Trump Criticizes Prediction Markets as His Administration Expands Them

President Donald Trump denounced prediction markets on Thursday as he faced questions about people who had made lucrative bets tied to the Iran war, calling the world "somewhat of a casino" and saying, "I was never much in favor of it." The criticism landed awkwardly for an industry that has expanded alongside Trump’s political rise and now sits at the center of fights over gambling law, federal oversight and insider-trading safeguards.

Trump said he did not like the trend "conceptually," then added, "I think that I’m not happy with any of that stuff, but they have all these different sites of predictive markets. It’s a crazy world." His comments came as the White House, his family and his media company have all been pulled closer to the business of betting on political and real-world outcomes.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has been moving in the opposite direction. On March 12, the agency opened a rulemaking process and asked for public comment on how to police prediction markets, including protections against manipulation, margin trading and whether some contracts should be banned in the public interest. Regulators specifically raised wagers tied to terrorism and military action, while also pressing commenters to address whether federal employees could use inside information to profit from event-driven trades.

The broader legal fight has only intensified. In February, CFTC Chairman Michael Selig backed prediction markets in a dispute involving Nevada, arguing that the agency has exclusive federal jurisdiction and that states should not be able to block the products. Nevada regulators say Kalshi is effectively offering unlicensed sports gambling, and a Nevada appeals court denied Kalshi’s request to block state civil action, keeping alive a case that could shape whether these platforms are treated as regulated financial exchanges or illegal sportsbooks.

The political backlash has grown just as quickly. On March 23, Senators Adam Schiff and John Curtis introduced bipartisan legislation to ban prediction markets from listing contracts tied to sports events or casino-style games. Days later, more than 40 Democrats in Congress signed a letter urging the CFTC and the Office of Government Ethics to issue guidance and strengthen training to prevent insider trading by federal workers, after concerns that traders may have profited from news tied to Nicolás Maduro, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the length of White House press briefings. No federal employee has been charged so far.

The market itself has swelled into a serious business. Kalshi said Super Bowl trading volume topped $1 billion, a 2,700% increase from the prior year, showing how rapidly these platforms have moved from politics into sports and entertainment. Their lineage stretches back to the Iowa Electronic Markets, launched in 1988 at the University of Iowa by George Neumann, Forrest Nelson and Robert Forsythe as an academic experiment in forecasting. What began in Iowa City as a classroom test has become a multibillion-dollar industry now forcing Washington to decide whether prediction markets are financial innovation, gambling by another name, or both.