The Department of Stupidity

Tariffs and National Missile Defense are two of Trump's dumbest ideas. Both will make America weaker.

Donald Trump acts as if he is the only one smart enough and courageous enough to use massive tariffs to “make America wealthy again.” Nonsense. We have done this before. It was a massive mistake. The protectionist trade policies of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 are widely credited with turning a recession into the Great Depression. Everyone got poorer, not richer.

Economist Paul Krugman goes deeper today in his wonderful Substack newsletter, asking ‘Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy?” It’s not just the policy, he writes. “Arguably what we learned about how the Trump team arrived at those tariff rates — the sheer malignant stupidity of the whole thing — was even worse.” The formula they used grossly overestimates the trade surplus the European Union, for example, has with the U.S., yielding tariffs rates wildly out of wack. “It looks to me like something thrown together by a junior staffer with only a couple of hours’ notice.” Krugman suspects the DOGE kids.

“Who makes policy this way?” he asks. “The key point is that Trump isn’t really trying to accomplish economic goals. This should all be seen as a dominance display, intended to shock and awe people and make them grovel, rather than policy in the normal sense.”

Exactly the same is true for Trump’s scheme to build a giant “Golden Dome” over America that could presumably protect the country from long-range ballistic missiles. (I am not making that name up. Trump original called it “Iron Dome” but apparently changed it because an Israeli defense contractor has a trademark on that name.)

Trump's Iron Dome Cannot Protect America

Sometime this month, the Department of Defense will present its plan for how to build this dome, as ordered by Trump’s January 27 executive order to deliver a plan within sixty days. Among other wishful thinking, Trump ordered a plan for “defense of the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.”

Such a comprehensive defense is impossible. It is impossible now. It is impossible for the foreseeable future. Don’t take my word for it - even though I have tracked this scam for over 42 years, seen Congress spend over $415 billion, and heard generals, contractors and presidents promise such a defense and yield absolutely nothing. Consider the new report from the leading association of this country’s physicists, the American Physical Society (APS).

These scientists conclude that the fragility, unreliability and vulnerability of the system to counter measures make it impossible to provide anything close to a protection against nuclear attack. “Because of the difficulty of correcting these deficiencies in a timely or cost-effective way, the report concludes that within the 15-year time horizon it considered, the [Ground-based Missile Defense] system cannot be expected to provide a robust or reliable defense against more than the simplest attacks by a small number of relatively unsophisticated missiles.”

This means, as the study notes, that even North Korea with a handful of missile and simple countermeasures like decoys and chaff, could defeat any conceivable defense system over the next couple of decades.

This includes the new space-based defenses that Golden Dome envisions. Thousand of new weapon satellites orbiting the Earth with interceptor rockets that would try to blow up enemy missile as they launch, rather that wait until they are streaking down to their targets on the ground.

I will write later about how this plan - like the tariffs - is just an updated version of a tried and discredited scheme from decades past. It is basically the plan developed at the end of the Reagan administration in 1988, once scientists (particularly the APS) concluded that the lasers and other directed-energy weapons originally promised by the “Star Wars” system could not work. I directed a report for the House Democratic Caucus in 1988 that showed why even this revised, space-based, multi-layered scheme could not work.

The Golden Dome architecture will basically look like the late-1980s plan, depicted above. The defense department had to abandon it in the 1990s when it became obvious to even the most enthusiastic proponents that it was unfeasible.

Trump will dig it up, dust it off and present it as a shiny, “golden” new idea. It, like the tariffs, is an attempt to display dominance. Trump and his cronies will gloss over the technical problems, and most media will likely not dig enough to expose them.

But the scientists did. National missile defense won’t work, they warn in their new report.

Here is just one of the problems: For every potential enemy missile, you need hundreds of interceptors. Because an interceptor satellite has to be directly over an enemy launch site to shoot at it, and because the earth rotates, the physicists calculate that “over a thousand orbiting weapons would be needed to counter a single North Korean solid-propellant ICBM and that ten times more would be needed to defend against ten launched within a short time. The system would be costly and vulnerable to anti-satellite attacks.”

They don’t even try to calculate how many would be needed to defend against the scores or hundreds of missiles China and Russia could launch. Nor do they estimate how many additional missiles countries would build to simply overwhelm the system. We already see China doing just that as a hedge against a possible future interceptor system.

The image, below, from the APS report basically tells you all you need to know. Although space-launch companies would reap large profits from putting thousands of satellites into orbit (Elon Musk’s SpaceX is the leading space-launch company in the world), the practical and technological difficulties of launching, maintaining, operating and protecting the system from attack are so enormous as to render the scheme useless.

The bottom line? In their dry, understated conclusion, the scientists end their dense, 61-page report with this warning: “Few of the main challenges involved in developing and deploying a reliable and effective ballistic missile defense have been solved, and many of the hard problems we have identified are likely to remain unsolved during, and probably beyond, the 15-year time horizon we considered.”

In short, national missile defenses, like tariffs, offer an appealing, quick fix to a persistent, difficult problem. But history shows that every time we have tried them, they simply don’t work. In fact, they make the problem worse.