, and we’re watching Hunter’s very own clock ticking away.

You don’t have to take Debord’s word for it. Just open your phone. The evidence is everywhere. The stock market is exploding higher and higher each day. Why? Who is making money? The tech elite in Silicon Valley who promise a vision of a future that few want. That’s the new America. Sprawling data centers and artificial intelligence and less whiskey and clean living so long as the living is alone, on a screen, scrolling forever while Trump and sons score big on dirty drone deals with the Israelis and shadowy crypto boondoggles with crypto zealots. The Zoomers aren’t happy? Who could’ve seen that coming? As Trump struggles to stay awake in cabinet meetings, Hunter is the new, cool kid on the block. And who can blame anyone for embracing a real antihero in a time of such villainry? As Trump and his team argue with CNN anchors about whether his eyes were blinking or closed, Hunter’s busy pulling back his cape and revealing the hidden key that once led Trump to the promised land. This is the America Hunter is posting into; somehow, at least this particular week, he’s the most honest thing in it.

Authenticity is the only currency left in American politics, and it’s ideologically neutral. Trump proved that a decade ago. Hunter is proving it now from the opposite side. Trump’s authenticity was aggressive and acquisitive. It explicitly sought power. Hunter’s is confessional and self-destructive. It seeks nothing but to be seen. Yet they produce the same effect in the audience. The audience doesn’t care about the politics, they merely care about the unmediated person, and with Hunter, they’ve gotten the Full Monty. 

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Consider the alternative. California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has spent the better part of 2026 auditioning for the presidency, has attempted his own version of radical honesty. It has landed like a fat man’s cannonball into an empty pool. Newsom can’t be authentic because there is nothing there to excavate. While he was locking down California and state officials were counting the deaths of peasants, Newsom was enjoying tasting menus at the French Laundry. Newsom is a man whose entirety is the mask. 

Hunter, on the other hand, has lived a life of genuine, spectacular failure and is now showing it off, totally unfiltered, for the world to revel in its distinct misery. Newsom has lived a life of careful, managed success and is now trying to talk like a guy who hasn’t. The audience knows the difference. They always do. You can borrow Trump’s language, but you cannot borrow his life.

Where does this leave Trump? The man who built his empire on being the loudest man in the room is losing his voice at its most critical juncture. We’re learning, in real time, that you simply can’t out-spectacle spectacle forever. The era has left our president struggling to keep pace in an arena he explicitly manufactured. Like that in Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Trump’s Zone is a type of surreal, lethal, and constantly shifting temporal geography that is now eating away at its own creator. As Trump attempts to navigate an end to the war he started, the man who was once prized for his open honesty has struggled to keep straight a list of compounding lies. After all, nothing can be the “biggest” or the “greatest” when every single line item is meant to outdo the last. Eventually the audience stops believing the superlatives and begins looking for someone who’ll just tell them the truth. Even if that someone is a recovering crackhead with a Twitter account.