You could bet (literally!!) that greedy U.S. kleptocrats couldn’t get Iran deal

It should not have come as any great surprise that Vice President JD Vance and America’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — real-estate developers Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff — flew home from talks in Islamabad early Sunday with no permanent U.S.-Iran peace deal.

In fact, you could have bet on it.

No, I mean seriously, you could have wagered on it over at Polymarket, the popular and controversial prediction market, where as of Sunday morning more than $1.9 million had been bet on the timing of a permanent deal between the two warring nations, with odds of an agreement by May 31 plunging overnight from 46% to as low as 28%.

Presumably, whoever scores big here on the world’s failure to give peace a chance will plow those profits right back into betting on when and where the next Tomahawk missiles will fall and which Iranian leaders — or schoolgirls, or whoever — will be slaughtered.

A recent exposé in the Guardian about the growing insanity of prediction markets like Polymarket or Kalshi that increasingly handle wagers on life-or-death geopolitical events, like war in Iran or Ukraine, found that $280 million was bet on last week’s ceasefire between Washington and Tehran, amid mounting suspicion that some players might have inside governmental information.

An Associated Press investigation found that last Tuesday, as Donald Trump was threatening a genocide that would wipe out Iranian civilization, 50 new Polymarket accounts placed substantial bets instead on a ceasefire, just minutes before it was announced. It was just the latest example of perfectly timed bets on American war and peace that have netted some lucky ducks millions of dollars of free money.

At least we can feel completely confident that no one in the Trump White House was cashing in on the boss’s death threats. That’s because last week the president’s staff was officially warned in a sternly worded memo not to do this, telling them that “the misuse of nonpublic information by government employees for financial benefit is a very serious offense and will not be tolerated.”

“LOL,” the memo writers should have added. I was, of course, being sarcastic in the prior paragraph; we actually have no way of knowing whether any Trump aides are placing bets or leaking advance news to close friends, and in a more serious nation a full-scale criminal investigation into these dubious bets would be well underway.

I don’t gamble, but if Polymarket was taking wagers on “Has there been insider trading on the Iran War,” I’d bet my meager life’s savings. Trump’s military misadventures in Venezuela and Iran are the first completely kleptocratic wars in America’s 250-year history, where literally everyone is cashing in one way or another, and there are no honest brokers working for the public interest, let alone world peace.

The deeper you dig, the more scandalous, and arguably treasonous, it all becomes.

Why, for example, has Pakistan warmed so much to Trump World, to the point where the South Asian nation has become an unlikely mediator in the U.S.-Iran talks? Is it the peace-loving nature of Pakistan’s military regime? Or is it because of the January deal between Pakistan’s finance minister and World Liberty Financial (WLF), the crypto venture headed by Zack Witkoff, the son of America’s inexperienced top negotiator, and heavily owned by the Trump family. Under the unusual arrangement, Pakistan is using WLF’s stablecoin for cross-border transactions.

Yet Witkoff’s co-negotiator — Kushner, the presidential son-in-law — is arguably even more financially compromised, After forging close ties with Middle Eastern dictators during his father-in-law’s first term, Kushner struck gold when a Saudi Arabian government fund directed by his friend, de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), invested $2 billion in his start-up equity fund. Now, MBS is a leading advocate of waging war until the complete destruction of Iran, the opposite of what Kushner was supposed to be negotiating in Islamabad.

At least Vance is morally and economically uncompromised, right? Well...yes and no. The vice president’s unlikely political rise has been backed from Day One by the billionaire founder of the leading defense-tech contractor Palantir, Peter Thiel. It was Thiel who met Vance at Yale Law School and gave him his first job, invested in Vance’s venture-capital fund, and pumped as much as $15 million into his Ohio Senate win.

Today, Palantir is critical to the Pentagon’s war plans, with its Maven Smart System powered by artificial intelligence making the decisions about who lives or dies when American bombs fall on Iran. During his 21-hour talks with Iran this weekend, was Vance working for the American people, who have overwhelmingly wanted an end to the war, or his patrons who’ve gotten filthy rich off of it?

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The answer to that alarming question may have come last week from the president himself, who took the extremely unusual step of boosting Vance’s favorite tech giant — whose stock has fallen because of broader Wall Street fears about software profits in the AI era — with a Truth Social post: “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!”

Trump seemed to erase any doubts about America’s transition from flawed democracy to naked kleptocracy by including the firm’s PLTR ticker symbol, and indeed shares in Palantir spiked 3% before resuming their recent slide.

Does Palantir want the now-fractured negotiations between the United States and Iran to resume? Does the Trump family? We learned recently that a Florida-based drone manufacturer called Powerus, backed by Eric and Donald Trump Jr., is trying to sell its defensive drone interceptors to Persian Gulf countries to defend themselves from Iranian attacks that came with the war that the Trumps’ dad started.

“Hey, nice oil dictatorship you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.” Apparently the business finesse that Trump Sr. learned from his mentor, the mob lawyer Roy Cohn, is getting passed down.

It takes more effort to find someone in Trump’s orbit who’s not profiting off death and destruction than the many who are, or hope to. What about “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth, whose stock broker — according to a report in the Financial Times — inquired about a large purchase in a defense-industry stock fund right before the U.S. started bombing Iran?

It’s no secret that pretty much anything and everything in Trump’s orbit is, in the infamous words of Steve Martin in The Jerk, a “profit deal.” But it’s one thing when Trump’s blatant corruption is about stuff like meme coins or sneakers or making a dirty deal to get free foreign steel for his hideous White House ballroom.

Making money off death and devastation is an entirely lower rung of hell. The concerns that top Homeland Security officials may have profited off plans for the squalid warehousing of detained immigrants is unconscionable. Making money off a war that’s already killed a couple thousand civilians in Iran and Lebanon ought to be beyond unthinkable.

Look, we truly don’t know what’s happening inside Trump’s rapidly deteriorating brain. His real reasons for this ill-advised war that America appears to have lost might not be about the money but his fantasies of a military victory to etch onto his obscene D.C. arch, or changing the political conversation away from his late perverted pal Jeffrey Epstein.

But there’s a reason — OK, there used to be a reason — why government officials were instructed to avoid even the seeming appearance of a conflict of interest. We don’t know what was on the mind of the American delegation during those 21 hours in Islamabad. Were they only thinking about ending the bloodshed and the economic disruption, or were they also checking in with their broker and texting updates to their Kalshi buddies back home? Did 13 American troops die, so far, fighting in our name, or for the enrichment of Palantir and World Liberty Financial?

We do know this. Iran showed up in Pakistan this weekend with a team of 30 people, many of them with Ph.D. degrees and some expertise in diplomacy. America’s delegation was five real-estate developers and venture-capital dudes who were shocked when the Iranians didn’t succumb to their Glengarry Glen Ross high-pressure sales pitch. An American kleptocracy all about the Benjamins is becoming a joke on the world stage.

One other thing seems certain. When Democrats retake the House and possibly the Senate in January, and perhaps reclaim the Justice Department in 2029, there will be many subpoenas for U.S. war profiteers, and a lot of explaining to do. Will some folks go to prison for a long time? You could bet on it, but please don’t.

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