The Trump administration is intimidating voters like the Ku Klux Klan did in the 19th-century Reconstruction era, Hunter Biden has claimed.

In an interview with the YouTube account Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan, Joe Biden’s son compared deportations and the behavior of ICE agents to the racial violence directed at black people after the American Civil War. Across the country, Biden claimed ICE agents are “openly terrifying people for the purpose of scaring the shit out of them”.

Biden said the campaign of violence targeting black Americans unleashed after the Reconstruction era is similar to what is happening today. Callaghan described the Ku Klux Klan as primarily a “voter intimidation force”, a characterization Biden agreed with. “And that’s exactly what they’re doing right now,” he replied. “Whether it’s voter suppression through violence and intimidation or disinformation, it’s the same goddamn thing, whether it’s an algorithm or whether it’s a cross burning in your yard.”

As Biden outlined, from 1865-77 there were over 1,500 African American officeholders, spread across the Senate, the House of Representatives, and state legislatures. The emancipation secured by the Union forces in the Civil War eventually gave way to a renewed system of rigid racial segregation. “We are caught in the permanent reconstruction loop, the permanent Jim Crow loop,” Biden said. “Every single time we get closer to that idea, that promise, that potential of a more perfect Union, what ends up fucking happening is, they come in and shut the door down, because there’s this evil symbiosis between money and power.”

After drawing parallels between Trump’s America and the Reconstruction era, Hunter Biden then compared present-day America to Nazi Germany, saying that prisons in El Salvador were concentration camps. “If you think that a prison in El Salvador is not a fucking concentration camp, you’re out of your fucking mind. Tell me anybody that is returning from there.” On deportations, he said: “It’s a fucking crime what they’re doing.”

During the interview, Biden also discussed his troubles with addiction and the conspiracies in which his political opponents allege he is involved. He confessed that he had learned to make his own crack cocaine to avoid going to dangerous locations and said he was “very proud” of being sober since 2019. On conspiracy theories, he said that Fox News “got stuck on” the idea “that I funded the Wuhan lab”. In 2021, there were reports that an investment firm led by Hunter Biden was a financial backer of a company which partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In January this year, the CIA concluded that this was where Covid-19 most likely originated from.

Elsewhere in the interview, he rejected CNN anchor Jake Tapper’s claim that he was operating as his father’s “chief of staff”, saying that he only spent 12 days in the White House during Joe Biden’s term, and dismissed Democratic strategist James Carville for not having won “a race in 40 fucking years”.

In December 2024, Joe Biden pardoned his son, who was due to face sentencing later that month on federal felony gun and tax convictions. Trump called the pardon a “miscarriage of justice”. In March, after his father had left office, Hunter claimed in a court filing that he was “millions in debt” and could not access his Pacific Palisades rental home because of the damage from the wildfires. As a result, he asked the court to dismiss his lawsuit against ex-Trump aide and political activist Garrett Ziegler because he did “not have the financial resources to continue litigating this case”.

In October last year, just before the election, Hunter Biden said that a second Trump presidency could mean “the end of America as we know it”. He added: “I agree with Gen. Mark Milley that Donald Trump is a ‘fascist to the core’.” In his latest interview, he reiterated his previous claims, describing the President as a “fucking dictator thug”.

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Max Mitchell is UnHerd’s Assistant Editor, Newsroom.

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