Trump flashes Gold Card for rich foreign investors, says it will be ready in two weeks

TOI Correspondent from Washington: US President Donald Trump on Thursday flashed a personalized prototype $5 million "Gold Card" aimed at luring wealthy immigrants from across the globe to the US, saying it will "probably" be ready in two weeks.

"For $5 million this could be yours...Pretty exciting, right" Trump told reporters with a grin when he popped across to the back of his presidential plane as he flew to Florida to play golf after nuking global trade with his tariff gambit. The card conspicuously featured his face and his ECG-like signature.

It was not clear if the President was just pulling off a caper or was serious about the design and the two-week deadline, considering the program has to be approved by Congress, but stranger things have happened in the Trump White House.

The MAGA supremo has thrown out fantastic numbers about the demand for the card and the revenue that will accrue to US, saying “If we sell a million, that’s $5 trillion dollars.” He then ramped up the fantasy, saying, “If we can find 10 million people willing to pay $5 million each,” the US could make $50 trillion—enough, he claimed, to “pay off the entire US national debt.”

“They’ll 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," he said when he first announced the proposed Gold Card from the Oval Office last month. He also suggested US companies could use the program to retain elite foreign graduates.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick later said the gold card would replace the EB-5, an investor visa program created by Congress in 1990 to attract foreign entrepreneurs who spend around $1 million creating a business in the US. The EB-5 program attracts less than 10,000 investors annually, but Lutnick claimed in an interview on Fox Business that 1,000 gold cards had been sold in a single day, generating $5 billion, even before the card was ready.

While some of Trump's MAGA supporters have bought into the idea of raking in billions and trillions, more nativist supporters have questioned if it is wise to sell US residency leading to citizenship. Late night comics have made withering jokes about it including this from Desi Lydic on the Daily Show: "It beats the old way of becoming a citizen...marry Donald Trump." And from Jimmy Kimmel: "What a good idea. I’ve always said our immigration system should run more like the customer rewards program at a casino in Atlantic City...this is basically what he does at Mar-a-Lago. He’s selling memberships to a country club, but this club is actually our country."