Former senior Trump official pursues prediction markets

Mick Mulvaney wants to be clear: he really likes to gamble. “You’re talking to the only former member of Congress to ever win a poker tournament in Las Vegas,” he told WIRED. When he represented South Carolina in the U.S. House of Representatives, he urged 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 sounds like a sports bet, if it pays off like a sports bet, if it’s on a sporting event — it’s a sports bet.”

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

These developments are part of a fierce political battle over how to regulate prediction markets. At the federal level, these platforms are overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which are currently classified as derivatives markets. While traditional sports betting will offer customers the opportunity to bet on which team will win or lose a match, a prediction market will offer an “event hold” on the outcome. Critics see the spread as nothing more than a loophole, and state authorities from around the country are currently filing lawsuits against prediction market companies like Calci, claiming they violate state gambling laws. (While these markets offer event contracts on a wide range of topics, sporting events are their most popular offering.) “I like the CFTC, but it’s not set up to do that,” Mulvaney says.

Recently, a group of 23 Democratic senators sent a letter to the CFTC urging it to allow these court cases to move forward. Things don’t seem to be going well. CFTC Chairman 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 see those who “challenge our authority” in court, the CFTC 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 predictive market offerings.

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

However, the agency’s more friendly approach now appears to align with the White House’s interest in the industry. The Trump family has many connections to the prediction market world. Truth Social, the social media platform owned by President Trump and his family, plans to offer its own prediction market, said to be called Truth Predict. Donald Trump Jr. is an advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket, and his venture capital firm has invested in the latter.

But the launch of “Gamble, Not Invest” makes clear that there is a growing wing of the Republican Party that feels prediction markets need more guardrails. Its founding member organizations include a number of conservative consumer advocacy groups, including Mothers for America, Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, and Frontiers of Freedom.

Mulvaney hopes to be able to present his case to the current White House. “Their default position would be less regulation, not more,” he says. “And I respect that.” “But I also know that in the first Trump administration, when there were logical reasons to do some regulation, we did it.”