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Nearly 70,000 people have signed up for the new golden Trump Card, a visa scheme led by commerce secretary Howard Lutnick that will grant foreigners legal residency in the US at a cost of $5mn.
Last week, Lutnick’s department launched a website — trumpcard.gov — for would-be applicants to register their interest in the visa and to provide basic contact information, including their name, email address and region of the world. The card shown on the website features President Donald Trump’s face and signature, as well as an eagle, the Statue of Liberty and the American flag.
On Monday morning, Lutnick said his department’s internal online dashboard showed 67,697 people on the waiting list. Within an hour, the number had jumped to 68,703.
“The card will be made of gold,” the US commerce secretary told the Financial Times. “It will be beautiful.”
“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.”
Lutnick has said the initial idea for the visa came from billionaire Trump donor John Paulson as a way to raise revenue for the US and help it pay down its $36tn debt.
The commerce secretary said the Trump Card will appeal to business leaders and companies seeking legal residency in the US for themselves or their employees.
The chief executive of a global technology company who asked not to be named said through a spokesperson that his group would seek to buy more than 100 Trump cards if the scheme comes to “fruition”, adding he viewed the initiative as a way “to welcome the world’s best and brightest to the United States — particularly entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists”.
In 1990, Congress created a route to permanent residency for foreign investors through the EB-5 visa programme, which has a minimum investment of up to $1.8mn. About 14,000 such visas were granted last year, according to Invest In the USA, an EB-5 trade association.
Lutnick is pressing for the new scheme to replace the EB-5 visa, and is planning to expedite the creation of a much larger programme within months.
The commerce department plans to issue tens of thousands of Trump cards over the summer, said people familiar with the matter. Lutnick has said issuing 200,000 visas would reap $1tn for the Treasury.
Lutnick in May travelled with the president to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and concluded his conversations with foreign dignitaries with a pitch for the Trump Card.
“Whenever I meet with international executives, I always go through it with them and sell it to them,” he said. “I can’t help myself.”
The White House still needs to determine crucial details about the scheme, although three months ago Lutnick claimed on the All-In Podcast that it would launch in about a fortnight.
The design of a special tax structure for Trump Card holders has yet to be finalised, and while the vetting of applicants is expected to be done by the departments of homeland security, state and commerce, Trump has not decided whether citizens of any particular countries would be excluded from applying. The White House has banned travel to the US from a dozen nations and is reportedly considering others.
Italian billionaire and stablecoin Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino in April told the FT that the success of such visas depended on the tax treatment they afforded.
Ardoino, who has partnered with Lutnick’s former firm Cantor Fitzgerald in a crypto venture, said “the problem” with Americans is “wherever they go, they have to pay taxes in the US”.
“I didn’t research into it, but I live in Switzerland, in El Salvador,” he added. “Why should I [buy it]?”
Additional reporting by Philip Stafford contributed to this report
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