America cannot build lasting strength by making everything look stronger. From the Reflecting Pool to the proposed Golden Fleet, the Trump administration repeatedly chooses spectacle over substance—investing in what can be seen today while neglecting the infrastructure, expertise, science and institutions that determine whether America remains powerful tomorrow.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is the most honest thing in Washington right now.
President Trump promised to repair it, paint its bottom “American flag blue,” and make it last a century. Within days of reopening, algae spread across the water and the coating began peeling. The pool has already been drained again, the brilliant blue fading toward gray. The surface that was supposed to last a century barely made it a month.
The government knew exactly what was wrong. The National Park Service’s own budget documents diagnosed it years ago: undersized pipes that “continuously broke and failed.” In 2019 alone, the park pumped in 71 million gallons - more than ten times the pool’s capacity - just to keep it full, at a cost of over $1 million a year. The fix was $4.4 million of buried infrastructure that would have paid for itself within three to five years.
The engineers asked for pipes. The president bought paint. The cost swelled to $16 million.
That is Trump’s governing philosophy: find something visible, make it bigger, brighter, manlier, or gilded, then announce that the nation has been restored.
Ostentatious gold fills the Oval Office. The East Wing was demolished for a ballroom. Across the Potomac, a 250-foot gilded arch would place a monument to one man that blocks a landscape designed to be one of memory and reconciliation.
The Trump Trade-Off
Meanwhile, the administration proposes cutting the National Science Foundation by more than half, the National Institutes of Health by roughly $5 billion, and NASA science by nearly half; the unglamorous work American strength will stand on in twenty years. Spend where the image is immediate; cut where the damage is delayed. Take the applause now and send the invoice to the future.
The Pentagon is making the same substitution. Under the banner “High-T Department of War,” Secretary Hegseth has paired testosterone screening with a crackdown on shaving waivers, disproportionately needed by Black men and women in command and combat. He grades bodies against an image rather than a mission.
When a Navy selection board, one of the most competitive processes in the American military, chose thirty-one captains for promotion to rear admiral, Hegseth removed as many as nine names, including all three women and two Black men, without a public, performance-based explanation and without clear authority to do so. The Pentagon’s latest round of two-star promotions included zero women; among those passed over was the first woman ever to command a nuclear aircraft carrier. For the first time in nearly two decades, no woman serves as a four-star officer in the American military, and none is pending.
The secretary says combat roles must meet “the highest male standard”... “If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it.” The revealing word is not standard. It is male.
I believe in demanding standards; they protect lives. But a real standard measures what the military needs done: carry the load, make the decision, fly the aircraft, defend the network. An aesthetic standard only measures whether the person doing it looks right. The definition of a warrior is being narrowed to a casting call.
Every instinct converged in the proposed Trump-class battleship and the Golden Fleet. The president promised the USS Defiant will be “100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built” and said he will help design it himself because “I’m a very aesthetic person.” The Navy secretary promised it will “inspire awe and reverence.” The image arrived before the requirement. It is the arch, put to sea.
On August 5, the Congressional Budget Office put a price on that image: roughly $275 billion to build fifteen ships, with the lead ship alone running about $23 billion — nearly twice a new Ford-class carrier. A twenty-five-ship fleet, the size the president has floated, would run as high as $455 billion.
The Associated Vulnerabilities
A thinking adversary will not watch in awe. It will calculate the ship’s signature, track it from space, and count the missiles needed to disable it. The recent record is unambiguous: Ukraine has destroyed or damaged a third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet with cheap drones and missiles, while Houthi drones built for a few thousand dollars have forced the U.S. Navy to answer with interceptors costing two million dollars apiece, and this month they expanded their attacks into new Red Sea shipping lanes.
Mass, dispersal, and adaptability win. Monuments sink.
Our Navy once understood this. When the Great White Fleet came home in 1909 after demonstrating America’s worldwide reach, we stripped the gilded scrollwork and painted the ships haze gray. White was for the crowd on the pier. Gray was for the enemy on the horizon.
The Great White Fleet used aesthetics to advertise a real operational achievement. Trump’s Golden Fleet uses aesthetics to disguise the lack of one.
Real Strength
Congress has started pushing back. In the stopgap spending bill it passed 90-6 on August 8, the Senate refused the White House’s request for $1 billion to begin buying parts for a ship that isn’t yet designed; a request three Republican-led defense committees had already called premature.
Real strength is energy grids that work, laboratories funded, shipyards staffed, and officers promoted because they can think. It is held together by trust that performance is what gets measured.
President Eisenhower called the armed forces “nothing but the cutting edge of a great machine,” powered by the economic productivity and spirit of the whole country, that “must be sustained in all its strength,” to be effective. Gild the cutting edge while starving the machine, and what remains is a ceremonial sword.
The government knew what was wrong beneath the Reflecting Pool. Its engineers described the failure, the repair, and the cost of doing nothing. The administration prioritized paint. It failed. The algae came anyway.
The future will not test the veneer. It will test the structure.
So will an adversary.
Bree Fram is an astronautical engineer and retired U.S. Space Force colonel who served 23 years before being forced out by the Trump administration, including Pentagon assignments in space policy and national security planning. She has published three books and is a former congressional candidate. She is a member of The Steady State.
Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.