Gilded

President Trump took his most extensive step yet toward overhauling the U.S. legal migration system, with a pair of proclamations that explicitly favor the wealthiest of the world’s prospective expat workers.

Trump on Friday imposed a $100,000 application fee on the widely used H-1B visa program, a move that would drastically increase the cost of visas heavily coveted by some of America’s largest companies — including in the Silicon Valley — seeking to bring in skilled workers from abroad.

The president also unveiled a “Trump Gold Card” visa program — under which, for the price of $1 million, immigrants could get U.S. residency. Businesses could buy residency permits for $2 million per employee, while a new “platinum”-level card set to be issued soon would cost $5 million and allow the holder to come to the U.S. for up to 270 days a year without being subject to U.S. taxes on non-U.S. income.

The restrictions and fees go into effect on Sunday.

It all amounts to a plan for a new gilded age of immigration to America, where those with the resources to invest are welcomed along with their wallets — while at the same time new barriers to entry are erected for those with lesser means and others seen as taking away jobs that could be occupied by U.S. citizens.

The pomp with which Trump announced the programs echoed the theme — over his right shoulder as he spoke to reporters in the Oval Office was an image of a gold card with his face on it along with traditional American images including a bald eagle, all in gold.

It’s a stark shift from America’s stance toward immigration historically, which welcomed those of various economic backgrounds coming to the country legally in search of a better life and more freedom.

‘Significant disadvantage’

Yet even while Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick mused about the prospects of a windfall for the U.S. Treasury that could total $100 billion or more, immigration attorneys cautioned that a move of this magnitude would cause major disruptions — several of them potentially very expensive to the U.S. economy.

Cleveland-based lawyer David Leopold warned that Trump’s H-1B changes, including the $100,000 fee, would “effectively kill the program.”

“Who’s going to pay $100,000 for a petition? Unless you want to make this an exclusive program for extremely rich people,” said Leopold, a partner at UB Greensfelder, whose clients include physicians on H-1Bs.

Accenture, Cognizant Technology and other IT consulting stocks hit session lows on Friday on the news of the visa fee.

“This is a senseless, terrible policy for financial services firms that makes American firms less competitive in the global market for talent,” said Alexis DuFresne, founder of recruiting firm Archer Search Partners.

DuFresne warned that while some mega funds won’t be daunted by the prospect of a new six-figure fee to import top talent, “it will have a substantial impact at the margins — with mid-sized firms, smaller firms, and up-and-coming, younger talent at a significant disadvantage.”

“We have had clients who have said in the past, prior to this announcement, that they do not want to have to sponsor a visa. We anticipate that that will become a more prevalent part of our conversations with clients and their goalposts going forward.”

A feature, not a bug

Some of that sentiment, if it comes to pass, may be seen by this administration as an asset rather than a problem.

Senior members of Trump’s administration have repeatedly complained — in blunt terms — that too many immigrants are taking American jobs.

In a fact sheet, the White House said American workers are being replaced with lower-paid foreign labor and called it a national security threat. The dynamic is suppressing wages and disincentivizing Americans from choosing careers in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), the White House said.

Trump’s proclamation does anticipate a scenario whereby it can work around the new costs if they became a major burden, allowing for case-by-case exemptions if deemed to be in the national interest. That provision opens a potential window for certain companies or industries to seek an exception to the new fee.

Nonetheless, the intention to skew the H-1B program toward higher-paying jobs is clear.

Trump also plans to order the Labor secretary to undertake a rule-making process to revise prevailing-wage levels for the program, a move intended to limit the use of visas to undercut wages that would otherwise be paid to workers who are U.S. citizens.

Legal risks

Courts may also scrutinize the expansive new fees.

The H-1B $100,000 application fee in particular is at risk of being struck down as “excessive,” said Becky Fu von Trapp, an immigration lawyer in Stowe, Vt. That’s because federal law allows agencies to charge enough to recoup reasonable costs, and most work visa applications currently cost about $5,000. Even the most complex ones, for certain investment visas, usually run less than $10,000 in total.

The move could also incentivize technology firms and other companies reliant on foreign workers to set up offices outside the U.S. to avoid the application fee and associated hassles.

“Companies will reassess the need of who they really need to bring to U.S. and who can be based in Canada or Singapore, where they still have good technology infrastructure and can work remotely,” she said.

The move may also have a chilling effect on international students seeking admission to U.S. universities, since many of them hope to find jobs through the H-1B process upon graduation, she said.

