The Trump-Class Battleship: Worst Idea Ever
It is virtually impossible to name a single initiative of Donald Trump’s that isn’t either supremely stupid or downright satanic. From dismantling public health to pardoning criminals who ransacked the U.S. Capitol to brazen international aggression, Trump and his toadies seem hell-bent on destroying the country. With help from Pete Hegseth and other Trump lackeys in the Pentagon, the president has set his sights on weakening the military that Republicans claim to love so fervently.
The latest brainstorm in military weaponry to emanate from Mar-a-Lago is the Trump-class battleship. Just as engraving a sitting president’s mug on a U.S. coin is unheard of, putting a living person’s name on a warship or class of warships is outrageous—but then again, no other president has been impeached twice.
When Trump, Hegseth, and arch-sycophant Marco Rubio unveiled plans for the ship last month, Navy Secretary John Phelan, losing no opportunity to adopt MAGA-speak, enthused that “we’re going to make battle groups great again. The USS Defiant battleship [the planned lead ship of the class] will inspire awe and reverence for the American flag whenever it pulls into a foreign port. It will be a source of pride for every American.” In a plug on X, he added that the Trump-class vessel “will be the best-looking warship anywhere on the world’s oceans.”
The aesthetics of a warship and the awe it inspires in foreigners have not been design requirements for America’s Navy or any other. It has been customary for service secretaries to have experience with the service they oversee, or at least relevant qualifications, such as engineering. But Phelan’s only engineering experience has been as a financial engineer running a private investment company. What got him the job as Navy Secretary was his industrious fundraising for Trump’s campaigns; for good measure, in 2022, he moved his investment shop to Palm Beach.
The Trump-class ship, as envisioned, is a true battleship, expected to be around 850 feet long and to displace over 35,000 tons. There is just one small problem: the U.S. has not built a battleship since the Iowa class over 80 years ago, because by then airpower had already transformed warfare at sea. No naval power has attempted to build a battleship since then, with the arguable exception of four Soviet Kirov-class battlecruisers—and even those were roughly 10,000 tons smaller than the Trump-class.
Today’s security environment poses several problems beyond the Trump-class’s operational suitability. The key to a battleship (and what makes it so heavy) is its armor. Because the U.S. Navy has not built heavily armored ships since World War II, the American industrial base for fabricating naval armor plate is minimal and has shrunk further in recent months. In June, a Cleveland Cliffs plant, a key armor plate fabricator, was indefinitely idled, and the facility will permanently close in 2026. Meanwhile, China is expanding its capacity for armor plate production.
Surprisingly, given Trump’s tender concern for domestic manufacturing, there has been no detectable response from the White House or the Pentagon to the closure. Perhaps they are preoccupied with the “threat” (as depicted in the latest National Strategy Report) posed by Europe’s refusal to abandon its liberal democratic principles, even after Vice President JD Vance berated European leaders at—appropriately—Munich.
In addition to the armor-plate problem, only four U.S. shipyards can build a vessel the size of the planned battleship. Two of these, General Dynamics NASCO (San Diego) and Hanwha Philly (Philadelphia), can build noncombatant vessels, such as tankers and supply ships, and Hanwha is, in any case, under foreign ownership, a potential red flag for the protectionist Trump regime.
The remaining two shipyards, Ingalls (Pascagoula) and HII Newport News (both owned by Huntington Ingalls), are fully occupied building Ford-class carriers, Virginia– and Columbia-class submarines, and Burke-class destroyers; they reported a combined backlog of $56.9 billion. This reflects an accumulation of schedule delays due to optimistic contract terms, an inadequately sized and aging workforce, supply-chain deficiencies, and outdated construction techniques. It amounts to a crisis in U.S. Navy shipbuilding.
But the problem goes beyond the rate at which the industrial base can build ships; it also concerns whether it can build viable warships at all, given the Navy’s baroque design requirements. As I have written in the Washington Monthly, the only successful surface combatant it possesses is the Burke-class destroyer, a design dating from the 1980s that is still in production (with significant upgrades). Since then, the Navy’s record of introducing surface warfare ships has been unblemished by success.
After building three Zumwalt-class destroyers in the 2010s, the Navy canceled the program when it belatedly discovered the cruiser’s main gun was prohibitively expensive. It is still seeking a viable operational role for the ship. The Littoral Combat Ship, intended to be an affordable, small surface warfare ship, has been dogged with so many woes, including cost overruns, that the Navy is retiring the ships as fast as it can, even though they are relatively new.
I also described the woes of the Constellation-class frigate, intended to be an affordable adaptation of a European design. But the Navy demanded so many changes, including rerouting miles of pipes and cables throughout the ship’s interior, that it became an object lesson in how committee design can turn into a fiasco. In 2025, the Navy finally pulled the plug on the Constellation.
Given its less-than-glowing history of building surface combatants (even the Burke class’s unit cost is increasing as its schedule falls behind), what are the odds that the Navy will oversee the completion of “20 to 25” ships of a type it hasn’t built in over eight decades? (Even the Iowa class, constructed when labor and materials rates were vastly cheaper, consisted of only four ships.) Trump might as well ask the Navy to whip up two dozen examples of the starship Enterprise, complete with warp drive.
