WATCH: Vance Takes on Liberal White House Press, Dismantles Long-Winded Hot Takes

Curtis Houck
May 19th, 2026 6:43 PM

Text to Speech

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On Tuesday afternoon, Vice President JD Vance helmed the second White House press briefing since Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went on maternity leave and, much like Secretary of State Marco Rubio did back on May 5, he deftly took on liberal journalists looking to trap him on the new Justice Department weaponization fund, the war in Iran, and even stocks.

Vance’s strongest takedown came in the penultimate question, with the Independent’s Andrew Feinberg asking about President Trump’s most recent financial disclosures that include millions in stock trades. As Vance calmly schooled him, it’s one thing to ask a question about a tenuous subject, but it’s another to offer a long-winded speech masquerading as a query.

Feinberg began with a rambling set-up:

The President’s financial disclosures were released recently, and they showed a lot of stock trades in companies that he has talked up at 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 — their stock. Americans, according to recent polling, are increasingly describing the President as corrupt[.]

Notice the lack of a question mark.

When he went to add “and trading stocks,” Vance interjected: “This is a helluva question.”

Feinberg played along, taking it as a compliment and said, “thank you, sir” before continuing. Vance interrupted a second time to wonder if there was a question, which only then did Feinberg provide (click “expand”):

FEINBERG: Trading — 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 — through his trust —

VANCE: Okay, what’s the question?

FEINBERG: — the question — is 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?

Before addressing the topic at hand, Vance blasted this “doozy” of “speech” and approach liberal reporters engage in by hurling insinuations of malfeasance before expecting a substantive answer (click “expand”):

Okay. So, let me — let me — let me answer your question here. That was a doozy. 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, every — 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, okay?

Number one, the President doesn’t sit at the Oval Office on his computer, on his, like, Robin Hood account, buying and selling stocks. That’s absurd. He has independent wealth advisors who manage his money. He is a wealthy person. He has had success in business. He’s not making these stock trades himself. And your question imputes that. It sort of — it doesn’t say it exactly, but a reasonable person listening to that question would assume the President is sitting around and doing that. He’s not. Second of all, you’re right. I’m a big fan of banning members of Congress from trading stocks. So is the President of the United States. All of us believe that nobody should be taking proprietary information gained from public service and buying and selling stocks. We want to ban — we want to ban that — we want to ban that process. 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.

Elsewhere, longtime ABC correspondent and four-time anti-Trump author Jonathan Karl predictably focused on the $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded program for Americans to seek relief from the government if they feel as though it was unfairly weaponized against them.

Karl first wanted to know if that would include those originally convicted based on their conduct from January 6, 2021 and had beaten police officers:

Karl didn’t like Vance’s lengthy answer, so he asked again:

Former conservative reporter-turned-CNN liberal Kaitlan Collins followed up a little over 20 minutes later:

CBS’s Caitlin Huey-Burns followed Collins and asked a fair question about the timing of announcing the fund, given that Americans are feeling an economic squeeze amid the war with Iran.

Vance also gave a fair answer explaining how Americans shouldn’t view this fund as a check that could have been used elsewhere and, given other administration initiatives such as the Working Families Tax Cut, it’s not as though personal finance hasn’t been a concern:

Rewinding back to the beginning of the Q&A, Breitbart News’s Nick Gilbertson used his perch from the “new media seat” to ask about Tuesday’s Kentucky primaries featuring a Trump-backed challenger to GOP Congressman Thomas Massie:

Despite what the so-called media reporting crowd tries to have its followers and readers think, Fox News and conservative media came with tough questions.

Aishah Hasnie didn’t have softballs as she tried to pin Vance down on whether the Iranians are negotiating “in good faith”:

The New York Post’s Steven Nelson had two meaty, newsy topics about whether the Trump administration achieved anything last week with China on fentanyl plus if Russia could play a role in taking over an Iranian uranium:

Our friend Reagan Reese of the Daily Caller — who asked Trump a now-viral question last week — wondered if the work of the White House Fraud Task Force could yield an indictment of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and then whether working on the task force has altered Vance’s view on the country’s “immigration or refugee policies.”

The Daily Mail’s Jon Michael Raasch had this hardball on Iran:

And, filling in for the great Monica Luisi while on maternity leave, Turning Point USA’s Frontlines had Rowena Ortiz on hand to ask Vance to deliver a message to Americans of “across all faiths in America” amid “an uptick in religious violence.”

Vance explained how religious violence is particularly insidious, given it violates the core tenet of most major religions that “we are all children of God” (click “expand”):

[T]he principle of religious violence is particularly disgusting, especially in the United States of America. And as a devout Christian, I would say it’s — it’s one of the most anti-Christian things and anti-American things that you could do. And here’s — here’s why. One, because a fundamental principle of all the great faiths is we are all children of God. And because of that, we are endowed by certain rights that are unique to our status as human beings. You violate those rights, most importantly, when you commit violence against another person. You can violate them in other ways as well. But the most profound way to violate the fundamental right of human dignity is to commit violence. But here’s why the religious piece of it is particularly egregious.

One of the fundamental American rights that I think came from our Christian heritage as a civilization is the idea that we respect people’s religious freedom, in part because we respect them as human beings, but also because we respect their right to find their own pathway to God. You can’t force anybody to a pathway to God. They have to, through their own free will, find God themselves. That’s one of the reasons why that right of religious freedom is the very first right enshrined in our Constitution. So, when you commit acts of violence, you’re committing an act against this fundamental idea that people are created in the image of God, and that they have the right, through their own free will to find God however they might want. And as a as a Christian, of course, you might have your preference for how they find their pathway to God. They have to find that choice. And anybody who would commit violence against another human being in the name of religion is, I think, doing something that is a violation, of course, of the laws of — of man. But I think more importantly, it is a fundamental violation of the laws of God.

Vance addressed Monday’s deadly attack on a San Diego Islamic center earlier on in response to a question from Lindell TV concerning a repugnant so-called joke from Pete Davidson about the late Charlie Kirk:

To see the relevant transcript from the May 19 briefing, click here.

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