'Hell of a question': Vance squirms when pressed on Trump's curious stock trades
Vice President JD Vance was confronted at Tuesday's press conference with a question about President Donald Trump's personal finances, the inherent conflicts of interest, and how it is all at odds with the administration's messaging — and Vance awkwardly tried to sidestep the issue.
"Mr. Vice President, the president's financial disclosures were released recently, and they showed a lot of stock trades in companies that he has talked up events, official events at the White House, on his Truth Social account, sometimes even putting the stock ticker symbols in his posts and encouraging people to buy their stock," said the reporter. "Americans, according to recent polling, are increasingly describing the president as corrupt, and trading stocks—"
"This is a hell of a question," said Vance awkwardly.
"Thank you, sir," said the reporter. "Trading individual stocks is something that you said that public officials should not be able to do when you ran for Senate all those years ago. And yet the president, who arguably has access to more nonpublic information than your average senator, is not only buying and selling individual stocks, either through his trust—"
"Okay, okay, what's the question?" Vance cut in.
"The question, sir, is how can you and your administration argue to Americans that you're cleaning up corruption, you're preventing fraud, you're fighting the sorts of things that harm people and people's financial situations. When the president seems to be talking up stocks that he owns, selling them and enriching himself?"
Vance, looking uncomfortable, hectored the reporter about how he asked the question before trying to steer things to an answer.
"Okay, so here, let me, let me — let me answer your question here. That was a doozy," said Vance. "Before I answer your question, I want to just observe there are different ways to ask a question, okay? "You can just ask a question and try to get your answer. Or you could do like a speech where you say, you know, Mr. Vice President, you know, you're a — you're a terrible human being. And so is the president, and so is the entire Cabinet. And then I'm like, what's your question? And then your question is, how dare you? Come on, man. Have a little bit of objectivity in the way that you ask these questions, because there are a lot of things in that speech masquerading as a question that didn't actually get asked."
Vance then denied that Trump is relying on nonpublic information, calling the accusation "absurd" and saying, "he has independent wealth advisors who manage his money. He is a wealthy person. He has had success in business. He's not making the stock trades himself." And he reiterated he is a "big fan" of banning members of Congress from trading stocks, as is Trump.
"We want to ban that process," he said. "And I think the way to lead by example is banning that process, banning that approach and making it illegal, which is exactly what the president has proposed doing."