Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American power,

politics and society. On each episode, I will talk to an American expert or an expert on America

about something that's going on in America in

2023. I am delighted to be joined today by Damon Linker, who is a senior lecturer in

political science at the University of Pennsylvania and also has a very influential substack,

which you can find at damenlinker.substack.com to read what he's writing about there.

And today we're going to be talking about Hunter Biden and asking how big a political problem is Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son, for Joe Biden, as we're approaching

an election year. Now, Damon, you'll have seen the polls yesterday showing pretty bad news

for Biden, I think. It's a CNN poll showing that he's sort of level pegging with Trump

in a matchoff against Trump. Other Republican candidates do

better. But the overall impression is of a Democratic Party that's unhappy with Biden. Up to 75% of

people think that he's too old or is showing signs of being too old and are worried about his

physical and mental state. While reading about that, I thought that was sort of, we've seen this quite a lot in the last

couple of years, but I wondered to what extent the Hunter Biden story, which has been bubbling

along throughout the Biden presidency and is often thought of as a sort of right-wing story,

a conservative media story,

I wondered whether you think the Hunter Biden story is starting to affect Joe Biden's popularity

in America. I don't really think it has yet outside of the Republicans who have been focusing on it. I mean, but that's so overdetermined.

It's really hard to identify exactly what it is that, you know, Republicans are inclined and

predisposed to not like any Democratic president. They don't like Biden. They have lots of

reasons why Hunter Biden and

its story is a big part of it. The thing that I want to watch is whether the story about Hunter

...