US Vice President JD Vance speaks during a press conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on May 19, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Heather Diehl | Getty Images
Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday defended President Donald Trump in a question about heavy stock trading revealed in the president’s latest financial disclosures, which revealed transactions totaling hundreds of millions of dollars in just three months.
“The president is not sitting in the Oval Office on his computer, like a Robinhood account, buying and selling stocks,” Vance said in response to a reporter at a White House press conference.
“That’s nonsense. He has private wealth advisors managing his money. He’s a wealthy man. He’s successful in business,” Vance said.
“He doesn’t make these commercials himself,” said the vice president, while accusing a reporter of suggesting otherwise.
The applications, made public on Thursday, showed more than 3,700 transactions in the first three months of 2026 alone. It includes the securities of companies that Trump has “talked about at events” and on social media — some of which include ticker symbols, the reporter noted to Vance.
For example, disclosures show procurement of artificial intelligence software and government contractors. Palantir in March. In April, as Palantir’s shares suffered their worst week in more than a year, Trump praised the company on Truth Social, writing, “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has shown that it has great military capabilities and capabilities. Just ask our enemies!!! President DJT.”
White House spokesman Davis Ingle told CNBC in a statement Friday that Trump’s assets are “held by his children,” adding, “There is no conflict of interest.”
A spokesperson for the Trump Organization later said that the president’s investment funds are “maintained only in special accounts that are independently managed by third-party financial institutions that have sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions.”
“Trades are made and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and programs controlled by those institutions. Neither President Trump, his family, nor The Trump Organization plays a role in selecting, directing, or approving any particular investment,” the spokesperson said. “They do not receive advance notice about trading activity and do not provide anything about investment decisions or portfolio management of any kind.”
A reporter who spoke to Vance on Tuesday said in his interview, “The American people, according to recent polls, are increasingly describing the president as corrupt.”
“This is a tough question,” Vance said as the reporter continued.
When a reporter compared Vance’s previous support for barring government officials from trading individual stocks to Trump’s overt trading activity, Vance interjected: “Okay, what’s the question?”
Vance confirmed that he is a “big fan” of banning stock trading in Congress, and “so is the president of the United States.”
“We all believe that no one should take the secret information he got from the government and buy and sell shares,” he said.
“We want to stop that process. And I think that the way of leading by example prevents that process, prevents that process, and makes it illegal, which is exactly what the president proposed to do,” he said.
