MISJUDGED

Trump-Tied Bets Firm Quietly Pulls Segregation Gambling Ad

Kalshi cast the end of baseball’s color line as a betting market—then the pages featuring Jackie Robinson quietly vanished.

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A Trump-backed gambling giant has quietly scrubbed Black baseball legend Jackie Robinson from its splashy campaign celebrating America’s 250th birthday after it was accused of monetizing his momentous race-based civil rights win.

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Kalshi—the prediction market valued at $22 billion which counts Donald Trump Jr., 48, as a strategic adviser—rolled out its “250 Years of American Predictions” campaign for the July Fourth semiquincentennial, reports PunchUp. The project recast famous chapters of American history as make-believe betting markets, complete with odds, artwork from 17 artists, and murals in New York and Los Angeles.

One of those chapters was the end of segregation in baseball. A 1946 entry titled “Will Baseball End Segregation?” set the odds at 0 percent, citing a 15-1 vote by team owners to preserve the sport’s color line. It carried a line from Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller claiming even Robinson lacked “the qualities of a big-league ballplayer.”

Robinson, then 28, broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947, and was named Rookie of the Year that season. Kalshi’s 1947 sequel, “The Color Line Breaks,” showed the market settling at 100 percent over an illustration by artist Raj Dhunna.

Both pages have now vanished from kalshi.com/america250, the Daily Beast’s sister investigations Substack, PunchUp, reported Thursday, with no announcement and no explanation. The page now features a question about whether the sound barrier could be broken that same year, instead.

The deletion follows a blistering column by prominent Black journalist Hazel Trice Edney and online complaints by HuffPost Deputy Editor Phil Lewis, president of the Washington Association of Black Journalists.

The Beast has asked Kalshi when it pulled the Robinson segment, and why. We also asked whether the company received complaints that it had appropriated a landmark moment in the fight for civil rights to promote gambling, and whether the Jackie Robinson Foundation was among those who objected. They did not immediately respond.

The column by Trice Edney, who is editor-in-chief of the Trice Edney News Wire, ran in Black-owned newspapers across the country in the days before the pages disappeared, including the New Pittsburgh Courier on July 10 and the Philadelphia Tribune on July 14.

Edney wrote that the campaign asked Americans to picture placing bets on Black people’s basic humanity. Americans should have learned by now, Edney wrote, that “some things must no longer be for sale — including Black dignity.”

Robinson died in 1972, at age 53. His No. 42 is retired across the entire league, and every player wears it on Jackie Robinson Day each April 15. The Jackie Robinson Foundation, established by his widow, Rachel, in 1973, awards scholarships worth up to $35,000 to minority college students.

Kalshi’s ties to President Donald Trump’s family run deep. His eldest son, Don Jr., took the adviser job on January 13, 2025—a paid position—and on June 26, Crypto Briefing reported he also holds an equity stake that could hand him a windfall if the firm goes public.

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President Trump’s first pick to run the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates Kalshi, was Brian Quintenz—a sitting Kalshi board member. Sen. Cory Booker warned Quintenz at his confirmation hearing that there would be “some real questions about your role,” and the White House pulled the nomination in September 2025.

The agency, now run by Trump appointee Michael Selig, has since sued a string of states—New York, Wisconsin, and Arizona among them—for trying to police prediction markets. And in May, the president attacked officials behind the state crackdowns as “SCUM” in a social media post.

Kalshi is fighting enforcement actions in more than a dozen states. In March, Arizona prosecutors filed 20 criminal charges accusing it of running an illegal gambling operation—charges the firm branded “meritless.” A week earlier, a federal judge in Ohio had ruled that its products are gambling.

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A Massachusetts court ordered the company in January to stop taking sports wagers there, Nevada hit it with a restraining order, and in May, Minnesota became the first state to ban prediction markets outright—a law Trump’s Justice Department sued to block the very next day.

Native American tribes in California and Wisconsin are suing too, as Tribal Business News reported last July.

Sports bets delivered 89 percent of Kalshi’s $263.5 million fee revenue in 2025, according to Yahoo Finance, and in May, addiction experts told CNN they were alarmed by the wave of college-age users pouring onto prediction platforms.

The Daily Beast has contacted Kalshi and the Jackie Robinson Foundation for comment.

Tom Latchem exposes the secrets, scandals, and stories that powerful people and institutions want to keep under wraps. Follow all of his reporting at PunchUp on Substack.

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