Trump’s latest monument to stupidity
“Fixed fortifications,” General George S Patton once said, “are monuments to the stupidity of man. If mountain ranges and oceans can be overcome, anything made by man can be overcome.” Consider as an object lesson of one man’s stupidity, Trump’s border wall. Trump claimed it was a success, of course. It was in fact a failure, of course. Very little of it was ever built, and the minuscule part that was built was laughable. It could be scaled using tools costing less than $30.
Not content with one colossal failure, Trump is busy with another. His “Golden Dome” so-called anti-missile shield. It was upgraded from an “Iron Dome.” That was decreed by Trump’s January executive order calling for an “Iron Dome for America.”
So if any of the 14 million Americans are interested in what Trump intends to do with their money after he unceremoniously kicks them off of Medicaid, fear not. Trump is going to take 25 billion dollars out of that budget and transfer it to his Iron — I mean Golden — Dome.
Is that a small price to pay for keeping America safe? No. It’s a huge price for what is going to fail. But that money isn’t going to fund the dome. It’s going to be used for preliminary studies. The whole project is going to cost, according to the congressional budget office, more than half a trillion dollars. Which in budget-speak means a trillion dollars, because all such projects always overrun, typically by double.
Where will the trillion dollars for Trump’s boondoggle come from? Certainly not from taxes on the rich. No, Trump’s latest tax cut, his “big beautiful bill” (notice he frequently uses third grade adjectives, no offence to third graders) is going to make the rich even richer and the poor even poorer. No, that money will have to come from somewhere else, and the only thing big enough to fund this pile of waste and horseshit is Social Security.
So what is America supposedly being shielded from? Enemy nukes, of course. The problem with that is, if any nation fires a nuclear weapon at America, America will probably retaliate with an “appropriate response.”
Even in the unlikely event that America elects not to respond with anything beyond defence, once nukes start flying, some of them will probably come down somewhere. And that will be all she wrote, as far as the habitability of the planet by humans is concerned.
The focus should be on total worldwide disarmament. I know, it’s all been tried before. So what? We should keep trying until we succeed. There is only one enemy in nuclear conflict, and that is war itself.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.