Congress will also weigh in, Lutnick said, noting that lawmakers must also approve the planned platinum card program. He predicted that could happen later this year.

That’s easier said than done.

Republicans only narrowly control the House and the Senate. Immigration has been a particularly challenging issue to legislate for the GOP in years past, sparking clashes between the pro-business wing of the party that wants more high-skilled immigrants to come in, and another group far more skeptical of immigration as a whole who’ve sought to limit new arrivals no matter where they come from.

What’s more, Democrats are broadly furious about the president’s stepped-up immigration enforcement including aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in major U.S. cities including Los Angeles. As such, they have little incentive to cooperate without demanding wholesale reversals of Trump’s existing immigration policies, which he almost surely wouldn’t accept.

Wingrove and Soper write for Bloomberg. Bloomberg reporters Katia Porzecanski and Hema Parmar contributed to this report.

The juxtaposition at the weekend was apt: one big, ugly bill in Washington and one big, garish wedding in Venice.

This is what days of Senate debate over President Trump and Republicans’ nearly 1,000-page legislation had in common with the days of revelry at the $50-million nuptials of the world’s-third-richest-man, Jeff Bezos, and ever-couture-corseted Lauren Sánchez: an exhibit of excess for a new Gilded Age, encapsulating the gulf between the have-nots and the have-yachts. (Venice’s “yacht ports” were reportedly all booked for the wedding, though not by Bezos’ own 417-foot-long “Koru.”)

The president was invited, natch, but he was a no-show. Consider his legislation his gift to the happy couple. Sánchez and Bezos have much to love in Trump’s absurdly titled “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” making its way through the Republican-run Congress. But Bezos’ Amazon employees and many of his cut-rate-shopping customers? Not so much.

This may be the most inequitable and overtly reverse-Robin Hood budget behemoth ever. It would make permanent and expand upon the deep Trump tax cuts of 2017 that disproportionately benefited the rich. The multitrillion-dollar cost would be offset by about $1 trillion in healthcare cuts, mostly to the Medicaid program that serves more than 70 million people. Other cuts would end clean-energy projects (costing jobs and ceding the alternative-energy future to China) and slash nutrition programs for the needy. Meanwhile, spending would increase roughly 15-fold for immigration enforcement, paying for purposely cruel detention centers such as Trump’s new “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Bottom line: about $3.5 trillion in additional debt over just the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

This monstrosity would exacerbate what is already record income inequality in the United States. It would reverse the past decade’s decline, under Obamacare, in the number of Americans without health insurance, causing about 17 million people to lose coverage, according to the health-policy nonprofit KFF. More rural hospitals, reliant on Medicaid, would close. Forget the “minutiae of Medicaid policy,” tweeted Vice President JD Vance, supposed elegist of hillbillies and other downtrodden Americans — it’s the extra immigration crackdown cash that counts.

Healthcare threats loom even as two research papers recently reported that Obamacare and its Medicaid expansion have saved the lives of many low-income adults. One study last month found that the proposed cuts could increase preventable deaths by nearly 17,000 annually. The other, in May, concluded that as much as 20% of the well-documented disparity in the lifespans of low- and high-income Americans, with the latter living longer, is attributable to the lack of health insurance among those with lower incomes.

In other words, the supposed One Big Beautiful Bill Act would be a killer.

That, of course, would be the worst of it. But other descriptors are so damning that only Trump’s death grip on fellow Republicans can explain why they’d vote for this politically suicidal package. With polls this bad, the 2026 midterm elections can’t come soon enough to eject Republicans’ rubberstamping majority in Congress and check Trump’s madness.

“The largest upward transfer of wealth in American history,” said the Atlantic of the bill’s particulars. “The biggest cut to programs for low-income Americans ever,” according to budget guru Bobby Kogan at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “The most expensive piece of legislation probably since the 1960s,” said analyst Jessica Riedl of the conservative Manhattan Institute, “… piling trillions of new borrowing on top of deficits that are already leaping.”

That pile-up couldn’t happen at a worse time.

For decades, budget experts have warned of a coming fiscal tsunami by the 2020s that would swamp the economy as retiring boomers drew from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while federal revenues were drained by tax cuts. Yet Republican presidents and Congresses kept cutting taxes and, in league with Democrats, failed to make necessary and relatively painless adjustments to the so-called entitlement benefit programs.

