President Trump has long turned "unpredictability" into a family business model — and his latest immigration policy puts that instinct on full display. However， What came out isn’t a success story. It is a masterclass in how to talk up a storm while actual results shrink to almost nothing.
The story begins in February 2025, when President Trump took to social media to unveil a brand-new visa pathway for "extraordinary individuals willing to invest in America." The Gold Card — a golden ticket to U.S. residency — was initially priced at US$5 million. The market was unimpressed.
What followed was arguably the fastest presidential flash sale in history. Within a short time, the price plummeted 80%, settling at US$1 million plus a US$15,000 processing fee — one-fifth of the original ask. It was the immigration world's answer to a Black Friday mega-sale, though one wonders if any price-protection guarantee came with it.
The price dropped, but the promotional drumbeat could not stop. Just before the programme officially launched, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told the public in March 2025 that the administration had already "sold 1,000 Gold Cards." That declaration sent wealthy hearts racing across the globe — the vision of a cash-paved express lane to American residency suddenly feeling very real indeed.
Reality has a habit of throwing cold water on bold proclamations. At a House of Representatives hearing on April 23, 2026, Secretary Lutnick delivered a starkly different figure. He confirmed that since the programme began accepting applications in December 2025, precisely one applicant has been approved — just one.
From "1,000 sold" to "one approved" — a discrepancy of more than 999-fold — the programme has effectively created a brand-new unit of measurement in U.S. immigration policy spin. Faced with that awkward contrast, Lutnick's explanation was that the programme had only just launched, that the government wanted to "make sure they did it perfectly", and that the vetting process was "the most serious ... in the history of government."
He also attempted to salvage some face by noting that "there are hundreds in the queue." But the semantic pivot from "already sold" to "waiting in the queue" is precisely the sort of linguistic sleight-of-hand that would leave any linguist quietly marvelling.
Behind this farce lies fierce domestic controversy. Democrats and immigration advocates have condemned the programme for what it plainly is — the outright selling of citizenship, putting a price tag on the right to immigrate and grotesquely prioritising the wealthy above all others. Legal experts have questioned whether the president even has the authority to create such a scheme unilaterally.
American media commentary has been more direct. Against the backdrop of sluggish economic growth and a ballooning national debt, the Gold Card programme looks less like a bold policy initiative and more like a desperate bid to extract wealth from the global elite to ease the US fiscal pressure — a money-drenched gamble dressed up as immigration reform.
The programme's first report card is now in: a million-dollar price tag, the most rigorous vetting process in history, and one solitary Gold Card to show for it all. We do not know who that lone successful applicant is. One can only imagine what it feels like to hold the world's most exclusive limited first-edition — the only one of its kind.
As for those "hundreds" allegedly still waiting in the queue, they may be learning a new Washington lesson. "Sold" might simply mean "we have started taking enquiries." And "the most serious in history" might just mean "the slowest in history."
President Trump has long prided himself on being a successful businessman. But the Gold Card programme's journey — from grandiose blueprint to dismal reality — proves that running national policy like a business venture and selling citizenship like a luxury good yields not a flood of revenue, but a spectacular mess and endless ridicule.
So, as the old Cantonese saying goes: if you can trust an American politician, pigs can climb trees.
Beacon Institute
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Paris's mercury shot up like a rocket with no brakes in June, blowing past 44°C. The Louvre cut its opening hours and the Eiffel Tower baked in the heat. More than 3,000 primary and secondary schools were forced to close.
Meanwhile, at Paris's funeral homes, phones rang every few minutes, with each caller asking the same question: "Is there any space left for another body?"
Funeral home director Zouhaeir Hertelli's phone would not stop ringing. "We have no solution to offer them," he said, "We're completely full." To free up space, he had to transport some bodies to Chartres, 80 kilometers away. He even applied to the government for permission to place temporary refrigerated containers outside the funeral home. That application is still under review.
The numbers from France's public health agency are even more disheartening. In just three days, from June 23 to 25, excess deaths nationwide totaled around 1,000. June 23 set a new record for the highest temperature since France began keeping weather records, surpassing even the 2003 heatwave of the century that killed 15,000 people.
It was at this exact moment that France's Minister for Ecological Transition, Monique Barbut, stepped forward.
