President Donald Trump on Friday reiterated his claim that critical television coverage of him is “illegal” and pushed back on criticisms that his administration was taking actions that chill free speech.
“When 97 percent of the stories are bad about a person, it’s no longer free speech,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, complaining about an apparent asymmetry between his victory in the 2024 election and his treatment by media organizations. It was not immediately clear what statistics or laws he was referencing.
Trump’s comments came days after Disney indefinitely suspended the late night host Jimmy Kimmel after Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr suggested on a podcast that his agency may take regulatory action against ABC, which Disney owns. Kimmel drew ire over comments he made about Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist and White House ally who was shot and killed last week.
After Kimmel was suspended, Carr said “I don’t think this is the last shoe to drop” and suggested the FCC — an agency, overseen by Congress, designed to act independently from the president — may target other shows, including ABC’s “The View.”
The Kimmel saga caused Democrats and some free speech hawks to protest. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded Carr’s resignation.
One notable Republican also weighed in: Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who on a podcast released Friday called Carr’s actions “dangerous as hell” and “right out of ‘Goodfellas.’”
Trump in the Oval Office defended Carr, calling him “incredible” and “a great American.” He said he disagreed with Cruz.
“I think he’s a courageous person,” Trump said of Carr. “He doesn’t like to see the airwaves be used illegally and incorrectly.”
Trump imposes $100K fee on H-1B visas in new immigration action
President Donald Trump signed an executive action on Friday to impose a $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas — in an effort to curb what his administration says is overuse of the program.
“We need great workers, and this pretty much ensures that that’s what’s going to happen,” Trump said from the Oval Office, where officials detailed how the measure would incentivize companies to employ American workers while still providing a pathway to hire highly skilled foreign workers in specialized fields.
The proclamation will restrict entry under the program unless accompanied by the payment.
In a separate order, Trump also directed the creation of a “gold card” immigration pathway that he said would fast-track visas for certain immigrants in exchange for a hefty fee. The policy will expedite visas for foreigners who pay the US $1 million, while allowing a company to pay $2 million to speed up the process for a foreign worker that it sponsors.
The moves mark the latest in a series of efforts from the administration to crack down on immigration and place sharp new limits on the types of foreigners allowed into the country. They threaten to significantly impact industries that depend heavily on H-1B workers.
The H-1B visa is a work visa that’s valid for three years and can be renewed for another three years. Economists have argued the program allows US companies to maintain competitiveness and grow their business, creating more jobs in the US.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters on a call Friday evening that the administration came to the fee of $100,000 per year, plus vetting costs, after talking with companies.
He noted that the payment structure is still under discussion with the Department of Homeland Security, in terms of “whether we’re going to charge the $300,000 up front or $100,000 a year for the three years.”
Trump’s stance on the H-1B visa program has fluctuated, and the issue has sharply divided his supporters at times.
The president restricted access to foreign worker visas during his first term and has targeted the H-1B program in past remarks – but during the 2024 campaign, he signaled openness to giving some foreign-born workers legal status if they graduated from a US university.
Trump also defended the program last December, telling the New York Post that he’s “a believer in H-1B.”
“I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump told the news outlet at the time.
Trump’s remarks came after entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whom Trump initially tapped to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, defended the program, igniting sharp criticism from MAGA loyalists hoping to restrict immigration.
65,000 H-1B visas are granted annually, with another 20,000 reserved just for people who hold advanced degrees from US higher education institutions. Demand for the visa often exceeds the supply, triggering a lottery system.
Many companies use H-1B visas to help fill their workforces. But tech is the sector most commonly associated with H-1Bs. Tech firms big and small say they need the H-1B program to hire trained talent that they can’t find at home.
Trump has previously opposed the H-1B visa program as part of his platform to encourage US companies to prioritize American labor over hiring foreign workers. During his 2016 campaign, Trump accused US companies of using H-1B visas “for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay.”
