Murphy Hits JD Vance on Trump Corruption, Brings Receipts

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In case you missed it, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) published a Substack article responding to Vice President J.D. Vance ’s ludicrous claim that President Trump has not used the powers of the presidency to enrich himself and his family. In a response to Vance’s comments on CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil , Murphy laid out the damning evidence of President Trump’s multi-billion-dollar webs of corruption, stressing that the American people have had enough of the lies and excuses coming from Vance and the rest of the Trump administration. Read Murphy’s full takedown of Vance below or on Substack . JD Vance says he hasn’t seen “a single shred of evidence” that Donald Trump is enriching himself in office. Yes, he just said that. Really? Let me help him out. I wrote out some of Trump’s top enrichment schemes below in the 15 minutes before my son’s hockey practice ended. First, the stock trades. Trump has made tens of thousands of stock trades, including trades that have raised serious questions about whether he’s profiting from information available to him as president. Take Nvidia: Trump disclosed up to $1.6 million in stock purchases in August, just before announcing a policy change that stood to benefit the company’s stock price. This is a major conflict of interest. We can’t just shrug it off. Read more . Then there’s crypto. Trump has made over $1.4 billion from his crypto ventures. His family’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial, depends heavily on Binance, another crypto company whose founder, Changpeng Zhao, pled guilty to violating anti-money-laundering laws and went to prison. Trump gave Zhao a presidential pardon as Zhao’s company helped Trump amass his crypto fortune. JD, you really haven’t seen anything concerning there? Read more . How about suspicious bets on the Iran war? Just 15 minutes before Trump announced a major reversal in Iran policy, billions of dollars in oil-related contracts were placed in a way that stood to profit from falling prices. Federal regulators reportedly began looking into the trades, only for the investigation to hit resistance. Read more If someone had advance knowledge of a major presidential announcement, they could make a fortune. We deserve to know whether that happened here. Or the family business. Trump’s sons have pursued a mining deal in Kazakhstan, and the administration subsequently approved $1.6 billion in taxpayer-backed financing tied to the project. That is an extraordinary amount of public money flowing into a deal that could benefit the president’s own family. This isn’t some minor ethics question. It’s a fundamental question about whether the presidency is being used to serve the public or enrich one family. Read more . And then there’s the merchandise. Trump’s political products have reportedly been sold on military bases, turning spaces meant to serve our troops into another opportunity to promote his personal brand. Read more. JD, military bases? Really? These are just a few examples. We haven’t even gotten into the broader web of business interests, political favors, and conflicts of interest surrounding this administration. Here’s the thing: I understand why JD Vance doesn’t want to talk about any of this. His job is to defend Donald Trump, even when that means asking Americans to ignore what’s right in front of them. But Americans aren’t buying it. Two-thirds of voters now say Trump is enriching himself in office. And corruption is emerging as a major issue for voters heading into the midterms. People work hard, pay their taxes, and expect their government to work for them. They don’t expect a president to use the most powerful office in the world to pad his own bank account. JD Vance can keep pretending he hasn’t seen the evidence. The rest of us aren’t going to look away. Voters are going to remember this and those who enabled him when they go to vote this election.