Donald Trump Jr trolls Hunter Biden over his struggles with drugs by posting picture of crack pipe and parmesan

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox

Get our free Inside Washington email

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

Donald Trump Jr has mocked Hunter Biden on social media after the current president’s son opened up about his battle with substance abuse in a new memoir.

On his Instagram stories, Don Jr posted a picture of a crack pipe, parmesan cheese and a lighter to troll Mr Biden. That’s because in his book Beautiful Things, Joe Biden’s son admitted that he once smoked parmesan cheese since it resembled crack.

Don Jr posted: “Parents don’t let your kids do... Um... Parmesan.” Making fun of Mr Biden’s addiction problem, in another Instagram story using the same photo, he said, “Watch out for Big Parma.” This was accompanied by three laughing emojis.

Hunter Biden is a Yale-trained lawyer and lobbyist who has been repeatedly in the news for the wrong reasons — be it Republican accusations of controversy around his business dealings or tabloid coverage of personal scandals and his struggles with drug use.

In an interview on CBS News, Mr Biden admitted that he sometimes used to smoke anything that even remotely resembled crack cocaine. He said: “I probably smoked more parmesan cheese than anyone.”

Read more:

He also chronicles his family’s intervention in 2019 in his memoir, after it got to the point where he didn’t care what he was smoking. “It didn’t matter: I smoked it,” he said. “If it was crack, great. If it wasn’t, I’d take a hit [anyway].”

The 51-year-old was often attacked by the Trump campaign during the lead up to the 2020 presidential elections, mostly focussed on his role on the board of a Ukrainian business at a time when his father Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point man for Ukraine relations.

In his memoir, Hunter Biden speaks about how he lost his mother and younger sister in a car crash when he was very young, a crash which he and his older brother Beau survived. In 2015, he lost Beau to cancer. He was later in the news for having a relationship with his brother’s widow, Hallie, in 2017, something he has since said was a “miscalculation” borne of grief. In 2019, he married his now-wife Melissa just a week after they met.

Mr Biden writes in the book that he had his first drink at the age of eight. He also admits that he tried various strategies to wean himself off drugs.

In one passage, quoted by US media, he says one method he tried was psychedelic toad venom, that he claimed kept him sober for a year. “I know it sounds loopy. Yet whatever else it did or didn’t do, the experience unlocked feelings and hurts I’d buried deep for too long. It served as a salve.”