When President Donald Trump first broached the idea in February, it sounded like a characteristically bold and worthwhile innovation.
Of course, establishment politicians with sclerotic minds cannot fathom such things, so they criticized it.
Unsurprisingly, based on early returns, the president’s idea has proven so successful that it has already raised enough money to wipe out nearly 1 percent of the U.S. national debt.
According to the Financial Times, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick reported on Monday that nearly 70,000 people had already applied for the Trump Card, a golden ticket to legal U.S. residency and citizenship designed to appeal to the world’s affluent.
At a cost of $5 million per card, that results in a total of $350 billion in revenue.
According to the National Debt Clock, the national debt will soon reach $37 trillion. Thus, the Trump Card has already raised a sum equal to nearly 1 percent of the debt.
In true Trump-ian fashion, the gilded card will appeal to the eyes, as well as the Treasury.
“The card will be made of gold,” Lutnick told the Times. “It will be beautiful.”
Do you support Trump’s Gold Card program?
“Donald Trump appreciates these kinds of things. He cares about how it looks. He cares about how it feels. I mean, he deeply cares about that, and thinks if you’re going to buy and make this investment in America, we should give you something that is beautiful,” the commerce secretary added.
Working-class Americans, of course, care less about the card’s appearance than about the tax relief that comes with reducing debt.
Moreover, inviting the world’s wealthiest and most productive people to invest in U.S. residency and citizenship — for themselves and/or for their employees — should create a number of well-paying jobs.
Lutnick envisions the Trump Card as a replacement for the cheaper and much less robust EB-5 visa program, which Congress created in 1990 and which only 14,000 foreign investors received in 2024.
When he announced the program in February, Trump had both revenue and job creation in mind.
“We’re going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million, and that’s going to give you green card privileges, plus it’s going to be a route to citizenship,” the president said at the time.
He added that applicants will be “wealthy, and they’ll be successful, and they’ll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people, and we think it’s going to be extremely successful.”
Meanwhile, critics scoffed.
For instance, former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, an establishment Republican, called the plan a “bad idea.”
“Look, I get it if you’re getting a comfortable seat on an airline. But we’re talking about U.S. citizenship, the most desired thing on the planet. And just letting the rich kind of cut the line. No, don’t buy it, don’t like it,” Sununu said in March on the NewsNation program “Elizabeth Vargas Reports.”
On the surface, of course, Sununu’s objection sounded populist. But it wasn’t.
Indeed, let us consider the gargantuan differences between the establishment plan and the Trump plan.
As we saw for four years under former President Joe Biden, the establishment plan for immigration involved flooding the U.S. southern border with traffickers, thousands of criminals, and millions of impoverished people, allowing those people into the country and forcing American workers to compete with them, thereby depressing wages and appealing to establishment politicians’ donors.
The Trump plan, on the other hand, has attracted job creators whose wealth will help pay down the debt.
In short, America still wants your tired, poor, huddled masses, too. But it does not want millions of them all at once, for that harms the tired and poor masses who already live here.
Trump’s plan attracts resources that will give America’s tired and poor masses a chance. Once we have taken care of ourselves, we can talk about the rest of the world.
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