Dumb Evidence for Dumb Ideas

There’s nothing wrong, in my opinion, with having a dumb thought and thinking it’s smart. We’re all susceptible to thinking that the entire airplane should be made out of the black box material, or that it’s ridiculous to fund a study of shrimp on a treadmill, or similar notions.

The trick is what you do with it. The smart thing is to contact somebody who knows a lot more about that subject area than you do, ask them about it, and learn from their response. Most often, you will find that there are actual reasons, based on logic, experience, testing, or history, unfamiliar to you as a non-expert.

Another option of course is to just plow ahead and advocate public policy around your dumb thought, ignoring subject matter experts entirely.

It helps, when going this route, to appear on television with large visual aids while presenting your dumb thought in the form of a rhetorical question: “Why don’t we just make the whole plane out of that black box?” Never mind that your rhetorical question actually has a well-established answer. (Labelling the idea as “common sense” is another tried-and-true technique.)

The Trump administration, and many Republicans in Congress, proceed along this second path with frustrating frequency. Which brings us to this week’s Oval Office presentation about plans for a Golden Dome missile defense system.

It is widely acknowledged that this originated with Trump watching videos of Israel’s Iron Dome system intercepting incoming rockets during hostilities beginning in October 2023. Trump, as a Presidential candidate, began musing that America should have such a system to protect our homeland. His supporters reacted well to the idea, so he turned it into a policy, named it Golden Dome (of course), and by January 2025 he was directing the Pentagon to get cranking on plans.

Again, it’s not bad to muse that we should have a U.S.-scale Iron Dome system that protects us from the horror of nuclear missile attack. The Pentagon regularly reviews the idea to determine whether the state of technology, costs, and geopolitical circumstances warrant requesting funding as part of its budgetary request to Congress. It might be exciting if some day the answer is yes; to date, the answer has always been no.

Trump and his team, however, don’t believe in following the facts to form a policy; they prefer to work the other way around. So, there was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth earlier this week excitedly announcing plans to build a system of unspecified design or concept, that will thwart all missiles coming at our country for land, sea, or sky. You could tell it would do this, because he had a large visual aid depicting the contiguous 48 states covered by a golden hue.

The White House didn’t even pretend to have any further details to offer, then or afterward, about how this system would work. I have seen some verbiage from defense contractors who stand to get big contracts for research, development, and implementation of whatever it might be. They seem excited.

We do know that Trump, at the announcement, claimed that it would cost a total of $175 billion and be fully implemented before the end of his current term in office. The latter claim has already been “clarified,” since obviously untrue, but I can’t say it clarified much other than giving the sense that Trump wants to have a big, triumphant ribbon-cutting of sorts, perhaps with a big button he gets to push at the end of the 2028 Third Annual June 14^th Military Parade and Trump Birthday Celebration. Actual complete implementation will proceed for years thereafter.

You can easily see why the Golden Dome appeals to Trump, who fancies himself the great protector of the people—the dome is not dissimilar to the mighty protective border wall, when you think about it. It is the eternal strong man promise: you need me because the world out there is filled with evils coming for you and your family, and I am the only one who will do what needs to be done to stop them.

On the other hand, missile defense runs quite contrary to the Hegseth doctrine of focusing the military on pure lethality. All these billions will be spent on technology that doesn’t kill anybody at all.

Indeed, the images that come to mind belie the very way that Hegseth talks about the military he is trying to shape. This is the modern military, which sits at terminals, monitoring and configuring computer systems. Quite frankly, it’s hard to conjure an argument for barring transgender soldiers from working on Golden Dome development, implementation, and maintenance. Hegseth’s justification for banning them, while in my opinion thoroughly unpersuasive even for combat units, falls completely to pieces here, it seems to me; I hope somebody posits this question to him at some point.

As for sticking with dumb thoughts regardless of contrary evidence and explanation, this week was full of them. Trump and his coterie of aggrieved white men (Vance, Miller, Musk, Hegseth, etc.) lectured South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office about the genocide of white Afrikaners he is allowing and abetting; as I wrote previously, this is a belief lacking a foundation. The so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” in this week’s headlines is crammed full of policy changes—such as denying funding for gender-affirming care, and Medicaid cuts supposedly affecting only those abusing the system—that rely upon ignoring the explanations of those with actual knowledge about certain dumb ideas. On Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that Harvard can no longer host foreign students, citing reasons that are so unproven that, as others pointed out, some of the links for evidence go to other press releases making the same claims. And of course the administration continues to insist that every deportee it attempts to shuttles off is guilty of horrific crimes, the details of which they choose not to divulge or discuss. Dumb ideas can seem smart if you just make up your own evidence and ignore everything else.