Joe Biden spent four years claiming his Afghanistan withdrawal was a triumph.
Even his own son couldn't stomach the lie anymore.
And Hunter Biden just called his father's presidency an "obvious f***ing failure."
Hunter Biden torches his father's Afghanistan disaster
Hunter Biden sat down for five-and-a-half hours with former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan on Monday and delivered the kind of brutal honesty about his father that Democrats never wanted to hear.
The former first son didn't mince words when describing Joe Biden's catastrophic August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan that left 13 American service members dead and billions of dollars in military equipment in Taliban hands.
"I think one of the failures was the way in which they executed the withdrawal from Afghanistan," Hunter told Ryan. "I think it was an obvious f***ing failure. I think 13 Marines are dead. I think that there was a better way to do it."¹
That's the son of the former President admitting what the entire country watched in real time — Joe Biden's Afghanistan debacle was an unmitigated disaster.
The Abbey Gate bombing at Kabul's airport killed 11 Marines, one Navy corpsman, and one Army psychological operations specialist as they tried to process desperate Afghans fleeing Taliban rule.
Hunter acknowledged his father bore ultimate responsibility for the chaos.
"I can blame it on his generals, I can blame it on the people, the way in which we did it — but my dad always knew this also, is that the buck stops with him," Hunter said.²
A 2022 Department of Defense report revealed the Taliban seized more than $7 billion worth of U.S. military equipment left behind in the rushed evacuation.
Ryan, whose experience as a Navy SEAL gave him intimate knowledge of military operations, didn't hide his disgust at the botched withdrawal.
"I cannot f***ing stand the way the Afghan withdrawal happened," Ryan told Hunter. "I don't even want to talk about it because it's going to get me into a really dark place."³
The lies Joe Biden told about Afghanistan just got exposed by his own son
Joe Biden spent months after the withdrawal claiming he made the right call.
During an August 31, 2021 speech, Biden actually called the evacuation an "extraordinary success" and defended every decision his administration made.
In July 2021 — just weeks before Kabul fell — Biden told reporters the likelihood of the Taliban "overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely."⁴
The Taliban controlled all of Afghanistan within two weeks.
Biden's pollsters told him for months that voters saw Afghanistan as his signature failure, yet he kept insisting he was right.
Now his own son just confirmed what Americans already knew — the Afghanistan withdrawal was a humiliating debacle that got Americans killed and surrendered an entire country to terrorists.
Hunter tried to soften the blow by claiming Joe was "crushed" by how things unfolded.
But being crushed doesn't change the fact that 13 American heroes came home in flag-draped coffins because of catastrophically bad decisions made by Joe Biden and his national security team.
The former President never fired a single person for their role in the disaster.
Hunter Biden also destroys his father's open border policies
Hunter didn't stop with Afghanistan.
He torched Joe Biden's immigration policies that saw the illegal alien population explode to 14 million by 2023.
"We need vibrant immigration, but we don't want immigrants that are coming here illegally, draining us of resources, and being prioritized above people that are actual, literal heroes, that are still recovering from 21, 20 years of endless war — or anybody else in our society," Hunter said.⁵
That's a stunning rebuke from the son of a President who spent four years pretending the border was secure while presiding over the largest illegal immigration surge in American history.
But here's the kicker — Hunter Biden complained during the same interview about people who "always, some way, avoid the consequences."
He said this while sitting on a presidential pardon from his father that erased his federal gun and tax evasion convictions.
That pardon got Hunter out of prison time any normal American would serve for the exact same crimes.
The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking.
The Shawn Ryan interview exposed something Democrats feared — even Joe Biden's own son can't defend the catastrophic failures of his father's presidency.
¹ Marc Tamasco, "Hunter Biden criticizes father Joe's 'obvious f—ing failure' on Afghanistan in new interview," Fox News, December 23, 2025.
² Ibid.
³ Ibid.
⁴ W.J. Hennigan and Kimberly Dozier, "Joe Biden's Botched Withdrawal Plunges Afghanistan Into Chaos," TIME, August 15, 2021.
⁵ Marc Tamasco, "Hunter Biden criticizes father Joe's 'obvious f—ing failure' on Afghanistan in new interview," Fox News, December 23, 2025.
