Vice President Donald Trump

The problem with White House enthusiasm for the worst our economy offers.

Donald Trump’s claim to the title of “vice” president is threatening to become a defining feature of his legacy. From online betting to cryptocurrency to marijuana, Trump has gone beyond a hands-off approach and become an active protector and promoter of some of the worst our economy has to offer. On related issues like social media regulation, the White House has been absent from the field. On artificial intelligence, it has repeatedly tried to prevent the establishment of guardrails, even as its highest-profile surrogates like Elon Musk promote AI girlfriends and carelessly unleash exploitative tools.

The latest faceplant comes from the administration’s CFTC director, Mike Selig, who posted a hostage-style video last Tuesday explaining that prediction markets “provide useful functions for society by allowing everyday Americans to hedge commercial risks like increases in temperature and energy price spikes.” He declared them to be within his sole jurisdiction, and warned with a gravitas that sent shivers down exactly zero spines: “To those who seek to challenge our authority in this space, let me be clear: we will see you in court.”

I’ve made frequent fun of the Kamala Harris campaign’s pathetic “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men,” on which the third of five items was “protect cryptocurrency investments” and the fifth was “legalize recreational marijuana.” But the Trump approach is not much better, and it’s coated in a patina of hedonistic excess and juvenile nihilism that is especially toxic for the young men of all races who are struggling most in our culture today.

Democratic capitalism requires, at a minimum, political and cultural leaders who elevate and ratify the public’s common sense and morality as a check against the shameless pursuit of unproductive or downright harmful profit. Embracing a laissez-faire attitude unmoored from virtue would be bad enough; a White House that actively cheerleads for ways to ruin your life will accelerate our social decay. Placing vice on a pedestal is its own road to serfdom.

The harms of sports betting have become especially apparent especially fast, in part because its gradual spread from state to state creates many natural experiments for analysis. Sports betting is credibly linked to a range of worsening financial problems, mental health issues, and domestic violence. The fallout from legalizing marijuana has become so obvious that even the New York Times editorial board recently opined, “It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem,” acknowledging that “legalization has led to much more use” which “has caused a rise in addiction and other problems.”

Beyond the real-world damage, the president is committing a costly, unforced political error, abandoning to the Democrats an issue on which conservatives should naturally lead. Indeed, it would be difficult to envision the modern Democratic Party tackling these themes if not for the negative polarization that drives them to the not-Trump position regardless of the merits. It’s worth taking note when Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) takes to the pages of the New York Times to warn:

Today our society is routing young men to online sports betting, pornography and bot-infused social media platforms, like Meta, whose policies at one point deemed it “acceptable” for bots “to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.” In this realm, it’s all digital reward, with no in-real-life effort. Young men are the worse for it, in both work and love. That’s not only a failure; it’s a warning about a technology that will soon saturate our culture.

Americans do not want this. Just look at the outcry from state and local lawmakers of both parties when House Republicans tried to bar states from regulating A.I.

It’s not a coincidence that both Rahm Emanuel and Gavin Newsom are now speaking in support of an Australia-style ban on social media for children under the age of 16.

If Trump brands Republicans as the party of liberty-means-license and “kids want to spend their time gambling with borrowed money because that’s their welfare-maximizing revealed preference,” while Democrats become the party that speaks in moral terms and works to ensure young men build decent lives, the electoral consequences will be steep.

There is no “vice vote,” some savvy play for young men. They are as likely to consider cryptocurrency a “scam” as to consider it an “important technology.” And even those who like playing the ponies in the short-run will come to a different view as the consequences play out. Indeed, this is already happening. Pew Research reports that the share of American adults who believe “the fact that betting on sports is now legal in much of the country is a bad thing for society” increased from 34% in 2022 to 43% in 2025. But among young adults, ages 18 to 29, the increase was twice as fast: from 23% (far below other age groups) to 41% (in line with other age groups). Concern among men likewise rose faster than among women, and is higher overall.

The conflicting views of free-market libertarians and social conservatives on the legitimacy of regulating vice was one of the most obvious tensions in the coalition that shaped the Republican Party from Ronald Reagan’s rise until Trump’s. But the libertarian influence is in sharp decline, and its replacement by an ethos that takes seriously the downsides of unfettered markets is key to constructing a more robust and effective conservative coalition for the years to come. Who is all this vice for?

Admittedly, cracking down on prediction market nonsense, or at least allowing states to do so, will enrage the many “everyday Americans” who value the useful ability to “hedge commercial risks like increases in temperature.”

The White House may be overestimating the size of that constituency.