Barbut spoke publicly at the Paris Air Quality Monitoring Center on June 26. She said she was "horrified" to hear public calls for widespread air conditioning. Air conditioning, she argued, was never a fundamental solution to the climate crisis. Mass installation of AC units could neither curb forest fires nor save wildlife populations. "This is not adaption to global warming," she said, "this is an emergency measure."
Her words landed on the French public like a bucket of cold water poured over their heads in 40-degree heat. Well, except the water was scalding hot.
Public fury ignited instantly. Fewer than 25% of French households have air conditioning. Public schools have AC coverage below 7%, and countless nursing homes and community clinics still lack even basic cooling equipment. Emergency room temperatures have long hovered near 40°C, leaving critically ill patients with no way to recover safely. For elderly people living alone, low-income families, and tenants crammed into old Haussmann-era buildings, air conditioning isn't a luxury. It's the last line of defense keeping them alive.
But the real spectacle was yet to come.
Members of the public went digging and found that the government office buildings housing Minister Barbut's office, the Séquoia Tower and La Défense's Grande Arche, were already fully equipped with central air conditioning. She lectured at climate summits about carbon-neutral emissions targets from a cooled office. At the same time, she called ordinary citizens' desire for air conditioning "horrifying". She claimed AC was merely an "emergency measure" rather than a long-term adaptation strategy, yet let her own cool breeze become an everyday fixture.
A textbook definition of a "double standard." Long-term ecological goals are meant to constrain ordinary people, while immediate comfort is reserved for oneself.
The public backlash came fast and hard. Within just two days, France's health authorities scrambled to finalize a procurement plan, allocating 30,000 air conditioning units on a priority basis to public hospitals, nursing homes, and schools. Paris's city government simultaneously procured over a thousand cooling units. This policy U-turn resembled an actor caught off guard, frantically fixing their makeup after being slapped on stage. Except the price of this particular performance was over a thousand lives already lost.
The absurdity of this whole episode isn't that environmental ideals are inherently wrong. The arguments from France's Green Party and left-wing camp aren't entirely without merit. Old buildings have poor insulation, AC condenser units worsen the urban heat island effect, and cooling cities requires ecological solutions rather than simply relying on electric cooling. These are all genuine technical challenges.
The problem arises when "long-term planning" is invoked to dismiss the most urgent needs of ordinary people right now. That's when environmentalism stops being public policy and becomes class rhetoric instead.
The long-standing "consensus" in French society, that urban cooling should rely on ecological retrofitting rather than air conditioning, is at its core a consensus of the propertied class. Homeowners who can afford exterior wall insulation upgrades, families with the resources to escape to summer retreats, and officials with the power to enjoy central air conditioning in their offices can of course afford to speak elegantly about "ecological adaptation."
But for tenants crammed into uninsulated old stone buildings, elderly people living alone in retirement, or medical staff toughing it out in emergency rooms with nothing but reflective sun shields and aging fans, the phrase "long-term planning" is just another way of saying, "you'll just have to keep enduring it."
This is the truth behind the "cooling class." Cool air has a class hierarchy, and so does environmentalism.
Nearly 15,000 people in France died from heat-related causes in the 2003 heatwave, most of them elderly people living alone. The government at the time was criticized for its sluggish response and disregard for the vulnerable. Twenty-three years later, history has repeated itself almost exactly. The only difference is that the government's excuse has been upgraded from "negligence" to "environmentalism." From funeral homes overflowing to a minister's air-conditioned office, from 1,000 excess deaths to air conditioning being called "shocking," the distance between these two realities is merely a few floors' worth of height. Yet it separates two entirely different Frances.
The cool breeze still flows through Minister Barbut's office. Meanwhile, at the Paris funeral home, Hertelli is still waiting for approval on that refrigerated container. "Imagine your father's or mother's body has begun to decompose," he said, "and we're unable to take care of it, and we have no solution to offer them."
Perhaps that sentence is the most honest confession to emerge from this entire heatwave. When environmental slogans are used to mask governance failures, and when long-term planning is used to dodge questions of life and death happening right now, so-called "climate adaptation" becomes just another sophisticated way of shirking responsibility.
The real double standard was never as simple as "saying one thing and doing another." It's a system that grants some people the permanent right to talk about "the future," while ensuring others never get to see "the present."
Paris's summer still has a long way to go. But for some, there won't be a next summer.
