Trump’s Golden Dome Is a Combover

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 21, 2025

According to world-leading war-profiteer Lockheed Martin, its Golden Dome, marketed for it by Donald Trump, “stands as a layered defense shield, safeguarding the American homeland with unwavering precision, ensuring the security and resilience of our nation.” But it doesn’t exactly “stand” anywhere in the present day or what some of us like to call “reality.” Rather, it’s one of those scientific research projects Trump loves to defund if they might succeed or do anyone any good. In the words of Lockheed Martin, the Golden Dome will try to “develop game-changing tech – like space-based interceptors and hypersonic defenses.” In case you’ve been in a daze since Ronald Reagan was pushing non-functioning space-based interceptors, Ronald Reagan was pushing this same madness, and it’s never gone away.

The Golden Dome is guaranteed to waste vast resources desperately needed by people.

The Golden Dome is guaranteed to do tremendous environmental damage in production, testing, and accidents — and especially if ever used.

The Golden Dome is guaranteed to kick start a crazed race to weaponize space by a number of governments, all but one of which have long been trying to ban space weaponization by treaty. It will also fuel arms races to develop new weapons to evade defenses, and to duplicate and out-do the Golden Dome.

The Golden Dome is highly unlikely to actually ever protect anyone from anything.

The Golden Dome is definitely going to be perceived as an aggressive threat by most of the world — already by China, no matter how many times the word “defense” is uttered. It will therefore be a blow to disarmament, cooperation, and the rule of law.

The Golden Dome is the belief in militarism taken to its logical extreme, so it’s very interesting that most of the militarists don’t like it any more than I do.

Here’s the BBC doing its level best to report on this insanity with a straight face:

“An initial sum of $25bn (£18.7bn) has been earmarked in a new budget bill – although the government has estimated it could end up costing 20 times that over decades. There are also doubts about whether the US will be able to deliver a comprehensive defence system for such a huge land mass. Officials warn that existing systems have not kept pace with increasingly sophisticated weapons possessed by potential adversaries. A briefing document recently released by the Defense Intelligence Agency noted that missile threats ‘will expand in scale and sophistication’, with China and Russia actively designing systems ‘to exploit gaps’ in US defences. . . . ‘Israel’s missile defence challenge is a lot easier than one in the United States,’ Marion Messmer, a senior research fellow at London-based Chatham House, told the New York Times. ‘The geography is much smaller and the angles and directions and the types of missiles are more limited.’ Shashank Joshi, defence editor at the Economist, told the BBC the Golden Dome would probably work by using thousands of satellites to spot and track missiles and then use interceptors in orbit to fire at the missiles as they take off and take them out. He said the US military would take the plan very seriously but it was unrealistic to think it would be completed during Trump’s term, and the huge cost would suck up a large chunk of the US defence budget.”

Here’s The Independent not even trying:

“[T]he Golden Dome is overly ambitious in a way that is typical of Trump. Like his infamously unfinished and useless wall along the Mexican border, it is supposedly ‘visionary’, but is, in reality, flawed and vastly expensive. There is no reason why the relatively small Iron Dome system, designed to frustrate short to medium-range missiles, could be scaled up in anything like the way necessary to withstand a sustained attack from intercontinental ballistic missiles or rockets from space itself. Even if it could be made to work, it may not be 100 per cent effective, as is the case with Israel’s Iron Dome – and you wouldn’t want to be in a position where you’d need to find out. By that point, you’d have spent far in excess of Trump’s optimistic costing of $175bn finding out. Maybe he should ask his now strangely absent friend Elon Musk about whether the Golden Dome is a good use of American taxpayers’ money. This brings us to the next typically Trumpian problem: it’s not very well thought through. When Reagan proposed his Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) in 1983, it was obvious who he had in mind – the Russians. Yet now Trump wants to befriend them and partner up with Putin, and maybe even Presidents Xi, Kim and others in a global strongman alliance. If Golden Dome is protecting America, who is it protecting it from? As yet unknown and unforeseen enemies would be a rational answer, but not if Trump wants to make friends with them all.”

That last argument would be stronger if Trump and his supposed allies were disarming, rather than rapidly building up weapons to slaughter each other’s people and the rest of humanity. Unfortunately, the Golden Dome is a giant declaration that the United States will never be part of global cooperation and disarmament.

David Swanson 

Author, Activist, Journalist, Radio Host.

Executive Director of World BEYOND War

Campaign Coordinator of RootsAction.org

davidswanson.org