Elon Musk and his company SpaceX were set to win big from Trump’s planned “Golden Dome” missile defense system. Then Musk went to war with Trump over the Big Beautiful Bill Act, the deficit-expanding centerpiece of the president’s domestic agenda. Musk called it a “disgusting abomination.”

The president shot back with a not-so-veiled threat. “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” Trump ranted in a post on Truth Social last Thursday.

Experts say that Trump is partly right: Golden Dome itself needs to be terminated, before countless tax dollars are poured into an implausible project that is destined to fail.

“Golden Dome is really more of a political marketing scheme than a carefully thought-out defense program.”

“Golden Dome can certainly go forward without Elon Musk, but it shouldn’t,” William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told The Intercept. “Once you get past the soaring rhetoric and glossy corporate PR, Golden Dome is really more of a political marketing scheme than a carefully thought-out defense program. The fact that President Trump claims it can be built in three years — when less complex systems like the F-35 [fighter aircraft] have been in development for 23 years and still aren’t fully ready for combat — is one sign that it is not a serious initiative.”

Trump signed an executive order on January 27 that directed the Pentagon to develop a plan for an “Iron Dome for America” — a riff on the name of Israel’s anti-missile defense system — which the president, who has a penchant for all things gilded, calls the Golden Dome. The plan calls for keeping America safe from “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries” or, put more simply, shooting any threat out of the skies before it harms the United States.

The Golden Dome could be the top Pentagon cash cow of the next quarter-century. Its ultimate price tag is estimated in the hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars.

Experts say that a comprehensive defense against all........

© The Intercept