If the Navy wastes time, money, and effort on this project, it will divert resources from what it needs to fight a real war: improved fleet missile defenses (without which any surface vessel is vulnerable, as the next of kin of the Russian cruiser Moskva’s crew can tell you); submarines, unmanned submersibles, and aerial drones. Integrating these systems requires a state-of-the-art intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) network to detect and identify targets or incoming missiles.
The obvious threat the Navy faces is China, which not only has a numerically larger fleet (although the U.S. Navy, with its emphasis on big-deck carriers, has roughly twice the total tonnage of the Chinese Navy) but also a vastly greater shipbuilding infrastructure. How much greater? A leaked Navy briefing slide claims that China has the capacity to build 232 times the tonnage of U.S. yards.
Admittedly, sheer tonnage or the number of ships is just so much scrap metal without ISR, both to protect a fleet and augment its striking power. Still, China is racing ahead in this category. Quoting from a 2025 U.S. Space Force briefing: “In 2024, China conducted 68 total space launches of which 66 were successful, placing 260 payloads into orbit. 26% of these (67) were intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capable satellites.” Further: “The [Peoples Liberation Army] benefits from 510+ ISR-capable satellites with optical, multispectral, radar, and radio frequency sensors, increasing its ability to detect U.S. aircraft carriers, expeditionary forces, and air wings.” Apparently, Hegseth’s response is to badger generals into doing more push-ups.
By pouring resources into a fleet of battleships rather than advanced, remotely-operated strike systems, it would be doing everything the Chinese military could hope for: providing it with large, easily detectable targets. And the Chinese have the offensive means to strike them once they are detected: barely had Trump ballyhooed plans for the battleship when the Pentagon announced that China had fielded the D-27, an anti-ship ballistic missile with a range covering the entire Indo-Pacific. This is a longer-range follow-on to the DF-21D “carrier-killer” and the DF-26 “Guam-killer” missiles.
Trump’s sentimental love of battleships echoes Winston Churchill’s similar besottedness before the outbreak of the war in the Pacific. Churchill sent the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse to the South China Sea, hoping their “vague menace” would overawe and deter the Japanese. But only two days after the war began, the Japanese sent both ships to the bottom—so much for the vague menace. This 85-year-old precedent suggests that blithely sailing battleships into the South China Sea in hopes of impressing the Chinese may not be a winning strategy.
The U.S. Navy has been fortunate not to face a peer or even a near-peer adversary in high-intensity combat over the past eight decades. There have been vanishingly few such engagements in the entire post-World War II era. One example, the Falklands War, may be flawed because, on paper, Argentina was no match for the Royal Navy. Still, it provides sobering lessons about the effectiveness of autonomous guided weapons.
The Argentines possessed only five operational AM39 air-launched Exocet missiles for only four Super Étendard aircraft equipped to carry them. However, they also improvised two ship-launched Exocets for land use, resulting in seven missiles being used with great effect against the British fleet, sinking HMS Sheffield, forcing the abandonment of the SS Atlantic Conveyor (which later sank under tow), and putting HMS Glamorgan out of action for the remainder of the war. All three ships sustained considerable personnel casualties.
Unlike the Argentines, the Chinese are noted for their abundance of weaponry, raising the question: What will the Trump-class battleships be good for? As recent events suggest, they are likely to be ineffective against a modern adversary equipped with guided weaponry and ISR capable of finding targets; they would be the ideal symbol—albeit at ruinous expense—of 19th-century gunboat diplomacy (such as we have seen in Venezuela) against countries with little or no power of resistance. All for only $9 billion each, minimum.
In the surreal times in which we live, there is something oddly appropriate about the ship, outsized, expensive, and useless as it is. Trump’s maritime gigantomania, also evident in the plans for his Brobdingnagian White House ballroom, is of a piece with his childish equation of greatness with size and with a kind of sleazy, kitsch grandeur.
This trait is often seen in dictators; Hitler’s Volkshalle, a planned gargantuan domed structure in Berlin, would have borne as much aesthetic concordance with the Roman pantheon that inspired it as Trump’s ballroom does with the simple, restrained architecture of the original White House. As for Hitler’s taste in weaponry, the Maus tank is a good analog to the Trump-class warships: At 188 tons, it would collapse bridges, making it totally unsuitable as a combat vehicle. Dictator-designed weapons are rarely practical.
Many defense experts are confident that the Trump-class leviathan will be slow-rolled in its design phase and then quietly shelved, regardless of Trump’s political fate or that of any potential like-minded Republican presidential successor. Having worked my professional career in government, I am not so sure. Within the Beltway, bad ideas resemble the Terminator—you just can’t kill them, especially once the first contracts are let in somebody’s congressional district. Add to that the current climate of belligerent irrationality, and the Trump-class battleship’s quiet death is hardly a foregone conclusion.
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