And now here we are, knifing Medicaid not to make it and the overall budget more fiscally sound, but to offset the cost of more tax cuts favoring the wealthy, driving up debt.

Trump, plainly peeved at talk that he’ll break his first-term record of the most debt in a presidential term ($8.4 trillion), on Wednesday whined in a post, “Nobody wants to talk about GROWTH.”

Americans are on to this fiction that tax cuts pay for themselves. Presidents Reagan, George W. Bush and Trump 1.0 all slashed tax rates disproportionately for the rich and corporations, claiming that economic growth would help reduce deficits. They were wrong. For Trump to do it again and expect a different result, is, as the saying goes, the definition of insanity. The only recent Republican president who helped reduce deficits was George H.W. Bush because he raised taxes as part of a balanced, bipartisan package of spending cuts and tax increases — shared sacrifice, something Trump knows nothing about.

Just as the Senate was ending its vote to pass Trump’s bill on Tuesday, sending it back to the House, Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine, was heard shouting to Republican senators as he exited, “Shame on you guys.”

Doesn’t he know by now that Trump and his party minions have no shame?

In Venice, Bezos the billionaire groom came in for some razzing too. A huge banner carpeted the famed Piazza San Marco before his three-day bacchanalia: “If you can rent Venice for your wedding you can pay more tax.”

Bezos could, but he won’t. We’ve gone beyond trickle-down tax politics. It’s bottoms up for Bezos, other billionaires and all the mere millionaires. We’ll all suffer the hangover, however, and none more than the most needy among us.

@Jackiekcalmes @jackiecalmes.bsky.social @jkcalmes

She was once known as Violet Harmon in the first season of American Horror Story. Now, Taissa Farmiga has traded Violet’s whimsical streak for Gladys Russell’s socialite status.

George and Bertha Russell’s marriage is hanging by a fragile thread in the third season of The Gilded Age – but one of the show’s stars originally shot to fame with several appearances in American Horror Story.

Taissa Farmiga portrays socialite Gladys Russell in The Gilded Age, originally aired on HBO. In its third series, due on Sky, Gladys has to face the aftermath of her parents’ choice to promise her hand in marriage to the Duke of Buckingham. But will she go through with the nuptials?

This remains to be seen. But, back in 2011, shortly after debuting her acting career in High Ground, Taissa starred in the first season of American Horror Story as Violet Harmon, the daughter of Vivien (Connie Britton) and Ben Harmon (Dylan McDermott).

Violet’s story ended in tragedy as she committed suicide, joining her killer boyfriend Tate Langdon (Evan Peters) in the afterlife – but Taissa still reprised the role in the eighth season of American Horror Story. She even appeared in the anthology series as two different characters – Sophie Green and Zoe Benson.

READ MORE: Disney+ drops to £1.99 in rare deal Netflix and Amazon can’t beat

Now starring in The Gilded Age, Taissa admitted that she had to delve deep into the Downton Abbey universe to nail Gladys’ role. “I started watching Downton Abbey because I thought ‘I have to brush up,'” she told producer Joshua Horowitz in 2023 on his podcast Happy Sad Confused.

But when she first auditioned for Gladys, Taissa was honest – she wasn’t a fan of period dramas. “During my audition, they asked me if I was passionate about period pieces,” she remembered, joking later: “I told them, ‘I don’t know. I’m a stoner, I watch Rick and Morty.'”

Growing up, Taissa was the youngest in a family of six children and watched her older sister Vera Farmiga rise to fame through her roles in The Conjuring franchise, Orphan and even Bates Motel. But she had no intentions of following in her footsteps.

Instead, Taissa dreamed of being an accountant – until Vera convinced her to appear in her directorial debut drama, Higher Ground. “I was thrown into this world,” Taissa once told Yahoo Movies in 2015.

The experience was enough for her to change trajectory completely. “After Higher Ground about six months went by and I went back to my normal life,” Taissa said.

“I was looking at community college classes for accounting. I wasn’t jumping right into it, thinking, ‘I have to be an actress.'” And the rest was history.

Since then, Taissa has bagged a multitude of roles in feature films and series alike. She was notably seen in The Bling Ring with Emma Watson, The Nun franchise as Sister Irene Palmer and even in The Twilight Zone.

Taissa is also very active on social media, particularly on Instagram, where she’s followed diligently by 1.9 million admirers. The 30-year-old shares everything – from snaps on set and on the red carpet, to her trips with producer husband Hadley Klein.

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