Updated August 24, 2026 · 11 min read · by Jake Hari
Twenty-Four Days Of Silence
What will Trump say this month? On August 1, Kalshi turned that question into 31 contracts, one for each word or phrase it listed. Each is its own yes-or-no bet on whether Donald Trump says that word before the month runs out, and each closes the instant he does.
Nineteen have already closed. "Autism" is done. So are "Filibuster," "Space Force," "Kamala," "Golden Age," "UFC," "Barack Hussein Obama" and twelve others. The exchange closed each one out early as soon as a qualifying quote or post landed, which means this board has been resolving itself in slow motion since the first week of August.
Twelve are still trading, and those twelve are not really predictions anymore. They are survivors. Each has now gone twenty-four days without coming out of his mouth, in a month where nineteen other words on the same list came out of it. So the question left on the table is much narrower than the one Kalshi asked on August 1: will he say it in the final week, having not said it in the first three and a half?
We put that narrower question to eight AI models, one contract at a time, without letting any of them see a price. On one word, the machines and the money are thirty-one points apart.
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New to markets that pay out on things a person says? Our plain-English walkthrough of how event contracts work on Kalshi covers what a price in cents actually means before you read a single number below.
How A Word Becomes A Contract
The settlement language matters more here than on almost any market we cover, so it is worth reading Kalshi's own words. A contract resolves Yes "if the word or phrase is stated by President Donald Trump in public statements, direct quotes published by Source Agencies, or written public statements on his personal social media accounts (Twitter/Truth Social)." Executive orders and signed bills do not count. The exact word has to appear, or a plural or possessive of it; other tense changes do not qualify. On the contracts carrying a slash, like "Fat shot / Ozempic," either side satisfies it.
Read that surface again, because it is wider than people assume. This is not a speech market. A single Truth Social post at two in the morning settles a contract as cleanly as an hour at a podium, and the exchange also counts direct quotes carried by the news outlets it names as source agencies for the series.
The posting channel is not a theoretical backdoor, either, and Kalshi runs a separate market that sizes it. Its weekly board on how many times Trump posts on Truth Social currently has the money on 180 to 199 posts and 200 to 219 posts, both quoted at 20¢, with the "more than 240" bucket at 12¢. That board says nothing about which words he uses. What it does say is that traders expect roughly two hundred posts in seven days, which is about twenty-eight separate chances a day for one of these twelve words to appear, before he says anything out loud at all.
What he says out loud is thinner than usual this week. Kalshi has listed exactly two public Trump events inside the remaining window: a tele-rally on Monday and remarks at NASA on Friday, August 28. NASA's own release says the President will award the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four Artemis II astronauts at 11 a.m. EDT that day, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Both are low-yield formats by the exchange's own settled record. Across the twenty most recent Trump event boards, tele-rallies landed between 10% and 33% of their listed words, while open rallies and long unscripted remarks landed 66% to 82%. A medal ceremony is the narrow kind: the one previous Medal of Honor ceremony Kalshi ever priced settled just four of its twenty-eight word contracts Yes.
The Board, And Where The Models Split From It
Here is how the panel works. Eight models each priced all twelve live contracts, and every one of them got the same fetched packet first: Kalshi's settled results from the two previous monthly boards, all ten settled weeks of the exchange's weekly Trump word market, each of these twelve words' exact contract history, the event-format table above, and dated news lines with their outlets attached. None of them saw a market price, which is the whole point. A model shown the price tends to agree with the price.
Then each model read the other seven's reasoning, with the names stripped off, and was invited to revise or hold. The numbers below are round two, and the blend is the median of the eight seats.
The Board. Sorted by market price, as of August 24, 2026, 6:34 p.m. ET. The middle column is how the same word settled on Kalshi's June and July monthly boards.
