Trump unveils new class of Navy battleship named after himself
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
www.washingtonpost.com /national-security/2025/12/22/trump-battleship-golden-fleet/
Trump unveils new class of Navy battleship named after himself
Dan Lamothe, Tara Copp 2-3 minutes 12/22/2025
President Donald Trump on Monday said he will oversee the development of a new class of Navy battleship — named after himself.
The move appears designed to give the nation’s stagnant shipbuilding industry a shot in the arm, but also will upend the Navy’s ship-naming norms and thrust presidential politics firmly into the program from its genesis. The announcement follows a flurry of recent actions by Trump to rebrand existing institutions to include his name, including the U.S. Institute of Peace and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Trump, speaking alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan, said the new warships will have “guns and missiles at the highest level,” along with hypersonic weapons, electric rail guns and lasers. The first battleship, to be called the USS Defiant, will be part of a broader effort to buildmodern “Golden Fleet” of warships, Trump said, indicating that he will play a leading role in the program.
“The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a really aesthetic person,” Trump said. The Wall Street Journal first reported Trump’s new warship announcement.
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He's naming all this stuff after himself because he knows no one else ever will .
Just this -
In 2016 a polling station not far from where I live was named after Trump --
i would say you are onto something there.
me? i might name a coprolite after him, but nothing else .
Thanks, I learned a new word today.
yea, but it's a shitty word
i knew i misspelled so went and looked it up and corrected .
Thing is when i looked it up , what also came up is that they make jewelry out of it ,,, now talk about a shitty present ....
Then again look up Fordite. Ford found that by the 1940s they had increasing maintenance issues from paint overspray build up. While most of the agate was dark colors the occasional yellow, red or white paint made unique patterns when cut and polished - and made into jewelry.
Demand increased into 70's when the big three actually let "rock hounds" declutter the equipment virtually for free.
Now that the technology has virtually eliminated overspray, jewelry prices has grown as the supply dwindles to almost nothing.
Jewelry Gallery - Fordite.com
that's the highest rank trump made in military school ...
me, too
I could buy moose "nuggets" in Alaska. They made all kinds of jewelry from them. I always passed
... so did the moose.
The SS BS Battleship, let that sink in, cause everyone knows aesthetics should be prioritized over stealth and firepower .
I can just see it now .
enormous fan tail , most enormous imaginable , with itty bitty guns and anchors .
All little, damaged, hands on deck(or Dick, according to Bubba), cause the SS STD is going down, like some soon to be orange clown
Henceforth to be called the GBBB (great big beautiful battleship)
Let's just call it the "Golden BB"...
Let's just call it the "Golden BS"...
let's just call it the USS blowhard, since it will never be built ...
If they're naming it after Trump they must be calling it the U.S.S. SHIT-FOR-BRAINS.
That is funny as hell. If he uses the same aesthetic he's using at the White House it is going to be all gold leaf and gaudy as fuck.
Tell me this article is satire, please!
Sorry but it is not
And totally worthless
Wait a second... there was already a ship named after Trump...
Historically, battleships were named after states. I wonder which will come first?... the USS FLORIDA, TEXAS or NEW YORK?....
Age of the battle ship is gone , as for how the navy names things thats up to them and congress i believe , i did read something that they freed up a couple of state name from some of the BBs sunk or damaged and lost from pearl harbor attack, cant remember if it was okla, nevada , or penn. and maybe utah ?? , one i dont think the navy or congress will ever allow to be used again is Arizona .
most things as of late named after states have been in the sub fleet , only one i can think of thats not a sub is the USS New York , made with steel from the towers .
Trump wants to name them the USS CANADA, USS GREENLAND AND USS VENEZUALAN OIL.
the maga sailors on it must have eventually floated away, or became fish food ...
Ridiculous. He needs to keep his paws off the process.
We need function first not aesthetics.
Elections have consequences, lol.
Trump has No Class
tub of lard class
vanity class
never launched off the drawing board class
cancelled before the keel is laid class
fact free brag class
big ass boat (bloat) with a tiny gun class
The ego on this bastard is disgusting. Probably should have named it the Tyrant class.
I read elsewhere it's supposed to be three times the size of an Arleigh Burke, but that drawing makes it look smaller and more like a destroyer or a frigate than a battleship. Maybe the artist didn't get the memo.
At least the name of the lead ship won't be the same as the class, which I think is generally the norm.
In the age of hypersonic anti-ship missiles (or at least near-hypersonic), this program will hopefully be cancelled in favor of a larger number of smaller vessels. It looks like the Constellation frigate program was just cancelled in favor of a program for even smaller FF(X) vessels, which strikes this layman as probably a good idea. A new class of ego-driven behemoths like this, three times the size of Arleigh Burkes (and probably ten times as expensive), does not.
obsolete before it touches the water ...
Arvo...nah the colour is all wrong..
It wouldn't be Battleship grey it would have to be orange..🍊
cowardly yellow ...
So it blended in in the grey ocean
If the Navy wanted battleships, they’d have been asking for them.
