President Donald Trump sure doesn’t sound like a prediction market enthusiast.
Asked on Thursday if he was concerned about the potential for insider trading on prediction markets, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he was “never much in favor” of betting in financial markets.
“The whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino,” Trump said. “I don’t like it, conceptually, but it is what it is. No, I think that I’m not happy with any of this.”
“They have all these different sites, they have ‘predictive markets,'” Trump continued. “It’s a crazy world. It’s a much different world than it was.”
Trump’s comments came shortly after the Department of Justice indicted a US Army soldier who was involved in the planning of the US capture of Nicolás Maduro. Prosecutors say Gannon Ken Van Dyke used classified information to reap more than $400,000 in profit on Polymarket.
That trade caught the public’s attention in early January, leading to the introduction of a raft of bills on Capitol Hill to both rein in the industry and protect against potential insider trading.
On Thursday, Trump said he wasn’t aware of the indictment, but joked that the case sounded like when Pete Rose, the former manager of the Cincinnati Reds, was caught betting on his own team.
“Now, if he bet against his team, that would be no good. But he bet on his own team,” Trump said.
Trump previously told The Washington Post that prediction markets are better than “fake polls,” referencing the fact that both Kalshi and Polymarket gave Trump stronger odds of winning the 2024 election than traditional polling.
“They predicted me pretty right… by a landslide,” Trump said at the time.
Trump’s lament about prediction markets, which seemed to echo some comments that Democrats have made about the industry’s impact on society, contrasts with the way his administration has approached the industry.
Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Michael Selig, the top federal regulator of prediction markets, has moved to defend prediction market companies in the midst of legal battles with states over sports and elections betting.
“It’s something that I think is valuable to society,” Selig said of prediction markets in a February podcast appearance.
The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., is also financially involved in the industry, serving as a strategic advisor to Kalshi while investing in Polymarket.
