Americans marking the country’s 250th Independence Day on July 4 may yet get an unexpected addition to the calendar: a cage match between the sons of U.S. President Donald Trump and the son of former President Joe Biden.
The unlikely possibility emerged Thursday when Hunter Biden, son of the former Democratic president, challenged Trump’s two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, to a fight.
Biden said he received a phone call from Andrew Callaghan, a left-wing social media commentator, who told him he was organizing the match.
“I told him I’d do it, I’m 100% in if he can pull it off,” Biden said in a video posted on Callaghan’s Channel 5 Instagram account. “And if he can’t, I’m still coming.”
The Trump Organization and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
If the fight does take place, it is not clear when exactly it would be held. The White House itself plans to host a similar event, but with actual UFC fighters, on June 14 as part of a broader series of events marking the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.
The possible matchup between the Biden and Trump sons echoes the cage match proposed in 2023 between tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, a bout that never happened.
The episode also arrives against the backdrop of a long and bitter political feud between the two families. Joe Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election, which Trump and his allies, including his sons, have continued to falsely claim was marred by widespread fraud.
A cage match, the common term for mixed martial arts fights held in an enclosed arena, would mark an extraordinary turn even by the standards of modern American politics.
Hunter Biden, 56, is Joe Biden’s youngest son and his last surviving son after Beau Biden died of cancer in 2015. In recent years, particularly after his father returned to politics, Hunter Biden became a constant target for Trump and many Republicans, who cast him as a symbol of scandal, privilege and family dysfunction.
Many of the controversies surrounding him were tied to his cocaine addiction, which also led to his discharge from the military. Details of infidelity and paid sex became public, and embarrassing photos surfaced showing him drunk, high and partially naked.
Republicans also accused him of pursuing questionable business dealings in China and Ukraine while his father served as vice president under Barack Obama, and of benefiting from his father’s political connections.
Last year, shortly before leaving the White House, Joe Biden stunned the United States by granting his son pardons in two criminal cases.
One involved tax charges filed in California, accusing Hunter Biden of evading $1.4 million in taxes during a period in which prosecutors said he spent enormous sums on drugs, prostitution, cars and luxury goods. Hunter Biden pleaded guilty as part of a deal that he said was intended to spare his family further pain from the public airing of humiliating details. He had been due to be sentenced two weeks after receiving the pardon.
In the second case, in federal court in Delaware, Hunter Biden was convicted in June 2024 on gun charges tied to a federal form he filled out in 2018 when purchasing a firearm. On that form, he said he was not using drugs and was not addicted to them, though he was in fact using such substances at the time.
The maximum penalty for the tax charges was 17 years in prison, while the gun charges carried up to 25 years, though he was unlikely to have received anything close to those maximum sentences.
For now, the proposed fight remains more spectacle than reality. But in an era when politics, celebrity culture and online provocation increasingly blur together, Hunter Biden’s challenge has already ensured one thing: even before America’s 250th birthday arrives, the show may have already begun.