McKay Coppins

Polymarket hired a former Trump advisor as its first Washington lobbyist.

Both Polymarket and Kalshi added Don Jr.

to their payrolls effectively.

And the investigations were quietly closed.

The companies have begun to scale up rapidly.

And I think that they feel like they can operate with a certain degree of impunity.

Right.

Well, I spent some time talking to a Democratic congressman from New York named Paul Tonko, who kind of took on the cause of regulating sports betting several years ago when he first started seeing from his younger staffers that their social media feeds were filled with advertising from these online sports books.

And what he told me is that he was actually shocked when he saw them by how much they resembled the big tobacco

The cigarette ads from a generation earlier that have since been very heavily regulated.

You know, they're very slick.

They're very glossy.

They feature celebrities and famous athletes.

They're very clearly targeting younger people, trying to hook them so that they will become lifelong customers.

And they are, as Congressman Tonko put it to me, selling a known addictive product.

it is very well established that gambling and online sports betting can be addictive.

And these sports books are almost in kind of a Wild West moment where there's almost no regulation, certainly not at the federal level, in terms of how they can advertise, how they can track their users' behavior online.

And so, you know, he set out several years ago to start

regulating this industry.

And what he found was that there was a very little appetite in Congress for taking on this issue.