Back in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan famously championed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), referred to colloquially as “Star Wars.” Forty years later, in 2025, President Donald Trump has thrown his enthusiastic support behind what is tantamount to a rebranded, bright and shiny new version of SDI: the Golden Dome. It is surprising that so few commentators in the mainstream media have made the connection, apparently unaware of why the Star Wars program was abandoned.

Instead, pundits, politicians, and government officials such as Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth all speak of the prospect of the Golden Dome in reverent tones, evincing a state of manifest awe. Apparently either altogether unaware or insouciant of the many boondoggles to come, among other reasons why the original SDI project was scrapped, those who express ardent support of what is now being pushed as Trump’s project have bought into the seductive marketing line (as it was last time) that this is all a noble quest to keep Americans safe, by all means necessary.

Among other notable problems, the expansion of defense capacities into outerspace, which recommenced in earnest with the formal re-establishment of a U.S. Space Command (SPACECOM) in 2019, during Trump’s first administration, will in all likelihood initiate a new arms race. The original SDI program was criticized for abjectly violating the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Anti-Ballistic Missiles (ABM) Treaty of 1972, which limited each signatory’s anti-missile systems to two sites with a maximum of one hundred interceptor missiles each. The George W. Bush administration withdrew the United States from the ABM treaty in 2002, claiming that it hindered the development of technologies to address novel threats. It is worth remembering that the same administration also stated in its 2002 NSSUSA (National Security Strategy of the United States of America) that “Our best defense is a good offense.”

A second, purely practical, reason for opposing President Reagan’s SDI initiative was its exorbitant cost. That reason appears not to be regarded as prohibitive by the current administration, which has proposed a more than $1 trillion military budget for the coming year, despite the steadily augmenting $37 trillion government debt, and seemingly oblivious to the fact that the Pentagon has failed seven audits in a row, and “lost track of” trillions of dollars. The initial outlay for the project, included in the “Big Beautiful” allocations bill which passed in the House of Representatives but has a handful of detractors in the Senate, was $25 billion. The Trump administration maintains that the Golden Dome can be completed by the end of 2028 at a cost of $175 billion. …

Should the Golden Dome project move ahead, it will mean more economic pain for the people of the United States, who continue to struggle with soaring costs of living: housing, basic means of sustenance and healthcare. About 800,000 people in the United States are currently homeless, and the overdose epidemic (taking many thousands of lives each year) rages on as hopeless persons turn to drugs as the means to escape from the sordid reality which life in America has for them become. None of the people currently suffering in the United States would be helped in any way by the construction of the Golden Dome, which, on the contrary, would threaten the health, happiness and livelihood of all successful Americans as well. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth described the Golden Dome as a “game changer,” which it would be, in the sense that it would represent the effective takeover of the government by the Pentagon and its associated war profiteers.

Such a projection might sound hyperbolic, were it not for two other planks of the gloomy dystopic future being quietly put into place. First, President Trump signed an executive order on March 20, 2025, ostensibly to “eliminate information silos” by collecting and organizing data on all U.S. citizens, and he invited the company Palantir, originally funded by the CIA, to do this. The founder of Palantir, Peter Thiel, who is also a major stockholder, has connections to both Elon Musk and J.D. Vance, having collaborated with Musk on Paypal, and having donated a record-breaking $15 million to Vance’s very first election campaign, allowing him to serve in the U.S. Senate before being selected as Trump’s running mate. Second, a ban on the regulation of artificial intelligence policies by state and local authorities for the next decade has been written into the “Big Beautiful Bill,” unbeknownst to most of the congresspersons who voted for without reading the legislation.

Having seen what happened during the Coronapocalypse, the implications of the new apparatus of data collection, surveillance and artificial intelligence capabilities should be evident enough. If the Republicans fall out of favor due to their failure to manage the national debt and improve the standard of living for Americans, then the Democrats will return to power fully armed with the means to suppress all dissent against whatever their policies may be, most likely to include the antithesis of the anti-DEI, anti-trans, anti-immigrant agenda of the Trump administration.

The war party duopoly will needless to say continue to occupy the White House.