Four days after the election, on a glorious Saturday morning, I was sitting in the sunroom with all the girls, Natalie and Hunter, Melissa and baby Beau, Ashley and Howard, and Annie and Anthony—when the networks called Pennsylvania for Dad. That clinched it. Mom and Dad were on a dock out on the pond, so we all ran to the porch and screamed at the top of our lungs, “We won! We just won!”
It was a moment of relief, exhaustion, and absolute joy. By the time the counting finished, more Americans had voted for Dad than for any president in history. Still more amazing is the level of decency and integrity he brings to the office—exactly what the three of us ultimately determined was possible those many years ago. Neither Dad nor I said that aloud. We didn’t have to. We hugged and kissed instead.
I’ve survived, buddy. I know you were with me through it all. They came after me with everything they had. It was all “Where’s Hunter?” all the time. But it turned out they did me an unintended favor. I became the beneficiary of the absurdity and transparent criminality of my pursuers. Each attack added to my new superpower: the ability to absorb their negative energy and use it to make me stronger. It was like political aikido. Every bogus whistleblower, out-of-context email, salacious photograph or video clip (manufactured or real), made me feel nearly invincible to their slings and arrows.
They doubled down on the notion I wouldn’t be strong enough to maintain my sobriety, that I’d crack and they’d pounce. But here’s what they didn’t count on, Beau: you were with me the whole way, in the form of Melissa and baby Beau, my girls, our sister, our aunts and uncles, Mom and Dad. Everyone. Your strength and love was embodied in the strength and love that surrounded me.
That was never truer than when Giuliani, Bannon, and their collaborators purported to have a laptop that chronicled the lurid details of my descent into addiction the last three years. What should have been the most anxiety-producing event of an anxiety-producing campaign became a televised burlesque. I turned to Melissa at one point and said, “You’d think this would make me want to drink. But it’s the furthest thing from my mind.”
In that moment, I knew there was absolutely nothing they could do to take away this beautiful thing I’d built. When they finished, Melissa and I simply went about our day. We made lunch. We took baby Beau to the beach to watch the sunset.
Here’s my takeaway: the ability to shrug everything off and carry on, two weeks before the most consequential election in our lifetimes, was the result of the thousands of expressions of love given to me and that I’d given back. Talking to my girls every day; knowing Melissa was always there for me in the next room; looking up from my desk to see baby Beau’s big, toothless smile aimed directly at me—I’m living in those moments and not in the shitstorm I couldn’t control.
I took solace in being attacked by such despicable opposition. When you’re assaulted by people with the capacity to take away an infant suckling from his mother’s breast and place him in a cage—well, I knew I was playing on the right side. I knew that if I could hold on and have the strength to ride out the attacks, justice would be done. It doesn’t always happen that way. But it happened that way this time.
Dad, of course, never flinched. A turning point in the campaign was the first debate, and a turning point in that debate came when Dad talked about you. Trump played the only card he ever plays: attack. In that moment, the difference between the two men was never starker.
We knew he’d attack me. Before the debate, I told Dad not to duck when Trump brought me up, as I was sure he would. I told him that I wasn’t embarrassed about what I’d faced to overcome my addiction. I told him that there were tens of millions of families who would relate to it, whether because of their own struggles or the struggles being faced by someone they loved. Not only was I comfortable with him talking about it, I believed it needed to be said.
He said it. While Dad was honoring your service in Iraq as a response to the leaks that Trump had called Americans who fought in wars “losers” and “suckers,” Trump interrupted with his trademark callousness and went after me.
Dad countered artfully, empathetically, indelibly.
“My son,” he said, ignoring Trump while looking straight into a camera, “like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem. He’s overtaken it, he’s fixed it, he’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.”
Those words not only disarmed Trump but gave comfort and hope to millions of Americans. I felt nothing but pride. You would’ve, too.
Beau, I’m finally living a life you always wanted me to. You’d love California, you’d love where I live. There are so many beautiful things to be grateful for, and I try to remind myself to look at them every day. We’ve been in a lockdown because of the pandemic but I’m not really missing the outside world all that much. I have Melissa and baby Beau and my girls. I have the whole family. I’ve been writing. I’ve returned to painting.
I’ve been painting like crazy. It’s kept me grounded, and initially kept me away from that underworld just down the canyon from us. It unlocked something that had been trying to emerge from inside me since,
