A super healthy and not at all decaying President Donald Trump announcing the U.S. Navy's new “Golden Fleet” initiative at Mar-a-Lago on December 22, 2025. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images)
1. You Sank My Battleship!
Everything about the “Trump-class” battleship is a joke.
The new vessel is not a battleship. It’s a plus-sized destroyer.
Because the first ship of the line is set to be christened the USS Defiant, naming conventions would have this class known as the Defiant-class, not the “Trump-class.”
The proposed weapons systems—hypersonic nuclear-tipped missiles, rail guns, sharks with frickin’ lasers on their heads—are mostly theoretical.
This new class of ship is an answer in search of a problem. It serves absolutely no strategic purpose for America’s naval posture.
It cannot possibly be completed on the schedule Trump announced—construction beginning “almost immediately” with the first vessel deployed in 2.5 years.
I’ll go a step further: It is unlikely that any of these ships will ever be built. This is vaporware. No different than the Foxconn mega-plant in Wisconsin, or all of the iPhones that are just about to be made in America, or the addition of Canada as the 51st state, or the annexation of Greenland.
I can’t believe I’m doing this, but let’s explain why the “Trump-class” ship won’t happen...
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