177: Chapter 177: Parentage Scandal Erupts, President Breaks Down in Tears and Issues Order

When National Security Advisor Ronald Sawyer pushed open the door of the Oval Office, he was clutching a stack of public opinion briefs just pulled from the fax room of the Counsel's Office.

Madeleine followed closely behind,

The other stack of documents she held included the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and several inquiry letters sent separately by minority party congressional liaisons whose seats were about to be lost,

All about the same question:

So many things have happened to the President's son, what is the White House's official stance going to be? This affects the dignity of the entire executive branch.

Joseph Biden sat behind the large desk and listened to all the reports from Sawyer and Madeleine.

His expression was unusually calm,

So calm that he didn't look like a politician whose defense lines had just been pierced by opponents using his own biological son as a target.

That kind of calmness was like the surface of the sea before a tsunami, without even a trace of small waves, without even the gaps that seagulls should have when skimming low over the water.

Sawyer and Madeleine saw no anger, no fear, and no emotional anchor points on his face that could predict his next instruction.

They had never seen the President look like this.

Then, Biden looked at them and said in that extremely calm tone:

"Since the law has been broken, handle it according to the law."

"Handle it however it should be handled."

"Tell the people below, for this matter, there is no need to ask for my opinion."

Sawyer and Madeleine were slightly stunned, then nodded immediately.

Sawyer tucked the public opinion brief in his hand into the edge of his briefcase,

Madeleine filed the various inquiry letters into the thick letter folder tucked under her arm,

The two turned around and quickly left the Oval Office.

Biden just sat in his chair alone, looking at the oak tree outside the window dyed golden-red by the setting sun, looking and looking...

The whole person was as quiet as a wax figure forgotten by time in a corner.

I don't know how long passed, tears began to seep from the corners of his eyes.

At first, there were only a few tiny droplets, like a thin layer of mist condensed on an old window in the early morning of late autumn.

Then, the floodgate that had been jammed in his heart for countless years could finally no longer hold up,

The longing, like a collapsing flash flood, surged out from the deepest part of his chest,

His tears became more and more, changing from a few drops to several lines, from several lines to a large patch of wetness that blurred his vision.

He supported the table with both hands, his shoulders began to tremble slightly, and then he buried his face in his palms, sobbing and crying out.

He saw Beau Biden, his eldest son.

When Beau was little, he ran after butterflies on the lawn behind the old house in Delaware,

Fell down, and his knees were covered with grass juice and mud,

He picked him up from the ground, patted the broken grass off his pants, and Beau grinned and said to him:

"Dad, it's fine, it doesn't hurt at all".

Beau, wearing a Navy lieutenant commander uniform, stood in the Iraqi desert with his helmet tucked under his arm and his hair shaved very short, speaking into the satellite phone:

"Dad, it's very hot here, but I'm doing well, don't worry".

Beau spoke at a congressional hearing for the first time as the Attorney General of Delaware,

He sat in the very corner of the audience gallery, watching his son surrounded by reporters' camera flashes.

Then, all the pictures shattered...

Beau lay in the hospital bed, the cancer cells had spread to his entire brain, and those eyes that used to squint in the blazing sun of the desert closed forever.

That day, he, a pious Catholic all his life, stood at the end of the hospital corridor, shaking his head constantly at the crucifix on the wall bleached white by the fluorescent lights, with a hoarse and hollow voice,

Saying he no longer believed in God,

His lifelong belief only exchanged for an old man burying a young man.

Therefore, he pressed all his longing, all his sustenance, and all his misplaced love for his eldest son for the rest of his life onto his youngest son Hunter.

Hunter got addicted to drugs, and he signed checks for him at the rehab center,

Hunter hit someone, and he privately had his legal team handle the other party's claim without alarming any reporters,

Hunter made a mess of his life, and he lay on the leather chair of the Oval Office, silently enduring every heavy blow brought to his political prestige by the outbreak of any scandal.

He had already lost Beau.

He must never let Hunter be hurt again.

And now, Prant and those people actually dared to use his youngest son as a target.

He looked out the window, tears still flowing down, but his gaze had completely changed,

Deep in a pair of red-crying eyes on an aged face, what burned was not anger, not hatred,

But the coldest, deepest, most ruthless cold flame of an elderly male animal that had lost one child and whose other child was being hunted down in the most primitive way.

He picked up the encrypted phone on the desktop, dialed a number that no one had ever known whether it existed or not, and after the other party answered, instructed only one sentence in a hoarse and low voice.

"I don't want to hear those voices anymore."

"You know what to do."

...

Pennsylvania, Butler, open-air rally venue.

The evening setting sun dyed the entire sky into a hue intertwined with dark orange and deep purple,

Behind the temporarily erected stage hung a huge Stars and Stripes,

The flag occasionally fluttered in the muggy evening breeze, making a heavy fabric flapping sound.

The audience below was packed with people,

Mostly white working-class people from Pennsylvania and several surrounding swing states,

Many wearing red baseball caps with the words "MAGA",

Some holding homemade placards,

Some draping the Stars and Stripes over their shoulders,

And some driving thousands of kilometers from afar just to see with their own eyes the man who once made them believe again that the Lighthouse Country could be great again.

Prant stood in the center of the stage, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up to his forearms, the tie at his collar slightly loosened by half an inch, holding the microphone in one hand and constantly waving the other hand in the air with the rhythm of his speech.

His voice spread across the entire venue through the huge speaker arrays on both sides,

Every syllable carried his unique hoarse resonance, precisely hitting the tens of thousands of focused eyes in the audience.

"Look at America now, take a look!"

"Inflation is rising higher than the Empire State Building, the border line is like a sand pile flattened by a bulldozer, gas prices are so expensive that you have to calculate how much gas you can add just to go to Walmart to buy two boxes of discounted beer, and the whole world is laughing at us!"

"When our military retreated from Afghanistan, we didn't even have time to dismantle the helicopters!"

"Do you think that old man sitting in the Oval Office, who can't even tell which campaign rally he is in, has the ability to make America great again?"

The audience erupted into thunderous boos and roars.

Someone raised a placard reading "Impeach Biden",

Someone fiercely smashed an empty mineral water bottle at a sarcastic banner nearby reading "Biden-Harris Lighthouse Country".

The entire scene was ignited at that moment, and countless voices shouted the same word at the same time:

"Impeach Biden! Impeach Biden!"

The volume was so loud that it almost swallowed up the feedback whistle of the speakers.