John Runyan

Founder, Runyan Public Affairs. Public policy strategist and coalition builder. 25+ years helping entrepreneurs navigate pubic policy process.

[John Runyan @jcrunyan]

@JosephKopser Great overview.

[John Runyan @jcrunyan]

@ToluseO @S_Fitzpatrick Keep up the good work!

[Joe Scarborough @ScarboroughNow]

This is a beautiful and inspiring ad. Don’t get to say that often about politics.

[Axios @axios]

Exclusive: Raimondo charts moderate AI lane, leaves door open to 2028 run https://t.co/Gs4dp1yrxf

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[Politics & Poll Tracker 📡 @PollTracker2024]

Rep. Ami Bera (D-CA) endorses San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan for California Governor.

[M. Nolan Gray 🥑 @mnolangray]

More high-cost California cities need to be slashing fees and unfunded mandates. Slapping six-figures in costs on projects such that nothing pencils, thereb6 losing millions in possible tax revenue, is penny rich, pound dollar poor policy.

[Harry Sisson @harryjsisson]

Trump is having a mental health episode right now. He’s been posting on social media all night. He posted at:

9:49pm (Ai Jesus photo)
9:50pm (Trump tower on moon)
10:10pm (dumb meme)
10:32pm (news clip)
10:53pm (news clip)
12:43am (announcing Hormuz blockade)
2:35am (article about Biden)
2:36am (article on naval blockade)
2:37am (article on Rep. Swalwell)
2:37am (posted the same article about Biden again)
2:38am (article on his ballroom)
4:10am (article on Iran)

He’s not sleeping, he’s pretending to be Jesus, and he’s posting all night. He’s not well.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

APPLEBAUM: Victor Orbán has been in charge of Hungary for 16 years. He has used his power as a democratically elected leader to take over the institutions of the state, judiciary, media, bureaucracy, universities.

Thanks to that and unbelievably high level of corruption, Hungary is now one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in EU, with major problems in healthcare and education.

Yet in the campaign he’s not talking about any of that. Instead, he’s pushing mythical fantasy that Ukrainians are going to invade Hungary to create fear.

He’s trailing in the polls by about 20%. The only question is whether he will halt the election, change the result, or create some kind of outrage.

[Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews]

Couldn’t sleep

Started going through my notes

Can’t believe the ridiculousness of what has to happen Monday at 930am

[Leela Gray @LeelaJGray]

Two days in and the energy is real! Thank you to every supporter and neighbor who has lifted us up!

From veterans and working families to small business owners and neighbors, you’ve made it clear: FL-13 is ready for leadership rooted in service, not politics.

[Home of the Brave @OfTheBraveUSA]

JD Vance in September 2025: "If you celebrate Charlie Kirk's death, you should not be protected from being fired for being a disgusting person."

[onion person @CantEverDie]

remember when they tried to get people fired from their jobs for saying charlie kirk wasn’t a good guy lol

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

To be very, very clear: I didn’t write this to scare people.

I just think it’s our duty (those of us in the AI space) to share what we’re seeing so people at least have a sense of what may be happening.

Even if there’s a small chance things play out like I, and many others, expect, people have the right to know in advance so they can at least spend a little time thinking about it and preparing.

This has gone way more viral than I ever possibly imagined… and the reaction to it is much more extreme than I expected.

It’s very possible we will be entering a very weird, new world in the coming years (or we may not!) and I think it’s important that people spend at least a little time thinking about what this might mean for them, and how they should prepare.

If nothing else, I’m glad this article got people talking about this stuff.

[Governor Wes Moore @GovWesMoore]

This week, I learned that I was uninvited to this year’s National Governors Association dinner — a decades-long annual tradition meant to bring governors from both parties together to build bonds and celebrate a shared service to our citizens with the President of the United States. My peers, both Democrats and Republicans, selected me to serve as the Vice Chair of the NGA, another reason why it’s hard not to see this decision as another example of blatant disrespect and a snub to the spirit of bipartisan federal-state partnership.

As the nation’s only Black governor, I can’t ignore that being singled out for exclusion from this bipartisan tradition carries an added weight — whether that was the intent or not.

What makes it especially confounding is that just weeks ago I was at the White House with a bipartisan group of governors, working with the administration on reforms to lower energy costs and strengthen grid reliability. We proved in that moment what’s possible when we stay focused on outcomes over politics.

As Governor of Maryland and Vice Chair of the NGA, my approach will never change: I’m ready to work with the administration anywhere we can deliver results. Yet, I promised the people of my state I will work with anybody but will bow down to nobody. And I guess the President doesn’t like that.

[craasch @craasch]

A @FoxNews talking head, a thousand miles away from Minneapolis in a warm studio, just said, without fact or any basis whatsoever, that the shooting victim in Minneapolis pulled a gun on the agents who killed him. In any ethical news organization, this would be a firing offense

[Governor Tim Walz @GovTimWalz]

Federal agents are pulling over off duty cops based on the color of their skin.

This is not a serious operation to enforce immigration law. It’s a performative show of force and it’s gotten way out of hand.

[Federal Reserve @federalreserve]

Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell: https://t.co/5dfrkByGyX

[Sarah Longwell @SarahLongwell25]

Watch this. An expert examination explaining all the ways the ICE agents behaved counter to training and guidelines by 1. being immediately escalatory and 2. By firing at a fleeing vehicle, which they are not allowed to do.

Anyone who listens to me knows I’m often very defensive on behalf of cops. They have hard and dangerous jobs. But a bunch of masked agents acting like unprofessional goons and a government telling lies right out of the gate about the incident, which are immediately disproven by the video footage, does not earn the same benefit of the doubt. At least not from me. This is insane behavior from the ICE agents.

And it is horrifying that so many people don’t hold members of American law enforcement to a higher standard than the behavior on display here.

[Sam Greene @samagreene]

I study authoritarianism for a living, so I do not say this lightly: America isn't facing an authoritarian future. America is living an authoritarian present.

(A long 🧵)

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