As Hunter Biden’s Trial Nears, President Biden Pulls Him Close

President Biden wakes up every day to a list of concerns he must address as commander in chief. He receives updates from his aides each morning on the war in Gaza and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He calls his advisers to quiz them about the latest polls and headlines.

But at the top of that list, people who know him say, is a concern that nags at him as a father: the legal problems of his son, Hunter Biden.

Hunter Biden, 54, is scheduled to stand trial this week in a federal court in Delaware on charges that he failed to disclose his drug addiction on a form when buying a gun in 2018. His legal team has called the charges politically motivated, and his attorneys intend to challenge the notion that Hunter Biden improperly filled out the form.

The president has weathered years of personal and legal scandals surrounding his son, who has battled alcoholism and addiction, and the trial is the most serious legal problem facing him since Mr. Biden was elected to the presidency. But Mr. Biden has refused to shut out his son or treat him as a political liability — in fact, the president has a tendency to pull his son closer the worse things seem to get.

Father and son were spotted on a bicycle ride and at church on Saturday afternoon in Delaware. Earlier in the week, they were together to mark the anniversary of the death of Beau Biden, the president’s eldest son who died of brain cancer on May 30, 2015. The Biden family had gathered in Delaware when news broke that former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden’s Republican challenger, had been convicted of 34 counts in a federal hush-money trial involving a payoff to an adult film star before the 2016 election.

Hunter Biden has fielded questions from friends who have approached to ask him how he is doing. At a state dinner honoring Kenya in late May, the veteran Democratic operative Donna Brazile, who has known the Bidens since the 1980s, asked him how he was doing. He replied “as best as possible,” she recalled.