The man who feeds the President of the United States every prepared word just got caught feeding his own bank account first. Gabriel Perez, teleprompter operator for Donald Trump since the 2016 campaign, is on unpaid leave after allegedly using the actual speech scripts to cash more than $100,000 on Kalshi’s Mentions markets. That is not a rumor. That is the verified mess, and I am telling you right now it is a full-scale assault on the integrity of every prediction market in America.
I have watched these platforms grow from fringe novelty into real money for years. Kalshi’s Mentions contracts let you bet whether a specific phrase or word will leave a speaker’s mouth. Perez had the text. He knew what was coming in more than a dozen speeches over a three-month stretch: the December primetime address, Davos remarks, the State of the Union, a Medal of Honor ceremony. He put money on it. When Trump went off-script mid-speech, sources say Perez even tried to reverse some positions. That is not sharp analysis. That is theft of information dressed up as a bet.
Karoline Leavitt called it what it is. “He believes it’s deeply unfortunate and, frankly, a disgrace,” she told reporters after speaking with the president. “The White House has extremely strict ethical guidelines with respect to issues like this.” Trump himself ordered the leave. A different operator ran the glass for that night’s address. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle added that the staffer is “fully cooperating with the CFTC.” Kalshi’s enforcement chief Robert DeNault said the platform’s surveillance team “promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC,” froze most of the profits, and handed over the evidence. Prosecutors in Manhattan declined criminal charges. Settlement talks are underway. Perez’s company, VIP Prompting, stayed silent.
I said this when the first whispers hit: the man closest to the text cannot be allowed to own the outcome. Nobody listened. Trump once praised him publicly: “I have a guy, Gabe. He’s excellent.” That same president has also admitted, “I go off teleprompter about 80% of the time.” So Perez was not even betting a locked-in certainty. He was betting the base script and still cleaned up. That is how stacked the edge was. His White House salary sat at $175,000. The alleged winnings exceeded $100,000. One man with a laptop and a privileged PDF turned public addresses into a private ATM.
This is not some abstract ethics violation. This is an unmitigated disaster for anyone who still pretends prediction markets aggregate information fairly. Sportsbooks ban players and coaches for far less. If a quarterback’s coach knew the exact play call and hammered the under on yards, we would call it match-fixing and throw the book at him. Here the “play call” was the speech itself. The teleprompter operator is the coach with the headset. And he bet the house.
I have watched enough point-shaving scandals, enough tanked seasons, enough leaked injury reports to know exactly where this leads. Trust evaporates. Retail bettors who thought they were trading against the wisdom of crowds discover they were trading against the guy who wrote the script. Kalshi’s new employment disclosure rules came after the alleged activity. Too late. The damage is already in the books. Every Mentions market on a political speech now carries a permanent asterisk. Every sharp who loses to an unexplained spike will assume an insider is on the other side. That is how markets die.
Perez is cooperating. The profits are mostly frozen. The president acted fast. None of that repairs the principle. When the man holding the words can also hold the tickets, the entire enterprise becomes a rigged game. Prediction markets were sold as pure. This was pure insider. And if the industry does not treat it like the nuclear breach it is, the next Gabe will not even bother to hide.
