Columnist Maureen Dowd took aim at the Biden family’s refusal to publicly acknowledge one of their seven grandchildren in a blistering opinion piece in the New York Times Saturday morning.
“The president’s cold shoulder — and heart — is counter to every message he has sent for decades, and it’s out of sync with the America he wants to continue to lead,” wrote Dowd, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and mainstay of the left-leaning outlet.
“What I find unconscionable is that you refuse to admit or accept the fact that there is a beautiful little 4-year-old girl living in Arkansas by the name of Navy Joan who is your seventh grandchild,” Dowd wrote, quoting her sister, Peggy.
Peggy, Dowd’s Republican sister, penned the letter to President Joe Biden outlining her feelings about the family’s treatment of their unacknowledged grandchild, Dowd said.
A week before the Times ran Dowd’s column, the outlet published a piece in its politics section about Hunter Biden’s daughter in Arkansas. In it, the writer notes the child has not yet met her father or grandfather. The writer describes the politics surrounding the “Biden birthright” as “corrosive.”
White House aides have been told the President has only six grandchildren, not seven, two sources familiar with the discussions told the outlet.
Dowd says Peggy was briefly wooed by Biden’s “gregarious Irish charm” in the 2000s, earning her the silent treatment from some of her Republican friends at the time.
Peggy slammed Hunter Bidens’ high-priced lawyers’ tactics, designed to ensure Navy’s child support payments were slashed and that she could not use the Biden name. She called a reported settlement with Navy’s mother involving the child receiving some of her father’s paintings “a lousy trade-off.”
Toward the end of the column, Dowd shifted from quoting her sister to laying out her own thoughts on the matter.
“Joe Biden’s mantra has always been that ‘the absolute most important thing is your family.’ It is the heart of his political narrative. Empathy, born of family tragedies, has been his stock in trade. Callously scarring Navy’s life, just as it gets started, undercuts that.”
Navy’s story reveals Biden’s dated, inauthentic view of family, Dowd said.
Dowd’s take on how the elder Bidens should handle the situation was refreshingly simple and blunt.
“But the president can’t defend Hunter on all his other messes and draw the line at accepting one little girl. You can’t punish her for something she had no choice about. The Bidens should embrace the life Hunter brought into the world, even if he didn’t consider her mother ‘the dating type.'”
Dowd, a beltway socialite, famously took aim at the Clintons and their “cabal” during the tawdry scandal involving Monica Lewinsky, according to the Irish Times. Her coverage of the incident, which led to Clinton’s impeachment, earned her a Pulitzer.
Though Dowd may have taken the Bidens down a notch in Saturday’s column, it is important to note she is no friend to the Republican presidential front-runner, either. June 10, she wrote a piece blasting former President Trump after the raid at Mar-a-Lago.
“It’s shocking how easy it is to imagine Donald Trump campaigning for the presidency from prison,” she said.