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Donald Trump’s West Point commencement speech over the weekend could’ve gone better. As Politico’s Jeff Greenfield summarized, the president’s remarks were “a narcissistic [and] deranged rant.” What’s more, while other modern presidents have stuck around after their speeches to shake hands with cadets, Trump did not — a move Greenfield described as “just another insult.”
But of particular interest was the president using the platform to touch on one of his curious national security priorities. USA Today reported:
The president did briefly mention his plan of investing $25 billion toward building a massive anti-missile defense shield that seeks to cover the country with three layers of aerial protection, according to military officials. ‘We’re building the Golden Dome missile defense shield to protect our homeland and to protect West Point from attack, and it will be completed before I leave office,’ Trump said.
Yes, he’s still serious about this.
Trump spent much of 2024 talking up the idea of an “Iron Dome” comparable to Israel’s defense system, though the Republican seemed to struggle with the details: The whole point of Israel’s “dome” is to protect it from short-range missiles. Unless Trump is worried about Canada or Mexico launching a surprise attack, it stands to reason that the United States would focus on other national security priorities.
Nevertheless, in early 2024, Trump told a New Hampshire audience, in reference to a proposed shield and those who would oversee it, “And they calmly walk to us, and ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out, right. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom.”
I still don't know what that was supposed to mean.
Nevertheless, in time, the idea evolved. “Iron dome” became “Golden Dome” (because everything related to Trump now must be gold), and instead of developing a shield to intercept short-range missiles, the president apparently envisions a system that would intercept all missiles.
There’s no shortage of problems with such an idea. For example, U.S. officials have been trying to make a system like this work for decades, and they’ve always failed. What’s more, Trump told the public last week that the “total cost” of such an initiative would be “about $175 billion,” which is laughable: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the actual cost of the president’s “Golden Dome” could be as high as $831 billion.
But I’m also stuck on the idea that this nonexistent, experimental, technological breakthrough will be ready to go within three years. As The Hill reported, it’s an idea that left experts “scratching their heads.”
Such a system, as called for by Trump via a January executive order, would take far more than the ‘two and a half to three years’ he boasted in the Oval Office on Tuesday, according to Melanie Marlowe, a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Missile Defense Project. ‘Golden Dome is not going to be an impenetrable missile shield across the entire United States of America,’ Marlowe told The Hill, adding that the system will require both short- and long-term effort to come together. ... ‘We will not have space-based interceptors in three years,’ she told The Hill.
The New York Times’ W.J. Hennigan added that the “Golden Dome” would also likely “consist of 100 or more programs to be stitched together for a coast-to-coast, border-to-border shield against aerial attacks. Once those components are built, the military will need a way to orchestrate it all through a command-and-control system.”
The more Trump suggests that all of this can be done quickly, effectively and affordably, the more he sets himself up for inevitable failure.