A group of CNN panelists couldn’t contain their laughter over the Trump administration’s desperate struggle to get the president’s controversial $1 million visa program off the ground.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed Thursday that only one person has so far successfully applied for Donald Trump’s much-feted “gold card” visa.
The program grants high-net-worth foreigners the right to live and work in the United States, even as the president crusades to deport as many migrants from the country as possible.
The single million-dollar amount anyone has paid for the scheme so far falls fairly short of the $1.3 billion Lutnick claimed the government had already raked in just days after its launch in December.
“Obviously, he sold one gold card for $1.3 billion,” lawyer and political analyst Van Jones joked on CNN’s ”Erin Burnett OutFront."
Host Erin Burnett quickly hopped on the bandwagon, suggesting “the buyer was Vladimir Putin” and putting her little finger to her mouth as if to compare Trump to Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movie franchise.
Political commentator S.E. Cupp saw the humor in it but warned that underpinning the fiasco is in fact a graver set of concerns.
“Underneath the silliness of this, it made me think about our standing in the world,” she said. “Do people still want to come here? Are we as valuable as we think we are or as we once were?”
“You can’t wave this magic ticket into the greatest country in the world and get a lot of takers anymore,” she added. “So it actually made me a little sad.”
“Golden Visas,” otherwise known as resident-by-investment schemes, aren’t uncommon among other nations around the world.
They typically grant permission to live and work somewhere in exchange for bringing significant money into the local economy.
They’re also mired in controversy. Programs have been shown to disadvantage domestic communities in areas like housing, while a general lack of transparency and oversight makes them a magnet for corrupt officials and organized criminals to launder money and evade tax in their home countries.