This is the imagination of a kid who went to an overpriced tiny private boarding school with a military theme. New York Military Academy, 100 students.
Now he's gravitated to boats, biggly boats.
well, his political hero did have the bismarck and the tirpitz ...
New York Military Academy
new york military accademy - Search
Thei pics are too large to download, interesting. 25 to 30 graduates a year. Wearing masks is optional unless in dress review?
they surely didn't allow female students when trump attended, since his dad undoubtedly put him there because of his interaction with them in other schools ...
I don't believe there are any female cadets in any of the current pictures although all of the pictures are loaded on an old 1999 server
which is curious. One of the pics is of a Book sale which was published in 2017 and other pics have cadets in fancy Covid masks circa 2020.
yeah, I can't find them now. I must've veered off into something else, or maybe their effeminate looks were the reason their maga daddies sent them off to military school in the first place ...
I'd like to see Trump take his cabinet out for a "three hour tour" on the SS Minnow.
The Skipper -Trump
The Professor - Howard Nutlick
Thurston Howell III - Scott Besant
Mrs Howell - Miriam Adelson
Ginger - Melania Trump
Maryann - Kristi Noem
Gilligan - Stephen Miller
This is S-O-O-O Trumpian!
A weapon from the last century. Outdated before launch. A death-trap in the next, drone-dominated war.
TRUMP emblazoned on it. In gilt script.
December 22, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
This afternoon, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. Navy will build two new “Trump-class” battleships. As Lara Seligman and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal note, Trump has complained for years that America’s warships are “terrible-looking,” and has been involved in the design of the new “Golden Fleet.” A former rear admiral who is director at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies told Seligman and Weisgerber that the Golden Fleet is “exactly what we don’t need.” The last battleship in history to be built was the HMS Vanguard , completed in 1946; the last battleship commissioned by the U.S. was the USS Missouri , which was decommissioned in the 1990s. The proposed ships are, he said, “focused on the president’s visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship.”
In an illustration of the new battleship provided by the White House, the vessel sports an image of Trump on its upper deck.
Trump seems to be focusing on creating a golden legacy for himself as the MAGA movement falters.
At a news conference today from Mar-a-Lago announcing the new Trump-class ships, Trump expressed concern that Americans were still talking about the Epstein files. “A lot of people are very angry that pictures are being released of other people that really had nothing to do with Epstein. But they’re in a picture with him because he was at a party, and you ruined a reputation of somebody,” Trump said. “A lot of people are very angry that this continues. A lot of Republicans,” he added.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act required the Justice Department to release all the files by Friday, but it has released only about 10,000 of what are apparently hundreds of thousands of documents, and those are heavily redacted. Department leaders are quite obviously covering up material, suggesting that what remains unknown is so hideous that Trump and his loyalists have concluded it’s better to break the law Congress passed to provide transparency, thus infuriating the MAGA base that voted for Trump because he lied that he would release the files, than to let anyone know what they’re hiding.
Former president Bill Clinton issued a statement today demanding that the Department of Justice follow the law and “produce the full and complete record the public demands and deserves.” The material the department has released implies that a major perpetrator of abuse in the files is Clinton. Today he noted that the department’s actions make it clear that “someone or something is being protected.” Clinton says he needs “no such protection” and calls “on President Trump to direct Attorney General Bondi to immediately release any remaining materials referring to, mentioning, or containing a photograph of Bill Clinton.”
In other words, as USA Today opinion columnist Michael J. Stern put it: “Bill Clinton just called Trump & Pam Bondi’s bluff.”
MAGA leaders are now openly fighting over its future. At this weekend’s Turning Point USA AmericaFest, Erika Kirk, the widow of the late Charlie Kirk, announced her support for Vice President J.D. Vance for president in 2028, although Trump has been handing out Trump 2028 hats. As recently as last week, Brian Schwartz of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has been talking with lawyer Alan Dershowitz about ways in which he could constitutionally serve a third term. (He cannot.)
As Andrew Howard of Politico reported, the conference featured infighting in which prominent podcaster Ben Shapiro called out right-wing influencers Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Steve Bannon, who have lately moved even further toward the Nazi far right as “frauds and grifters.” Meanwhile, prominent employees are leaving the Heritage Foundation after its right-wing leader, Kevin Roberts, defended Carlson’s friendly interview with far-right Groyper leader Nick Fuentes. Many of those leaving Heritage are moving to former vice president Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom foundation, established in 2021 after Trump supporters called for Pence’s hanging. Pence’s shop rejects the trade walls, isolationism, and strongman rule of Trumpism.
That split is showing elsewhere. Ewan Palmer of The Daily Beast reported today that Texas senator and podcaster Ted Cruz is bad-mouthing Vance as he considers a 2028 presidential run, and notably, the state senators in Pence’s home state of Indiana recently rejected Trump’s demands that they redistrict the state in Trump’s favor.
And there is strong pushback to what appears to be last night’s attempt to censor the press.
