Frequently photographed with an ice cream cone affixed to his hand, Joe Biden comes across as the quintessential grandpa — like he’s got a pocket full of Werther’s and folksy advice to impart.
On Father’s Day, Biden said that “family is life’s greatest blessing and responsibility.”
His children and grandkids are an attractive feature in the Biden show. Granddaughter Naomi’s November White House wedding was featured in Vogue. And this week, the President and the First Lady Jill took in Fourth of July fireworks with their brood at the “People’s House” — including son Hunter and his toddler Beau.
In April, Biden told a group of kids that he had “six grandchildren. And I’m crazy about them. And I speak to them every single day. Not a joke.”
But there is a joke here. A sick one.
It’s how Biden treats his seventh grandkid — a 4-year-old girl in Arkansas, who the Bidens have systematically erased from their family tree.
The president has never publicly acknowledged Navy Joan Roberts, the little girl his son Hunter fathered with Lunden Roberts, a college hoops player turned Washington, DC, stripper.
A recent report in the New York Times revealed the Biden family snub is even more cruel and coordinated than previously thought.
Two sources told the paper that aides have been briefed in “strategy meetings” that President Biden only has six, not seven grandkids.
In the wake of the article, a WSJ reporter asked Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre if he acknowledged little Navy as his granddaughter. She replied: “I don’t have anything to share from here.”
Nothing. Not even a peep.
Heck, ol’ Joe talks more fondly and frequently of CornPop, the “bad dude” he allegedly chased off with a 6-foot chain back in 1962. And Navy actually exists.
But this 4-year-old is, apparently, a political inconvenience. And at the end of the day, Biden is a slick politician wrapped in the costume of a cute grandpa.
It’s grand hypocrisy and a cruel omission for a devout Catholic man who has built his entire persona and career on being a doting paterfamilias — one left to raise his two sons alone after their mother and baby sister were killed in a 1972 car accident.
It’s also rich considering the praise Biden has received for showing his former crack-addicted son, Hunter, unconditional love over the years, including after the 53-year-old scion recently took a plea deal on federal gun and tax charges.
“The Hunter Biden story, the scandal, the this, the that, it’s also a story of a father’s love, and Joe Biden has never and will never give up on his son Hunter and will never treat him lesser than. He is a father first. Take it or leave it. That’s who he is. That is part of his heart,” pundit Ana Navarro said on “The View” after the president brought his problematic son to a state dinner.
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof took a similar angle, saying the Hunter saga was more about the love the president has for his son.
Yes, Joe’s stuck by Hunter — who is, to be kind, a liability. But at the same time, he continues to publicly give the Heisman to an innocent toddler.
Roberts’ lawyer Clint Lancaster noted that Jill has given more attention to the family dog.
“It’s not lost on anybody that Jill Biden wrote a children’s book and [dedicated it] to her grandchildren,” Lancaster. “She could have kept it at that, but she named every child except Navy. They hung stockings for the dog at Christmas but not for Navy. That is one of the saddest things.”
The whole unsavory affair has played out like some well-trod trope in an ’80s movie: A rich man-child from a politically prominent family fathers a child with an undesirable.
They pay off the woman, and the snobby entitled guy pops his collar and drives off in his Porsche, leaving the woman and the child in a dusty cloud.
Only in this 2023 remake, the poor little rich boy departed his Arkansas child-support court date in a friend’s private jet.
Hunter and Roberts privately settled their child support dispute last month. Navy will now get proceeds from Hunter’s art sales, after he had previously agreed to pay $20,000 a month in child support.
Oh, and lucky little Navy can also keep a piece of Hunter’s art as a tangible reminder of the family that denied her existence. But she won’t be using his last name.
Struck from the record and erased. Navy’s biggest sin? To be born a Biden, out of wedlock.
The President can tout his “unconditional love” all he wants, but his treatment of his youngest granddaughter will be the true legacy of Biden family values.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
