One “Lucky” Trader Hit Jackpot on Polymarket With Iran Bets

With betting apps—sorry, “prediction markets”—like Kalshi and Polymarket, it’s easier than ever to profit off of deadly conflicts.

An anonymous user made nearly $1 million on Polymarket with dozens of eerily accurate bets about the ongoing Iran war, CNN reported on Tuesday.

The user bet with 93 percent accuracy on topics such as when U.S. and Israeli airstrikes would occur in 2024, 2025, and 2026.

This is not the first time that people who appear to have inside information have used sites like Polymarket to profit from violent acts.

A few days before the U.S. kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a raid, a user created a Polymarket account and wagered tens of thousands of dollars that Maduro would be in U.S. custody by the end of the month. They won more than $400,000.

Gambling, once tightly regulated in the U.S., has become easier to access than ever with the rise of betting apps. It has rapidly invaded sports, politics, and culture. Even CNN, which broke the Polymarket story, has a deal with rival group Kalshi to use its data in its news coverage.

Both Kalshi and Polymarket ostensibly ban insider trading, but with anonymous accounts and plausible deniability, the apps make it easy for those in the know to profit.

Sometimes the sites will even let slip that they’re fine with the practice. In November, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan told Axios it was “super cool” that his app “creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market.”

While some lawmakers and government watchdogs are looking to regulate the addictive, often unethical apps, Kalshi and Polymarket have an advocate in the president, a former casino owner. The Trump administration closed active investigations into the sites at the start of Trump’s second term, and Donald Trump Jr. has been hired as a board member of Polymarket and a “strategic adviser” of Kalshi. The war profiteering will continue until further notice.

President Donald Trump has once again voted by mail while railing against so-called “mail-in cheating.”

Trump, who has staunchly opposed mail-in voting as part of his delusions of mass voter fraud, voted by mail in a special election in Florida, according to The New York Times. The website for Palm Beach County’s Supervisor of Elections listed Trump’s voter status as “by mail ballot.”

Trump previously voted by mail in 2020.

Trump’s latest vote comes as the president has rejected a bid from his own party to end the partial government shutdown in order to pass the SAVE America Act, which would prohibit universal mail-in voting. Under the new legislation, voters would have to submit an application to receive a mail-in ballot.

In a statement, the White House pretended that the president’s mail-in ballot wasn’t at odds with his own legislation. “The SAVE America Act has common-sense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel—but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed,” the statement said. “As everyone knows, the President is a resident of Palm Beach and participates in Florida elections, but he obviously primarily lives at the White House in Washington, D.C.”

Between naps at a crime-fighting task force in Memphis, Tennessee, Monday, Trump had claimed mail-in ballots were a threat to democracy. “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” he ranted. “I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all.”

The Supreme Court appeared poised Monday to reject a Mississippi law that allowed ballots to be counted after Election Day, a decision that could further upend the democratic process. Last year, Trump signed an executive order banning ballots that were not “cast and received” by Election Day.

Former Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino—the man who oversaw President Trump’s violent immigration crackdown and thinks Latino immigrants are “scum,” “filth,” and “trash”—identifies as Native American. His family is Italian American, and he is not in any official tribal registry.

In several interviews with Bovino ahead of his retirement, The New York Times reported that Bovino listed his race as “Native American” on legal documents with Cherokee as his tribe, even gifting agents tomahawks as prizes for good work. Bovino told the Times that he has called himself Cherokee since he was 8 years old.

Bovino’s statement is tenuous at best, and the families he relentlessly brutalized and surveilled for over a year have a much more legitimate claim to American indigeneity than he does. The former Border Patrol chief continues to double down on all of the policies that led to federal agents killing two Americans in the street and his eventual firing, telling the Times he wanted “total border domination.”

“When you use terms like that, perhaps it scares some of the weaker-minded people. Domination. I want you to dominate that border. I’m not going to ‘control’ it. We’re going to dominate the hell out of that damn place,” Bovino said, and thinks that “all illegal aliens are criminals.”

Bovino oversaw the occupation of Minneapolis that led to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and had the gall to claim Pretti planned to “massacre” federal agents. Now he’ll be retiring to hunting and shitposting.

President Donald Trump was spotted struggling to stay awake even while his sycophants showered him with praise.

While attending a crime-stopping task force Monday aimed at curbing crime in Memphis, Tennessee, Trump appeared to doze off.

The 79-year-old president tried desperately to keep his eyes open while hearing about the rates of gunshot victims.

While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ranted about Trump steering the United States off of a “perpetual course of decline,” the president’s eyelids fluttered and closed.

When he wasn’t drifting off into a dreamless daze, Trump’s remarks ranged from incoherent to problematic.

At one point, Trump joked about moving to Tennessee. “I love it. You never know what that is, you know, you just have a relationship with a state. It’s a lot safer than relationships with other things, I can tell you as a politician,” he joked. Earlier, Trump suggested that it had been Hegseth’s idea to wage war against Iran.

Trump has repeatedly been spotted dozing off during press conferences and signings, and even admitted that he’d grabbed some shut-eye during Cabinet meetings because they were “boring as hell.”

President Trump is already trying to throw Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth under the bus for the fruitless war on Iran.

“I called Pete, I called General Caine, I called a lot of our great people … and I said, ‘Let’s talk. We got a problem in the Middle East. We have a country … that for 47 years has been a purveyor of terror. And they’re very close to having a nuclear weapon. We can keep going and get that 50,000 up to 55 and 60, there’s no end. Or we could take a stop and make a little journey into the Middle East, and eliminate a big problem,’” Trump said Monday at an event in Memphis.

“Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up,” Trump continued. “And you said, ‘Let’s do it.’ Because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”

“Hegseth about to give his next briefing from under the bus,” liberal podcaster Jon Favreau wrote on X.

This quick comment is magnified by the chaos of Monday morning, which saw Trump announcing a five-day pause on bombing Iranian energy sites while claiming that he was close to a deal with the Iranian government. The Iranian government then denied speaking to him in any capacity at all, sparking rumors that Trump was engaging in market manipulation. And if the war is going as badly as it appears to be, Hegseth may be in trouble.