Last week, with the global audience preoccupied with the World Cup in crescendo mode, vice-president JD Vance had a sit down with podcaster Joe Rogan. During the meandering chat, Vance began speaking about former president Joe Biden’s famous love of ice cream. Vance revealed that the sight of the 46th US president with a cone gave him the ick – and that it pulled his mind into an uncomfortable realm. Whereas most of the world regarded the sight of Biden enjoying a cone as just that – an elderly man thrilled with his whipped ice – the would-be next president saw something entirely different.“The thing I couldn’t get over Biden is ... the way that he ate ice cream,” Vance told Rogan, who was, understandably, stuck for words.“I mean, it’s like, we can bring some of the stuff up, but it’s like they would get him eating ice cream in the most ridiculous, suggestive way imaginable.”That line was the only thing the entire conversation will be remembered for. Worse was to come for Vance. July 19th was National Ice Cream Day. Hunter Biden, the president’s son, posted a picture of himself with an ice cream and tagged the vice-president with the line, “Hey JDVance, I wish I knew how to quit you.”The phrase was a nod to Jake Gyllenhall’s line to the late Heath Ledger’s character Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain and the post the latest in Biden jnr’s relentlessly sharp and often funny trolling of the figures in the Republican Party who for years had coursed him for fun. In short, the Republicans have a Hunter Biden problem. Back in May, the president’s son emerged from the shadows of self-inflicted disgrace by reactivating his X account and addressing everything and everyone, including his own descent into addiction and subsequent manifold humiliations, with a bracing candour and humour. His account caught fire when he offered a deadpan reply to a troll who brought up the discovery of cocaine in the White House, in 2023, and told Biden that the bag was his. “It most definitely was not. I would never have forgotten my drugs,” Biden shot back, adding, “I smoked crack. I would never have wasted coke on snorting it.”That was the beginning of a sustained bombardment of Hunter Biden posts, and replies to trolls, covering everything from his lows through addictions, the treatment of his father by US president Donald Trump and other officials, sharp critiques of the administration, occasional musings about art, empathetic addiction-recovery advice (he has been “clean” for seven years and, after a famously messy private life that became public fodder, married since 2019), his court case and general infamy. He has also taken aim at Democratic grandees and CNN journalist Jake Tapper, who co-authored a book on Joe Biden’s final years in office. This week, he has been cheerfully riffing on the theme of a cabal of Republicans in the closet, denouncing homosexuality while denying their own. Few Americans have been pilloried and mocked and prosecuted as mercilessly as Biden jnr over the past decade. For a while, he was reduced to the status of America’s laptop boy, after a personal computer he handed into a Delaware repair shop found its way to the New York Post, which happily divulged its contents. In 2024, he pleaded guilty to tax evasion charges in Los Angeles and was found guilty of three felony charges in a gun-possession trial in Delaware that same summer. That Christmas, with the presidential election lost, the New York Times ran a long profile piece with a former companion of Hunter Biden, Zoë Kestan, who, as the piece put it, “became a fixture in a dissolute 2010s milieu” in which privilege and obscure fame intersected. It’s a riveting story that includes this haunting pen-portrait of Biden in the throes of his addiction.“As the couple’s stay at the Chateau Marmont neared its end, Ms. Kestan had started to understand just how deeply Mr. Biden’s addiction ruled his life. When Ms. Kestan went to sleep, she said, Mr. Biden would retreat into the bathroom, where he would set up a laptop and a crack pipe on a chair and stay up all night making phone calls. If no one answered, he would find cam girls on the internet to keep him company.“At other times, Ms. Kestan said, Mr. Biden would go on late-night drives around Los Angeles, sometimes bringing strangers back to the hotel to party. Or he would join her poolside in the morning after a night out, collapsing on to a chaise longue with a double vodka.”It’s redolent of the Nicolas Cage character in Leaving Las Vegas, except it was real life. Joe Biden embraces his son Hunter in 2024. Photograph: Eric Lee/New York Times