In 2020, Trump restricted access to H-1B visas on several occasions, part of his administration’s effort to curb legal immigration while responding to the changing economic conditions brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The so-called gold card program that Trump also unveiled is also designed to overhaul the nation’s posture toward foreign workers, aiming to tip the balance of immigrants toward entrepreneurs and high earners.
A brainchild of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the program will speed entry for foreigners who can afford the $1 million fee — or get their employer to pay twice as much to sponsor them. In the Oval Office on Friday, Lutnick criticized the existing green card process for immigrants seeking to live and work permanently in the US, arguing it resulted in the country taking in the “bottom quartile” of workers from abroad.
“We’re going to only take extraordinary people at the very top,” Lutnick said of the gold card program.
Trump unveils gold, platinum visas to cost up to $5 million
(Bloomberg) — President Donald Trump announced a new visa program for the world’s wealthy, a much-anticipated effort to encourage them to immigrate to the US by offering residency permits for a hefty price tag.
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“They’re going to spend a lot of money to come in,” Trump told reporters Friday in the Oval Office as he signed the order to create the visa program. “It’s going to raise billions of dollars, billions and billions of dollars, which is going to go to reduce taxes, pay off debt and for other good things.”
Individuals can pay $1 million to receive US residency with the “Trump Gold Card,” following a processing fee and vetting, according to a website announcing the program. A “Platinum Card” will soon be available for $5 million, and allow recipients to “spend up to 270 days in the United States without being subject to U.S. taxes on non-U.S. income.”
Businesses that pay a $2 million fee per employee can receive US residency for an unspecified number of workers, according to the website.
“The Trump Corporate Gold Card allows your business to transfer access from one employee and grant it to another, with the cost of a transfer fee and DHS vetting. A small annual maintenance fee will also apply,” the website said, referring to the Department of Homeland Security.
It’s not clear how soon the visas could be awarded. The website includes an “apply now” section, which asks applicants for their name, the region in which they live and their email address.
Immigration experts say Congress likely would need to approve the program.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick predicted the plan would raise more than $100 billion for the US government.
Trump first teased the gold card venture in February, touting the concept as an initiative that would help draw capital investment and create jobs, while also providing revenue to reduce the deficit. Lutnick joined Trump at the White House event Friday to announce the initiative.
The visas for the super-rich are part of Trump’s efforts to overhaul the country’s immigration system, which also include ramped up deportations of undocumented migrants. Trump has said he wants to expand legal pathways to citizenship, particularly for high-earning individuals.
“The main thing is we’re going to have great people coming in, and they’re going to be paying,” Trump said.
The announcement comes as Trump is also moving to extensively overhaul the H-1B visa program, requiring a $100,000 fee for applications in a bid to curb overuse. Such a move would make it far more expensive for technology companies and other firms to employ foreign engineers and other skilled workers to fill in-demand jobs.
Trump said that technology executives would be “very happy” with the golden visa program because it would allow them to bring in additional workers.
Accenture, Cognizant Technology and other IT consulting stocks hit session lows on Friday on the news of the visa fee.
Trump has envisioned as many as one million people purchasing the cards, but immigration experts have said that the pool of individuals who could afford to take part in the program is far smaller.
—With assistance from Jason Leopold.
A vengeful Trump props up the unproductive as his economy falls apart
Inflation rose to 2.9 percent in September from 2.7 percent last month, and the economy produced a dismal 22,000 in the latest jobs report. Meanwhile, the imminent threat of a recession indicates a tarnishing rather than the “golden age of prosperity” President Trump promised at his inauguration.
Under normal slowdowns that any economy undergoes, such numbers would be of cyclical concern, but in in the current climate they may be precursors to large economic disasters lurking underneath the numbers.
Prices, jobs, and economic health are not just self-propelling numbers, but rest upon ever-deepening layers of an economy and their connection to a host of institutions which provide signals to investors to take risks, for consumers to buy, and for governments to spend or not spend.
