How COULD the President's grandchild be frozen out for Christmas? Joe and Jill grudgingly now accept little Navy Joan - but sneakily chop all stockings from the White House mantle... What a national embarrassment, says GRACE CURLEY

Grace Curley is host of The Grace Curley Show 

President Biden could make Scrooge blush.

After years of gifting his long-neglected seventh grandchild a heaping lump of coal every Christmas – he's being even more miserly with his love this festive election season.

He's erased granddaughter Navy Joan Roberts from Christmas entirely.

Bah-humbug!

You see, ever since Grampy Joe and Granny Jill have lived in the White House, they've made a grand show of hanging six red and white stockings above the fireplace in the State Dining room. One jolly sock for each of their beloved grandkids.

'How sweet,' their media cheerleaders gushed. 'But wait,' a handful of intrepid journalists protested: Don't Nana and Pop have seven grandkids?

Oohhh… oohhhh… Do you hear that howling?

It's the Ghost of Hunter's Past.

Come back with me to the year 2017, when a drug-addled Hunter Biden met an Arkansas woman named Lunden Roberts while she was working as an exotic dancer at the strip club Mpire in Washington, DC.

Years later, the First Son would write about their illicit affair in his memoir Beautiful Things. 'I had no recollection of our encounter,' Hunter explained. 'It's why I would later challenge in court the woman from Arkansas who had a baby in 2018 and claimed the child was mine.'

Like so many of Hunter's stories, this didn't pass the smell test.

For one, 'the woman from Arkansas' was on the payroll of Hunter's investment firm. And no number of challenges from The Talented Mr. Grifty could change a DNA test. So, in January 2020, a court ruled that he was, in fact, the father of Navy Joan Roberts.

Now, after Hunter's Maury moment, Joe and Jill – by any common standard of basic human decency - should have acknowledged their granddaughter.

Instead, they pretended the entire ordeal never happened.

Joe continued claiming that he had six grandkids. Hell, Dr. Jill even dedicated a children's book to her grandbabies – but only six of them.

Who knows? Perhaps Operation Denial might have worked if only Hunter hadn't tried to get his child support payments to Navy's mother reduced. He isn't just slimy, he's cheap! And the scandal was thrust back into the headlines.

'It's Seven Grandkids, Mr. President,' blared the headline of Maureen Dowd's New York Times column in July.

'The president's cold shoulder — and heart — is counter to every message he has sent for decades, and it's out of sync with the America he wants to continue to lead,' she wrote, skewering old Joe.

A few weeks later, Biden caved. In a Friday news dump, the President and First Lady revealed to People (yes, the magazine) that they were finally recognizing Navy.

It only took four years and a good old-fashioned public shaming for the pair to drum up some of that famous Biden empathy.

So surely this Christmas, after all of that, holidays at the White House were going to be different.

America would finally see Navy Joan's name on a stocking alongside all the other kids. The stalwart American people would rally their endless capacity for forgiveness, Hunter and Navy would stand proud, and together we'd all embrace this innocent child.

Right?

Wrong.

Rather than add the long-lost sock to the fireplace mantel, Mr. And Mrs. Decency have scrapped the display entirely.

The Biden family will be 'spending Christmas at Camp David and their family stockings will be there.'

Oh really? Suddenly, the Bidens are very private?

Does that mean that Hunter won't be appearing at any more State Dinners, prancing around overseas trips with his dad or sweating buckets on the White House balcony?

What of the family wedding ceremonies in the Rose Garden or glossy spreads in Vogue?

No, this isn't about decorum. This is clumsy cruelty, and it should be called out.

Nearly as nauseating as the First Family's behavior is the mainstream media's compliance with it all.

Witness the majority of the news coverage of the Biden White House decorations. They make no mention of that glaring national embarrassment – a naked mantle where those stockings once hung.

Look, we obviously don't know all the ugly details of Hunter and Lunden's relationship or whether the Bidens have reason to hold something against her.

But what does Navy Joan have to do with all of that? Why do they continue to publicly humiliate their own flesh and blood?

The President and the First lady are cold-hearted cowards, who refused to admit their own transgressions.

Like Scrooge – will they ever see the value of family?

Remember this as the country goes hurtling into another presidential election and we're told from on high that morality matters and that only President Biden can restore goodness in America.

And remember that the Biden family will shamelessly break from their Christmas tradition if it means upholding their most important family ritual: deceit.

Listen to Grace's show every weekday from 12-3 at GraceCurleyShow.com.