MS NOW’s Stephanie Ruhle couldn’t hide her disbelief Monday after Vice President JD Vance said he’d seen no evidence that President Donald Trump has enriched himself in office.
Ruhle opened the segment by noting that Washington Post polling shows nearly 2 in 3 Americans believe Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself, with most of the increase over the past year coming from people who lean Republican. She then played a clip of Vance in a CBS interview and town hall that aired Sunday, in which CBS’s Tony Dokoupil asked whether he had seen anything inside the White House “when it comes to corruption that makes you squeamish.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that from the president,” Vance said. “D.C. is a corrupt town, Tony. You know this as well as anybody. Donald Trump, I have not seen a single shred of evidence that he participates or sanctions in that corruption.”
“You can make all kinds of criticisms of our policies and decisions,” he added, “but I don’t see a single, I’ve not once seen evidence that Donald Trump has enriched himself.”
That set off the MS NOW host.
“You want to make arguments to refute it. You want to say they haven’t violated any laws. I’m here for it,” Ruhle said as her panel laughed. “I mean, like, that’s craziness.”
“It is,” agreed The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel. “And I think this is the problem for almost every Republican candidate in this cycle. And it will be the problem for JD Vance in the next cycle when he tries to run for president; they are yoked to a president where everyone can see that his sons are running crypto scams, and he’s tearing down golf courses in D.C. to build himself a golf course, that he’s putting gold ornamentation all over the White House. There are the overt symbols of corruption; there are the subtle symbols of corruption. And then there’s Trump-style corruption, where it is the policy of the administration to double dip in self-dealing constantly.”
The Trump family has denied wrongdoing in its crypto ventures.
“That’s a very hard question for JD Vance to have to answer,” Ruhle said, “but I cannot accept that that’s the best answer there is.”