The deeper malaise lies in the “wrecking ball” metaphor now regularly employed to describe Trump’s approach to economic institutions. This has played out at three levels: the direct government interventions in market behavior; the willingness to disregard the most productive sectors of the economy in favor of the least; and the disastrous approach to scientific research and innovation that the administration hails as a war on liberal elites.
Government interventions in the U.S. economy are not new. Whether we like it or not, defense has encouraged innovation from Presdient Dwight Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex,” the DARPANET that was a precursor to the Internet, to President Ronald Reagan’s Sematech initiative that may be seen as good precursor to Biden’s Chips Act for semi-conductor manufacturing in the U.S.
Trump’s wrecking ball is unique. It’s about destroying or weakening rather than strengthening American institutions. Don’t like the job numbers? Fire the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief. Don’t like Fed’s monetary policy in the face of inflationary pressures? Fire a Fed member and make its chief’s life miserable. Don’t like something about Intel or other companies? Berate them and make them provide partial government control. Meanwhile, extol Cracker Barrel’s old logo, praise Sidney Sweeney’s blue “genes,” eat unhealthy foods in public — it’s all part of the declaration of an unprecedented cultural war with dictatorial impulses.
Trump ignores the most productive sectors of the U.S. economy and caters to the most unproductive, welfare-fed and militantly Christian rural areas of the U.S. Even his promise to bring manufacturing jobs to the U.S. is a myth. Industrial economies lose agricultural jobs; post-industrial economies lose manufacturing.
Seventy-three percent of farms now feature industrial-style farming, with upwards of 1,000 acres in each farm. The Yeoman farmer ain’t coming back. Coal jobs were awful and most West Virginians don’t want them. (Full disclosure: I have a second home in West Virginia). The Rust Belt worker whom Trump mythologizes is just that: a myth.
Almost 80 percent of the U.S. employment is in services sectors, more than two-thirds of which is information work. To his credit, Trump, with assistance from JD Vance’s Silicon Valley ties, has held a tenuous balance between his utterly vengeful political movement and the innovation- and immigration-friendly high-tech sector of America. This compact, however, is fraying at the edges, however, with leadership from the likes of Steve Bannon and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). Growth in services was 3.0 percent in 2024, but it was only 0.9 percent in the first two quarters of 2025.
The famous international economist Fritz Machlup empirically demonstrated in the 1960s that we were in an information revolution which rests upon knowledge-work, mostly in services. And the U.S. still runs a sizable trade-surplus in services — usually around $300 billion each year — which never shows up in Trump’s charts or speeches.
Trump now champions the moribund sectors in the U.S., while the advocates for these left-behind sectors, from MAGA pastors to megalomaniacal politicians and talking heads, seek to shut down the productive sectors. I previously asked whether Trump could pull off a Bismarckian “iron-rye” coalition, combining productive and unproductive sectors in a cross-subsidy arrangement. Trump’s populism and the scarce factor’s vengeful brand of politics is getting in the way.
The post-industrial economy rests on what Machlup called knowledge workers. Trump has declared a war on knowledge in the U.S., and his sycophantic Cabinet follows with sharpened sickles. Funding for innovative scientific research is dwindling. Cuts to the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health represent let him extort money from the finest universities in the world rather than assisting them in their endeavors.
The elimination of the Minerva Research Initiative, a program started by President George W. Bush, shows how far this government would go to cut funds that enhance advanced robotics and warn us about terror or threats from evolving artificial intelligence infrastructures. (Another disclosure: My own $1.39 million program on AI was eliminated).
The Trump administration’s hierarchical and dirigiste crackdown on moral, social, political and economic life is disgusting. The government wants to set prices and interest rates and tell businesses whom to hire and fire.
The reassurances that the administration has given about the necessary pain to withstand economic disruption may be the ruminations of a mad king and his minions who are willing to disregard the most basic principles of economics for political gain, much of it related to vindictiveness.
