President Donald Trump said Thursday that he and first lady Melania Trump advised their teenage son Barron not to vape.
“We haven’t told him anything except ‘Don’t vape,’ Trump said. “Don’t vape, we don’t like vaping, I don’t like it.”
Barron Trump is 13-years-old.
The president commented to reporters as he left the White House to address a House Republican retreat in Baltimore.
On Wednesday, Trump and the first lady announced the administration’s plan to ban all non-tobacco flavored e-cigarettes to help prevent teen vaping.
The president criticized vaping “especially vaping as it pertains to innocent children” during an Oval Office meeting with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
“They’re coming home and they’re saying, ‘Mom, I want to vape,'” he said about teenagers. “And the parents don’t know too much about it.”
Trump said the administration would remove certain flavors of vaping e-cigarettes to make them less attractive to children.
“It’s, again, very new and potentially very bad,” he said. “People think it’s an easy solution to cigarettes, but it’s turned out that it has its own difficulties.”
Trump said that the first lady, who was present in the meeting, was involved with the issue.
“I mean, she’s got a son — together — that is a beautiful young man, and she feels very, very strongly about it,” he said. “She’s seen it. We’re both reading it. A lot of people are reading it. But people are dying with vaping.”
Trump, who does not drink or smoke, raised all of his children with similar advice.
“When my children were growing up, even when they didn’t know what drinking was, I’d say ‘no alcohol, no cigarettes, no drugs,'” Trump recalled during a CNN town hall during the 2016 campaign.
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