The New Yorker: Gilded

JUST IN: President Trump announces a new immigration “Gold Card” that will be sold to immigrants for $5 million.

The Gold Card is a premium version of a Green Card, according to Trump, and will provide immigrants with a pathway to citizenship.

“We’re gonna be selling a gold… pic.twitter.com/U3Bx3Nogfd

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 25, 2025

The Gold Card is arguably the most “gilded” thing Trump has done yet.

Politico:

“President Donald Trump says he’s open to attracting one kind of immigrant — people with money.

Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters Tuesday that the administration plans to offer a “gold card” that would confer legal residency to foreigners at a cost of about $5 million. They said it would replace an existing U.S. visa program for overseas investors that’s long been mired in controversy. …”

The New Yorker:

“When, in the nineteen-nineties, people decided that we were living in a new Gilded Age, the meaning was plain. The term, borrowed from the 1873 Mark Twain novel of the same name—a mediocre book by a great writer with a memorable title, like Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”—indicated an efflorescence of wealth and display, of overabundance and nouveau-riche excess. It referred mostly to the Veblenian side of American life: status competition through showy objects, from the cloud-level duplexes of the New York skyline to the Met Gala. Perhaps not enough attention was paid to the original concept, which implied a contrast between the truly golden and the merely gilded.

What we didn’t anticipate was that our new Gilded Age would become even more like its precursor—not only in the seeming concentration of overwhelming wealth into fewer and fewer hands but in the gravitation toward a plutocracy. In the industrial age, the totemic figures were Frick and Morgan and Rockefeller; in our post-industrial era, they are Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg. During that first Gilded Age—if we imagine it running from the eighteen-seventies to 1910—a counter cast of characters had a glamorous appeal of their own. These were the anarchists, whose isolated but highly publicized acts of individual retaliation were intended as inspirational melodramatic theatre rather than as actual revolutionary politics. In these years, anarchists claimed the lives of a French President, an American President, an Italian king, and a Russian tsar, and threw bombs at several American tycoons. Whether or not Luigi Mangione’s recent alleged murder of a helpless insurance executive on a cold New York morning belongs to this tradition, its affect and effect certainly evoke the past, with the curly-haired Ivy-educated youth conferring, in the realm of social media, an improbable aura of martyrdom and purpose on what otherwise would have seemed a sordid act. …

This despite the reality that what the Gilded Age anarchists mostly did was kill people, or try to, and mostly pointlessly. The Haymarket anarchists in Chicago in the eighteen-nineties may not all have been directly responsible for the bombs that killed seven policemen on a fateful day, but at least one of them had certainly built the bombs. Leon Czolgosz, who shot President William McKinley, in Buffalo, was inspired in part by Emma Goldman, who later wrote in his defense. And Goldman herself—under the crucial influence of the anarchist philosopher Johann Most, who impressed on her the anarchist ideal of “propaganda of the deed”—worked hard on a plan to kill Frick, sending her lover, Alexander Berkman, off to Pittsburgh with a revolver that he didn’t know how to use. Neither Goldman nor Berkman knew anyone in the labor unions that were striking against Frick, nor ever asked them if his assassination would be helpful to their cause. (It wasn’t; it only helped turn popular opinion against the unions.) But few remember the organizers who in the same period helped build the American union movement, while Emma Goldman’s name still rings. …”