Vice President JD Vance took on the role of press secretary for a day at the White House briefing room on Tuesday. His appearance was notably calmer compared to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s previous briefing, where Rubio dominated the room with high energy.
However, Vance’s session was not without tension. He sharply pushed back at a reporter who asked about President Trump’s 3,600 stock trades, which were revealed in a recent ethics filing. The trades are valued at between $220 million and $750 million and have raised concerns about possible conflicts of interest.
“This is not a question, it’s a speech,” Vance said, according to The Hill. “Come on, man. Have a little bit of objectivity in the way that you ask these questions because there were a lot of things in that speech masquerading as a question that didn’t actually get asked.”
Trump’s stock trades deserve serious scrutiny given the scale and timing of the deals
The ethics filing shows that Trump made these 3,600 trades between January and the end of March 2026, with heavy exposure to big names in technology and AI. Individual purchases of Nvidia, Microsoft, Broadcom, Amazon, and Apple ranged from $1 million to $5 million in disclosed value, while buy orders of AMD, Intel, Goldman Sachs, Alphabet, Airbnb, DoorDash, Micron, and Bloom Energy ranged from $500,000 to $1 million in disclosed value.
Trump also reported hundreds of stock sales ranging from $15,000 to up to $25 million. Assuming his holdings have remained roughly the same since the end of March, Trump is 20% or more in profit on almost all of the stocks listed.
According to Euronews, he is over 100% in profit on AMD, Intel, Iridium Communications, Bloom Energy, Intuitive Machines, Marvell Technology, Penguin Solutions, SanDisk, Seagate, and Vishay Intertechnology, among others.
The trades have drawn particular concern because the S&P 500 dropped over 8% in March, and Trump heavily bought into that price dip. This has led to accusations of insider trading, especially given the president’s role in major decisions such as those surrounding the Iran war.
This is not the first time Vance has found himself in a tough spot with the press; he was also caught denying a Trump quote directly to a reporter’s face before CNN rolled the tape. The White House has maintained that Trump followed all applicable laws and regulations.
Even so, the ethics filing has pushed the debate forward about whether stricter trading restrictions should be placed on public officials. Vance has also been in the headlines recently for other reasons, including inviting the Pope to the White House only to be turned down, after which Marco Rubio flew to the Vatican for a private meeting instead.
There is currently a bipartisan push in Congress to pass a stock trading ban. The “Restore Trust in Congress Act,” introduced in September 2025, would ban members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children from owning or trading individual stocks and other covered investments. A companion Senate version was introduced in January 2026 by Republican Senator Ashley Moody and Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.
The bill has attracted more than 120 co-sponsors, and a discharge petition launched by Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna aims to force the legislation onto the House floor even without leadership approval. However, disagreements remain over whether officials should be required to fully sell off existing holdings or simply stop buying new stocks.
Published: May 20, 2026 02:15 pm