On Sunday the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, pulled a 60 Minutes story about the Trump administration’s renditions of migrants to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador just hours before it was scheduled to air. The 60 Minutes story had undergone the normal process of vetting, fact-checking, and legal reviews. In an email to the newsroom, Weiss said she pulled the story, which focused on the torture the prisoners endured, because it did not present the administration’s justification for sending 252 migrants to CECOT.
Weiss took over the top editorship of CBS News in October after Paramount Skydance, owned by Trump loyalist David Ellison, bought her opinion website Free Press for $150 million. Ellison’s Paramount Skydance is currently in the midst of attempting a hostile takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN. Yesterday, billionaire Larry Ellison, David Ellison’s father, personally guaranteed that he would stand behind more than $40 billion in financing required for the deal.
The 60 Minutes correspondent who reported the story, Sharyn Alfonsi, wrote in an email to her colleagues: “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now—after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
Alfonsi also noted that the journalists had repeatedly asked for interviews with administration officials, who did not answer. “Government silence is a statement,” she wrote, “not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story. If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.”
But it turned out that the segment had already been distributed in Canada, and copies of it appeared in the U.S. this afternoon. Legal analyst Asha Rangappa watched it and explained that it “debunks the fundamental claim used by [the] Trump admin[istration] that the detainees it sent there are ‘terrorists’ and corroborates torture using clips from El Salvadorean influencers Bukele uses internally. Would be a shock to low information voters, probably.” Journalist Parker Molloy, who covers the media and culture, observed: “People are going to get to see a totally normal news piece that clearly isn’t biased against Trump and think, ‘She was afraid that THIS would upset the administration??’”
Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote commented: “Had Bari Weiss just ran the story, it would have been seen by a couple million people tops. The bootleg has now gone viral, and may end up being the most-watched 60 Minutes segment ever.”
In a new YouGov poll conducted for The Economist , fewer than half of Republicans say they “strongly approve” of Trump, and only a third of Republicans approve strongly of his handling of inflation and prices.
All of this adds up to a president who thinks a lot about gold and his legacy. On Friday, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo observed that, these days, the political world around Trump “has a feeling of drift, spectacle and fragmentation. Trump’s ballroom epitomizes it—crass, stupid, vulgar, unacceptable and yet ultimately meaningless. It’s the full-size version of having his stacked Kennedy Center board, of which he is the chairman, rename the institution after him…. These all have the feeling of a man who is bored, tapped out, losing coherence and energy and who others are trying to keep distracted.”
Toria Sheffield of People magazine reports that at this weekend’s Turning Point USA AmericaFest, Fox News Channel host Jesse Watters told the audience that the ballroom President Donald J. Trump wants to build next to the White House is “four times the size of the White House.” According to Watters, Trump told him: “Jesse, it’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself because no one else will.”
—
Notes:
Bluesky:
michaeljstern.bsky.social/post/3mam3uvjufk2p
alexshephard.bsky.social/post/3malxpxwtqc2d
annabower.bsky.social/post/3makcn2bwzk27
parkermolloy.com/post/3mameew42w225
newsguy.bsky.social/post/3mamdczrle22n
asharangappa.bsky.social/post/3mamfdvehnk22
muellershewrote.com/post/3mampmradyc23
A blithering old man who has no idea what he's talking about....
Pretty sure you can safely file this under Shit That Will Never Happen.
It takes years to develop a new ship, so... Yes. Thank God!
From what I hear, our shipyards aren’t even set up to build a ship like that anymore.
Nope, but Japan and Korea are, lol.
Lol which Korea?
the Southern part,
B - 4
U sink Trumps battleshit
L oser X 10
understand he might blow up the world and go home, when he loses, and it is coming.
Glad to see Trump may be able to shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose support, but when it comes to raping and trafficking young girls, even maga screams out ABORT
! doubt we will ever see another actual Iowa Class Battleship ( 887 feet long, 58,000tonnes ) because we have 4 in "preserved" status. If needed they would require a lot less time and
money to be in harm's way as opposed these trumpian battlecruisers of 35,000tonnes, almost as long which aren't even scheduled for construction until the 2030s.
I’m pretty sure you’ve seen the New Jersey Battleship there in Camden before. Have been on it a few times, and quite impressive
which are already made obsolete by weaponized drones today ...
There was a reminder article today about the time the BBS Missouri was firing supporting desert Storm in 1991 and had two Iraqi Silkworm missiles fired at her fairly point
blank but counterfire from the big old girl confused one Silkworm and the HHS Gloucester killed the second Silkworm with the first combat missile to missile kill using one of their own designed Sea Dart missiles.
A second incident the same day triggered the Phalanx on the USS Jarrett which inadvertently sprayed the Missouri with 20mm cannon fire producing minor damage.
Such is the fog of war.
likely not the first time in it's history, just based on the WWII naval footage I've seen ...
Yes multiple instances when Pearl was attacked
From toy soldier to draft dodger to racist slum lord to con man to rapist and child molester to CiC to ship design expert.
Ya just can't make this shit up.
the maga version of tinker, tailor, soldier, spy ...