Former President Joe Biden and his son Hunter appeared in a recorded video on Barstool Sports' Pardon My Take this week to present the show's "Lib of the Year" award to Barstool personality Jersey Jerry, who has now won it three years running.
It played during the podcast's annual Takie Awards episode. Jerry did not know it was coming.
What was said
Hunter Biden spoke first: "From one brother in recovery to another, congratulations on the Lib of the Year award."
The camera then panned to reveal the former president, who added: "Hey, Jer, congratulations, man. And keep the faith."
Jerry's response was unprintable in full — "What the f---? I was not expecting that" — and one of the hosts pointed out that a member of a group of 45 men who have served as president of the United States was handing out the award, calling the moment history.
That framing is more precise than it sounds. Joe Biden was the 46th president but the 45th person to hold the office, because Grover Cleveland is counted twice.
The recovery line is the part that isn't a bit
Hunter Biden's opening is the line worth pausing on, and it was not written for laughs.
Both men have spoken publicly about addiction and sobriety — Hunter Biden extensively and under considerable public scrutiny, Jersey Jerry about his own recovery on Barstool's platforms. "From one brother in recovery to another" is the kind of acknowledgment that only reads as ordinary if you have not had to make it in public.
The rest of the segment is a joke award on a comedy podcast. That sentence is not.
Why the venue matters more than the award
The award itself is Barstool ephemera. What is genuinely notable is where this happened.
Pardon My Take is Barstool's flagship podcast, and Barstool's audience skews young and male — the demographic Democrats visibly lost ground with in 2024, when Republican outreach through podcasts of exactly this type became a defining feature of the campaign. The post-election argument inside the party has been, in large part, about whether its figures should be appearing in these spaces at all rather than treating them as hostile ground.
A former president turning up on that show, for a joke, is a small data point in that argument. It costs nothing, it carries no policy content, and it puts a Democratic face in front of an audience that mostly encounters the party as a punchline.
Whether that kind of appearance moves anything is a separate question, and one on which the evidence is thin in both directions. But the calculation behind it is not hard to read.
Barstool founder Dave Portnoy responded to the segment publicly.
