A White House teleprompter operator who sat in the building reading the president's words before you heard them used that access to pocket more than $100,000 betting on what Donald Trump would say — and the only reason you know about it is because a prediction market flagged it first.
Gabriel Perez, who ran Trump's teleprompter since 2016, is "no longer works in the federal government," a White House official said Tuesday. Whether he resigned or was fired, nobody will say. His winnings came from Kalshi's "Mentions" market, where users bet on specific phrases in public speeches — including the State of the Union address. That haul is more than half his $175,000 federal salary, according to White House personnel records.
This is the swamp made flesh. Not a lobbyist, not a think-tanker — a guy literally inside the building, loading the words onto a screen, then logging onto a betting app to cash in on information you didn't have. The permanent bureaucracy doesn't serve you. It serves itself. Perez had access to the president's speeches before the American people did, and he treated that access like a personal ATM.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the reports "deeply unfortunate and, frankly, a disgrace." She's right about the disgrace. But the real scandal is how routine this is. The Guardian noted that in April, federal prosecutors indicted a U.S. soldier, Gannon Ken Van Dyke, for allegedly betting $400,000 on whether Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro would be deposed — while working on the operation to remove him. Kalshi also fined three political candidates who bet on their own races. The insiders are everywhere, and the house always wins.
Kalshi's lawyer Robert Denault said the platform's "surveillance team promptly flagged, investigated and referred these trades" to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Fine — a private company caught the grift. But Kalshi only recently started requiring users to disclose their employers. How many Perez-types cashed out before that rule existed?
Prediction markets have exploded, with trading volume on Kalshi soaring from $100 million to $3 billion in a year. The industry's defenders call it derivatives; critics call it unregulated gambling. Minnesota tried to ban prediction markets entirely in May, but a federal judge blocked the law before it took effect. Trump himself has defended the industry, saying regulation should stay at the federal level with the CFTC.
Here's the tension: free markets work when everyone has the same information. When the guy running the teleprompter is also running bets, you don't have a market — you have a rigged game. The question isn't whether prediction markets should exist. It's whether anyone in Washington will ever stop profiting off the access you pay for and don't get.
