Hunter Biden said in an interview published Monday that his father, then-President Joe Biden, took Ambien before his “absolutely horrible debate” with President Donald Trump in 2024.
Hunter broke his media silence in a three-hour Channel 5 interview with Andrew Callaghan regarding his addiction recovery, offering a behind-the-scenes look at his father’s failed presidential campaign in 2024. (RELATED: ‘I Learned How To Make My Own’: Hunter Biden Details Depths Of Cocaine Addiction)
“I know exactly what happened in that debate. He flew around the world, basically at the mileage that he could have flown around the world three times,” Hunter said. “He’s 81 years old. He’s tired as shit. They give him Ambien to be able to sleep. He gets up on the stage, and he looks like he’s a deer in the headlights.”
Ambien is a prescribed sedative-hypnotic drug used as a short-term treatment for insomnia. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Ambien usage may result in “abnormal thinking and behavioral changes,” which can present itself as “aggressiveness and extroversion that seemed out of character.”
Though these symptoms are not common, the FDA says that sedative-hypnotic drugs like Ambien are a “concern” in the treatment of the elderly, as it may impair “motor and/or cognitive performance after repeated exposure or unusual sensitivity.”
It was rumored but unverified that Joe was taking drugs, leading Trump to call for Joe to take a drug test before their big debate.
Joe spent nearly a week between traveling and the debate in preparation at Camp David.
A 2018 article from Politico reported that Ronny Jackson, the White House physician of the Obama-Biden administration, regularly handed out Ambien to West Wing officials, leading him to be labeled as a “candy man.”
Initially, Hunter was looking forward to the debates. He told Callaghan that his father had just come out of beating Trump in the last election, had major success passing bipartisan bills and had just given a vibrant State of the Union address.
“I thought that we had cleared all the hurdles that they had set up for us,” Hunter said.
However, Joe’s debate performance “scared the shit out of a lot of people because they were already concerned about his age,” Hunter said.
“My dad grew old in front of everybody’s eyes,” Hunter added.
Hunter said that this scene witnessed by the nation posed an important question to society on how to handle the aging of a person and “recognize that they may have lost a physical step, but that does not mean they don’t have the mental capacity to continue to do their job, and whether there still should be to be valued.”
Hunter added that George Clooney and members of the Democratic Party led the movement to replace Joe with Former Vice President Kamala Harris following the debate fiasco and the reports that the then-president was struck with COVID-19.
