Hunter Biden, in a first for a child of a president, has been found guilty of felony charges related to purchasing a firearm while addicted to drugs. And that news has been met with a surprisingly muted response from the right.

Donald Trump, in a comment, called the trial a “distraction.” Rep. Matt Gaetz called it “kinda dumb.” And Rep. Jim Jordan, the House Judiciary chairman who has made painting Hunter Biden as a criminal one of his signature political efforts, has said nothing. There have been few triumphant celebrations. For a party that has spent endless hours vilifying the president’s son, the GOP has been suspiciously quiet.

Why isn’t there more jubilation? Well, there is the obviously awkward fact that Hunter Biden was prosecuted for a firearm-related crime: The three charges were related to the fact that he claimed he was not a drug user in paperwork he signed to purchase a gun. Republicans won’t want to risk looking opposed to gun access; in a strange reversal of standard dynamics, the Democratic president’s son’s legal defense cited the conservative Supreme Court’s decision on Second Amendment rights to try to fight the charges.

But there may be something else going on here: Hunter Biden’s struggle with addiction may have proved too sad and, for so many Americans, too relatable to be politically useful.

Over the previous week, 12 Delaware jurors heard two narratives: one of a struggling addict who had, if just for a moment, pulled his life together, just long enough to legitimately purchase a firearm; another of a struggling addict who never found control. Either way, the story told in the courtroom through texts and testimonies from the various women in Hunter Biden’s life—his ex-wife, his sister-in-law, his ex-girlfriend, his daughter—showed a family deeply wounded by Hunter’s addiction.

The trial was a remarkable airing of intimate difficulties for a sitting president’s family. Witnesses spoke of affairs, of nights in strip clubs, of sleeping in cars, of all-night roaming in search of drugs.

But beyond the sordid details—the kind that led Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to share Hunter Biden’s near-nude photos at a public House committee hearing, and that caused some misguided liberals to make a dirtbag hero out of the president’s son—the picture of grief........

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