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Why is Trump turning a military base into an Airbnb? [1]

['Daily Kos Staff']

Date: 2025-09-04

In a move that was probably inevitable once we gave the keys to the government to the world’s tackiest and griftiest real estate developer, it looks like we might be turning the renowned Camp Pendleton into an Airbnb.

Officials have told NBC News that some of the California Marine Corps base could be leased for commercial use, and the profits would go toward the dumb Golden Dome missile defense system that President Donald Trump is obsessed with. Even better, they’re not contemplating one discrete chunk of land—they would just let some commercial enterprises scatter around the 125,000-acre base, which seems totally secure and military-minded.

You might be wondering why the government needs to have a fire sale to pay for the Golden Dome project. There was $24.4 billion allocated in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, but that’s not going to be nearly enough. The administration has arbitrarily declared the whole thing will cost $175 billion, but estimates vary wildly, coming in at anywhere from $119 billion to $6.4 trillion. Even the Congressional Budget Office, whose employees estimate things like this for a living, came up with a range of $161 billion to $542 billion.

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The cost estimates are all over the map because no one really knows how—or if—the Golden Dome would work. The CBO explained this very delicately, noting that one reason we don’t know how much the thing would cost is that both the number and sophistication of missile threats are increasing, including ICBMs from North Korea. The space-based weapons needed to repel Chinese and Russian ICBMs “would need to be much bigger—and therefore more costly—than the constellations in the previous studies.”

Hm. Doesn’t really seem like the government can turn enough of Camp Pendleton into strip malls or third-rate casinos or whatever to cover this sort of cost gap. Maybe the Golden Dome could arrange to tap into the seemingly bottomless pile of money set aside for terrorizing immigrants?

Trump does have to figure out a way to fund this thing, given how much he is bragging about it. He boasted the entire system could be built in three years, but at best, it looks like if the stars align, the Golden Dome might be ready for a demonstration by the end of 2028. It would be possible to have the network of satellites and communication systems up and running in that relatively short timeframe, but it wouldn’t be ready to shoot down any missiles with space-based weaponry by that point. Nevertheless, hope apparently springs eternal—if not a genuine hope for space lasers, at least one for an October surprise of sorts. Yes, that 2028 demo is conveniently already scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2028, right before the next presidential election.

Trump became obsessed with the idea thanks to Israel’s Iron Dome, but that covers an area about the size of New Jersey. To defend the sprawling United States from less than a dozen North Korean ICBMs would take about 10,000 space-based weapons. Nobody actually thinks the thing will work anyway, but it will be an epic boondoggle and moneypit until the wheels fully come off.

Indeed, the Golden Dome is the perfect sort of project for Trump. It’s an opportunity to shovel money to private tech companies, which he adores. As a bonus, he’ll get to sell off part of the government to do it. Sure, it’s not as gross as his fever dream of turning Gaza into one of his tacky hotels or his gold-plated trashville of a ballroom that will now mar the White House grounds, but when you have a real estate portfolio as big as the whole USA, you gotta diversify.

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