| Word or phrase | Said in June / July board | Market | Panel blend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Greenland | Yes / Yes | 52¢ | 21% |
| Newscum | not listed / Yes | 31¢ | 14% |
| Gulf of America | not listed / Yes | 27¢ | 28% |
| Third Term | not listed / Yes | 26¢ | 17% |
| Peace in the Middle East | not listed / not listed | 24¢ | 15% |
| UFO / UAP | No / No | 11¢ | 6% |
| Fat shot / Ozempic | Yes / Yes | 8¢ | 7% |
| Epstein | not listed / No | 8¢ | 10% |
| Nine War / Ninth War | No / No | 7¢ | 6% |
| Antifa | not listed / not listed | 7¢ | 14% |
| Make Iran Great Again | No / No | 4¢ | 5% |
| Knicks | not listed / No | 2¢ | 6% |
| Word | Fable | Opus | Sonnet | GPT | Gemini | Kimi | GLM | DeepSeek | Blend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Greenland | 22% | 24% | 20% | 16% | 16% | 26% | 24% | 18% | 21% |
| Newscum | 17% | 14% | 13% | 14% | 10% | 13% | 15% | 8% | 14% |
| Gulf of America | 28% | 25% | 32% | 27% | 18% | 28% | 30% | 38% | 28% |
| Third Term | 24% | 16% | 20% | 15% | 12% | 17% | 14% | 18% | 17% |
| Peace in the Middle East | 16% | 13% | 18% | 14% | 14% | 20% | 12% | 18% | 15% |
| UFO / UAP | 6% | 5% | 5% | 6% | 6% | 8% | 6% | 4% | 6% |
| Fat shot / Ozempic | 15% | 7% | 8% | 6% | 7% | 11% | 6% | 5% | 7% |
| Epstein | 11% | 10% | 13% | 11% | 7% | 9% | 8% | 6% | 10% |
| Nine War / Ninth War | 5% | 6% | 7% | 6% | 3% | 6% | 7% | 5% | 6% |
| Antifa | 18% | 15% | 30% | 17% | 12% | 7% | 12% | 5% | 14% |
| Make Iran Great Again | 5% | 3% | 5% | 4% | 5% | 8% | 6% | 7% | 5% |
| Knicks | 6% | 4% | 6% | 7% | 6% | 7% | 6% | 7% | 6% |
Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements — records to date: Claude Fable 84% on 707 graded calls · Claude Opus 84% on 777 graded calls · Claude Sonnet 82% on 755 graded calls · GPT 84% on 6,039 graded calls · Gemini 86% on 4,746 graded calls · Kimi 83% on 2,494 graded calls · GLM 81% on 2,504 graded calls · DeepSeek 80% on 2,542 graded calls. Recomputed daily; the full scoreboard is public.
These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Kalshi event contracts are regulated by the CFTC and are 18+. Every number in this piece gets graded in public once the market settles; the running tally lives on the full graded scoreboard.
More live boards from the same panel: the seven-day version of this exact market, where "Peace in the Middle East" trades at 15¢ against 24¢ here, is broken down in what Trump will say this week; the posting board behind all of it, with the 180-to-199 bucket at 20¢, is in Trump Truth Social posts; and Friday's NASA ceremony, the one scheduled event that could move this board, has "Moon" at 93¢ in Trump's NASA speech. Prices fetched August 24, 2026.
The panel came in below the market on seven of the twelve and above it on five, and one cross-board detail is worth pausing on, because anyone can check it in thirty seconds. Kalshi's weekly Trump word market currently runs from 8:00 a.m. ET on August 24 until 12:00 a.m. ET on August 31. That is almost exactly the window left on this monthly board, which runs until 12:00 a.m. ET on September 1, the moment August 31 ends. "Peace in the Middle East" sits on both. On the weekly board it is bid 13¢ and offered at 15¢. On the monthly board it is bid 22¢ and offered at 23¢. The monthly contract covers one extra day, August 31, and on a phrase that has landed in one of the last six weekly windows, one day is worth roughly two cents, not eight. Two Kalshi boards are quoting the same sentence out of the same man's mouth at meaningfully different numbers. "Newscum" last traded at 31¢ on both boards, which is its own small oddity, because the monthly window is strictly the longer of the two.
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Greenland And Epstein: The Board's Two Biggest Arguments
Greenland is where the panel and the market are furthest apart, and it got that way in about an hour.
The contract traded at 14¢ as late as two o'clock Monday afternoon. In the next hour it printed 45¢ on 191 contracts, and by seven in the evening it closed at 53¢. Before that it had spent the month sliding: 52¢ on August 13, 36¢ by the 18th, 20¢ on the 22nd, 13¢ by Monday morning. This is a jumpy book. The same contract printed 8¢ on Sunday morning and 53¢ on Monday evening, and it is currently bid 32¢ against an offer of 46¢, a fourteen-cent gap between what buyers will pay and what sellers want. Treat the headline number as a range in the high thirties to high forties rather than a precise reading.
