Trump teleprompter aide bet $100K on his own speech keywords

Gabriel Perez held a sensitive position in the Trump White House: he managed the teleprompter and had final oversight of nearly all of the president's prepared remarks, sometimes taking last-minute edits directly from Trump. During several months at the end of last year and early this year, Perez used this access to place bets on Kalshi, a prediction market where users can wager on the likelihood of specific words or phrases appearing in public statements. The mention markets Perez exploited work by pooling money into contracts tied to questions like "What will Domino's say during their next earnings call?"—with current bets suggesting terms such as "Parmesan" and "DomOS" are more likely to be mentioned than not. Perez's alleged scheme went further: sources told ABC and NPR that he would adjust his contracts mid-speech, backing out of certain bets when Trump skipped over prepared passages that contained words Perez had wagered would be mentioned. This real-time adjustment—essentially reacting to Trump's live deviations from the script—suggests Perez was using his privileged access to reduce his losses and protect his profits. Kalshi, which prohibits this kind of activity, detected unusual trading patterns and investigated. Upon discovering that the customer was a federal employee, the platform froze Perez's funds and reported him to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The CFTC opened an investigation and entered settlement discussions with Perez. However, when the CFTC alerted federal prosecutors in Manhattan, they declined to open a criminal investigation, effectively closing the door on potential criminal charges. The White House responded by announcing that Perez "will no longer be working at the White House." The broader context is the explosive growth of prediction markets and legal online betting in America, where roughly half of men ages 18 to 49 now have active accounts with online sportsbooks. Prediction markets are expanding far beyond sports—into drug trials, flight cancellations, and public speech—with heavy advertising backing their growth. Perez's case exposes the ethical hazards these markets create when they collide with positions of power and inside information.

The Perez case sits at the intersection of two rapidly growing American phenomena: the expansion of legal prediction markets and the normalization of betting via mobile phones. Kalshi's "mention markets" extend the betting model beyond traditional sports into earnings calls, flight cancellations, and—as Perez's situation illustrates—the specific utterances of public figures. The scale of this market is nascent but growing; the body notes that prediction markets have invested heavily in advertising during major events like the World Cup. Perez's behavior—adjusting bets in real time as Trump deviated from prepared remarks—reveals the structural danger: when someone with inside knowledge of future events places wagers on those events, the integrity of both the betting market and the public role itself becomes compromised. The White House's decision to remove him signals accountability at the political level, yet the CFTC's settlement-track approach and prosecutors' reluctance to pursue criminal charges may reflect legal uncertainty about how existing statutes apply to prediction market abuse by federal employees.