A Former Top Trump Official Is Going After Prediction Markets

Mick Mulvaney wants to be clear: he really loves acting. “You’re talking to the only former congressman who won a poker tournament in Las Vegas,” he told WIRED. While representing South Carolina in the United States House of Representatives, he pushed for the state to allow sports betting.

Because of his background, Mulvaney, a former Trump administration official, says he can tell when something is gambling — and that sports contracts in prediction markets fit the bill. “You know the old saying, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck?” he asks. “If it looks like a sports bet, if it looks like a sports bet, if it pays like a sports bet, if it’s on a sporting event, it’s a sports bet.”

Mulvaney, who served as acting chief of staff to President Trump in the White House from 2019 to 2020, now leads a new advocacy coalition called Gambling Is Not Investing, which will push for prediction markets to be regulated by state gambling laws. He joins a number of other prominent Republicans who are calling for similar rules. Earlier this month, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and current Utah Governor Spencer Cox both spoke out against the current federal approach to regulating prediction markets. (Christie also used the line “quack like a duck.”)

These developments come amid a bitter political battle over how prediction markets are regulated. At the federal level, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) oversees these platforms, which are currently classified as derivatives markets. While a traditional bookmaker will offer customers the opportunity to bet on which team will win or lose a match, a prediction market will offer an “event contract” on the outcome. Critics view this difference as nothing more than a loophole, and state authorities across the country are currently filing lawsuits against prediction market companies like Kalshi, alleging they violate state gambling laws. (Although these markets offer event-driven contracts on a wide variety of topics, sporting events are their most popular offerings.) “I love the CFTC, but it’s not designed for that,” Mulvaney says.

Recently, a group of 23 Democratic senators sent the CFTC a letter urging it to allow these trials to proceed. This doesn’t seem to have gone well; CFTC Director Michael Selig insists that prediction markets are properly classified and that his agency has jurisdiction over the industry. After Selig released a video promising to bring to justice those who “challenge our authority,” the CFTC even took the unprecedented step of filing a brief in support of cryptocurrency platform Crypto.com, which is facing a lawsuit from Nevada regulators over its prediction market offering.

Under the Biden administration, the CFTC took a significantly different approach to prediction markets, even fining Polymarket $1.4 million for failing to register as a derivatives market and temporarily blocking it from operating in the United States.

But today, the agency’s friendlier approach appears to align with the White House’s interest in the industry. The Trumps have many ties to the world of the prediction market. Truth Social, the social media platform majority owned by President Trump and his family, is planning its own prediction marketplace offering, reportedly called Truth Predict. Donald Trump Jr is an advisor to Kalshi and Polymarket, and his venture capital firm has invested in the latter.

But the launch of Gambling Not Investing demonstrates that there is a growing wing of the Republican Party that believes prediction markets need more guardrails. Its founding member organizations include a number of conservative consumer advocacy groups, including Moms for America, Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, and Frontiers of Freedom.

Mulvaney hopes to be able to make his case to the current White House. “Their default position will be to regulate less, not more. And I respect that,” he says. “But I also know that during the first Trump administration, when there were common-sense reasons to put some regulation in place, we did it.”