The market has a real argument, and the table above contains it: Greenland settled Yes on both the June and July monthly boards. This is a word he reaches for most months. There is also a live story underneath it. UPI reported on August 8 that Greenland Energy, a Texas oil company whose chairman Larry Swets is described as being in the President's circle, moved drilling equipment to the Jameson Land site without the permits Greenland's government requires, prompting a warning from Greenlandic authorities. Snopes' fact check found that drilling had not begun and that there is no evidence the President owns or controls the company. Newsweek later reported that Greenland cast doubt on the firm's drilling schedule. The acquisition push itself is old and documented: he restated it at the NATO summit on July 7, and Denmark's prime minister has publicly asked him to stop.
The panel weighed all of that and stayed low, and its reason is timing rather than topic. The drilling story broke on August 8. He then went sixteen more days without saying the word.
Greenland is a durable Trump acquisition theme with a live August drilling story and an always-on Truth Social channel, but 24 dry days plus a thin, narrow-format calendar (tele-rally, NASA remarks) make a 7-day hit an underdog.
— Claude Opus
The two lowest seats, GPT and Gemini at 16%, both landed on the same point: the remaining events are not naturally Greenland-focused. The highest seat, Kimi at 26%, is still six points under the market's own bid.
Then there is Epstein at the other end of the board, where the panel sits slightly above the money at 10% against 8¢, and where the number itself is the story.
Kalshi's settlement record says Donald Trump has not said the word "Epstein" in any of the five weekly boards that listed it, nor in July's monthly board, nor in the twenty-four days of August's. That is not our inference. Five weekly contracts and one monthly contract have closed on that word, and every one of them settled No.
One full monthly window, five weekly windows, and now twenty-four days of the current month: Kalshi has settled the word "Epstein" No on every window it has closed.
It has not been a quiet stretch for the subject. CNN reported on August 6 that the President has urged the country to move on from Epstein while congressional frustrations boil over. On August 13, ABC News reported that U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan pressed Justice Department lawyers to explain why some Epstein materials were withheld and why the redactions were not justified. The Department argued that the handwritten notes at issue are "substantially similar to" FBI reports it had already released and that releasing them risks exposing victim information, and that "all the redactions were lawful." Sullivan had concluded in June that the redactions and withheld materials violated the Epstein Files Transparency Act, writing that "the Attorney General has conceded that he is in violation of the Act." Forbes framed the August hearing as the test of whether more files get released. Eleven days on from that hearing, the contract is still open.
That is what an 8¢ price is describing. Not an absence of news and not an absence of questions, but a president who has been asked about a running legal story all month and has not used the word once in a way that reached settlement. Several seats revised downward for exactly that reason: they had been treating the hearing as a catalyst, and the settled record showed it was not one.
Where The Panel Changed Its Mind
The second round is where this gets useful, because a model that changes its number and says why is showing its work.
Claude Sonnet made the two biggest moves on the board, both downward, and both for the same underlying reason.
Moved down from 0.58: I overweighted a generic 'he says this constantly' prior without a dated news hook in the card to back it this week, and underweighted that the two scheduled events are narrow-topic, not rally/open-Q&A settings where stump vocabulary like Antifa naturally surfaces. ...
— Claude Sonnet, on Antifa, 58% to 30%
Moved down from 0.22 to 0.13: peers pointed out the hearing that I cited as ongoing risk already occurred within the settled 0-for-5 weekly window, meaning the catalyst I was leaning on for elevated risk failed to produce the word even when live — that's new-to-me framing, not just conformity to the pack.
— Claude Sonnet, on Epstein, 22% to 13%
Kimi walked its Greenland number down for the same class of reason, from 35% to 26%, writing that the drilling story "was live in early-to-mid August and he still didn't say the word, which is real evidence the hook isn't forcing his hand." GLM went from 32% to 24% after deciding the news hook is "company-level, not Trump-level."
Not everyone moved. Claude Fable held Greenland flat at 22% and put the panel's whole logic in one sentence.
