Last week, seemingly out of nowhere, Joe Biden at long last acknowledged the existence of his granddaughter, four-year-old Navy Joan Roberts, the daughter of his scandal-plagued son Hunter.
After years of only acknowledging the existence of six grandchildren, why is Joe Biden now admitting that he has a seventh?
Could it be a coincidence that this sudden change of strategy comes after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made an issue of Biden’s failure to recognize his seventh grandchild? Earlier this month, DeSantis blasted Joe Biden for his rhetoric that the children of America belong to everyone. “There is no such thing as someone else’s child. No such thing as someone else’s child. Our nation’s children are all our children,” Biden said back in April.
“You’re talking about all of our children; I have something to say to [Joe Biden],” DeSantis said at a campaign event in Iowa just over two weeks ago. “Why don’t you focus on spending more time with your granddaughter in Arkansas, or at least acknowledge she exists, before you worry about our children?”
IOWA — @RonDeSantis reacts to Biden’s creepy “all our kids” statements:
“Why don’t YOU pay more attention to YOUR granddaughter in Arkansas or at least acknowledge she exists?” pic.twitter.com/6tdTKIyStx
— DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) July 15, 2023
DeSantis has used variations of this line at different times, even tweeting later, “The Harris-Biden administration is obsessed with Florida…yet they ignore the chaos at the border, crime-infested cities, economic malaise, and the military recruitment crisis. Maybe if Biden’s granddaughter moved to Florida he’d actually visit her.”
Do you think it’s a coincidence that a couple weeks after this attack, Joe Biden finally, after four years, decided to acknowledge Navy’s existence?
Some on the left tried to make DeSantis’s criticism the story. “Ron DeSantis ‘reboots’ campaign by going after the Biden family – shames president for not visiting secret granddaughter,” claimed The Daily Mail. Similarly, Business Insider attacked DeSantis for making Biden’s granddaughter a “punchline” and argued it was a distraction from criticism of Florida policies.
“An atrocious tweet. … @RonDeSantis beyond the pale with the ‘granddaughter’ line,” tweeted Peter Schorcsch, the publisher of Florida Politics.
The effort to make DeSantis into the bad guy was clearly ineffective, since it took very little time after the faux outrage for Biden to quietly acknowledge Navy’s existence.
“Our son Hunter and Navy’s mother, Lunden, are working together to foster a relationship that is in the best interests of their daughter, preserving her privacy as much as possible going forward,” Biden said in a statement to People magazine. “This is not a political issue, it’s a family matter. Jill and I only want what is best for all of our grandchildren, including Navy.”
Related: Biden Finally Acknowledges His Granddaughter
It seems obvious from the statement that the sudden recognition of Navy was in response to Ron DeSantis’s criticism. Conservative media has been calling out Biden’s failure to acknowledge Navy for years, after all. The only logical conclusion is that in the wake of DeSantis’s criticism, the White House likely discovered that people are far more outraged at Joe Biden pretending that one of his grandchildren doesn’t exist than at Ron DeSantis for pointing it out. So Biden’s handlers sought to quietly take the issue off the table with him issuing a rather empty acknowledgment and a not-so-subtle call for his political opponents not to make it an issue.
Was a poll or focus group conducted, finding that Americans were turned off by Joe Biden’s reprehensible behavior? We may never know that, but let’s not pretend that this was a coincidence. It took Ron DeSantis to get Joe Biden to do the right thing, and Joe Biden doesn’t look any better for it.