Held. The strongest opposing case ... leans on the Greenland Energy drilling story, but that story broke 8/8 and he still did not say the word in the 16 days since — the news hook has already been tested against his silence and failed, which is why I discount it rather than add to it. ...
— Claude Fable
Dark Horses The Panel Won't Dismiss
Four contracts sit at or under 27¢ where at least one seat sees more than the money does.
Antifa, 7¢, panel 14%. The widest disagreement inside the panel itself, running from DeepSeek at 5% to Sonnet at 30%. The bull case is that this is event-triggered vocabulary attached to protests and deployments, so it needs a trigger rather than a topic, and triggers arrive without warning. The bear case is twenty-four days of silence in a month where nineteen other words landed. Both are true, which is why the seats spread so far.
Knicks, 2¢, panel 6%. Every seat priced it above the market, and every seat gave the same reason: the NBA is in deep offseason with no New York sports hook, but the word costs nothing to say and he is in a two-hundred-post week. Nobody went above 7%. The panel is not calling this likely, only cheaper than two cents.
Gulf of America, 27¢, panel 28%. The one contract where the market and the panel essentially agree, and the closest thing on the board to an honest toss-up argument. It settled Yes on July's monthly board and landed at two of the four Trump events where Kalshi listed it, which reads bullish. DeepSeek held at 38% and Gemini sat at 18%, and Claude Opus supplied the reconciling detail: at least two of those four hits came from the period when the renaming was fresh news, and the twenty-four-day August silence is the more recent evidence.
Make Iran Great Again, 4¢, panel 5%. The most-traded of the twelve contracts still open, by Kalshi's volume count, and it has settled No on both monthly boards Kalshi has ever listed it on. The phrase is unquestionably in his orbit: Al Jazeera reported in January that he was photographed with a signed "Make Iran Great Again" hat alongside Senator Lindsey Graham. The question was never whether the phrase exists. The question is how often, and the answer so far is not in any month Kalshi has priced.
What Would Change The Panel's Mind
Four things, each checkable, each with the direction it pushes.
- An open-format rally or long unscripted remarks getting added to the schedule. The single biggest lever on the board. Kalshi's settled boards show open events landing 66% to 82% of their listed words against 10% to 33% for tele-rallies. One added rally lifts nearly every number here, with the stump-adjacent phrases (Newscum, Third Term, Gulf of America) moving most.
- A Greenland development that puts him personally in the story. The drilling story so far is about a company, and the panel priced it as company-level news. A permit ruling, a Danish government statement aimed at him, or an American policy move would convert it into the kind of story he answers in his own voice, and Greenland would deserve the market's number rather than the panel's.
- A court order releasing more Epstein material. The August 13 hearing did not produce the word. A ruling that forces disclosure is a different class of event and would push the 10% figure up quickly, though the settled record says his consistent response has been to avoid the name.
- A protest or deployment story with a named group. This is the Antifa trigger, and it is why the panel's 14% sits at double the market's 7¢ instead of near zero. No such story is on the calendar, which is exactly why the contract is cheap.
Settlement timeline
| What | When |
|---|---|
| Tele-rally | Monday, August 24, 2026 |
| Remarks at NASA Johnson Space Center | Friday, August 28, 2026 |
| Saying window closes | Tuesday, September 1, 2026, 12:00 a.m. ET |
| Contracts stop trading and settle | Tuesday, September 1, 2026, 10:00 a.m. ET |
This page re-scores when the story moves. Prices and panel numbers are as of August 24, 2026, 6:34 p.m. ET.
The Bottom Line
The monthly board has already told you most of what it knows. Nineteen words came out of his mouth in twenty-four days, a higher share than June's board (six of fifteen) and a lower one than July's (twenty-six of thirty-three). What is left is a dozen contracts on words he has demonstrably avoided for most of a month, priced against a week containing one tele-rally, one medal ceremony at NASA, and something like two hundred social media posts.
Our eight models sit below the market on seven of the twelve and above it on five, and the disagreements cluster in a way that makes sense. They discount headline-driven words whose headlines have already failed to produce them, and they hold a small floor under the cheap ones because the posting channel never closes. The biggest gap on the board, Greenland at 52¢ against 21%, rests on a single hour of Monday afternoon trading that nothing in this run's reporting can account for.
All twelve numbers settle by 10 a.m. ET on September 1, and all twelve get graded in public when they do.
