Key Points and Summary – President Trump says the Navy will launch a new ‘Trump-class’ battleship program as part of a broader push to rebuild U.S. maritime capacity.
-He touted a first ship, USS Defiant, and promised a heavily armed design featuring hypersonic missiles, railguns, lasers, and nuclear-capable cruise missiles, arguing today’s fleet is too small and too slow to build.
-The move follows his April maritime executive order and months of rhetoric about steel warships over lighter designs.
-Retired officers and naval analysts remain wary, warning that battleships are ill-suited to modern A2/AD threats and could crowd out higher-priority ships and strain tight budgets.
Trump Unveils “Trump-Class” Battleships—And a New “Golden Fleet” Push
From time to time, in the first year of his second presidency, Donald Trump has talked about wanting to bring back battleships.
In April, the president issued an executive order titled “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance.”
While the order did not specifically mention battleships, it called for a Maritime Action Plan (MAP) to improve shipbuilding.
“The commercial shipbuilding capacity and maritime workforce of the United States has been weakened by decades of Government neglect, leading to the decline of a once strong industrial base while simultaneously empowering our adversaries and eroding United States national security,” the April order said.
“Both our allies and our strategic competitors produce ships for a fraction of the cost needed in the United States. Recent data shows that the United States constructs less than one percent of commercial ships globally, while the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is responsible for producing approximately half.”
Trump-Class Battleship. Image Credit: Creative Commons/White House.
“Something We’re Actually Considering”
During this fall’s Quantico meeting with military leaders from around the world, Trump brought up the idea.
“It’s something we’re actually considering,” Trump said, as reported at the time by Business Insider, “the concept of battleship, nice six-inch side, solid steel, not aluminum, aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. Starts melting as the missile’s about two miles away. No, those ships, they don’t make them that way anymore.”
“I’m not a fan of some of the ships you do. I’m a very aesthetic person, and I don’t like some of the ships you’re doing aesthetically,” Trump added at the Quantico meeting.
Battleships are a thing of the past, with the last ones having been decommissioned in the early 1990s. The last time new battleships were built was around World War II.
“I look at those ships, they came with the destroyers alongside of them, and man, nothing was gonna stop them,” Trump added in the September meeting. “Some people would say, ‘No, that’s old technology,’ I don’t know, I don’t think it’s old technology when you look at those guns.”
This looked, for a long time, like a usual Trump nostalgia trip that wouldn’t lead to anything real. But on Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was preparing to announce that the Navy would begin building a new “Trump class” battleship, part of what Trump calls the “Golden Fleet.”
The new battleships, per the Journal, would represent an upgrade to the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, but with an all-new design.
The Announcement
Trump made the official announcement at Mar-a-Lago on Monday.
As reported by Fox News, the announcement came alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan.
“As you know, we’re desperately in need of ships. Our ships are some of them have gotten old and tired and obsolete,” the president said, while also promising that the new ships will be “100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built.”
Trump spoke in front of renderings of the new ships in the “Trump-Class,” one of which will be called the USS Defiant.
The Navy will start by procuring two ships, and eventually “working up to 10 and eventually 20 ships to 25 ships in total,” Fox said.
“Battleships are the largest, sturdiest, and most heavily armed vessel built specifically for naval combat. While America has built many new warships over the years, they’ve tended to be smaller, much smaller, and not conducive to where we are and where we’re going — peace through strength,” Trump said, as reported by Breaking Defense.
The ships, Trump said, will feature such weaponry as “hypersonic missiles, electric rail guns… high-powered laser systems, [and] nuclear-capable sea-launched cruise missiles.”
“We make the best equipment in the world, but they don’t make it fast enough,” Trump added. “I mean, I have sold more planes than any president by far times, probably 20. So every time I go someplace, I sell 100 planes… And I’m always having to say five years, six years, seven years, helicopters, Apache helicopters, many years.”
Naval News described the look of the ships based on that rendering.
“Renderings show USS Defiant built with an integrated superstructure and several remote weapon systems, as well as an unidentified gun system similar in appearance to the Zumwalt-class 155mm Advanced Gun System (AGS). The gun appears to be a railgun, which President Trump confirmed would be equipped on the ships.”
The battleship announcement follows the Navy’s announcement this fall that it was killing the last four Constellation-class frigates.
Trump also announced that he plans to meet with defense contractors next week.
“We’re going to be discussing [capital expenditure] spending. We’ll be discussing the pay to executives, where they’re making $45 and $50 million a year and not being able to build quickly. They’re going to make that kind of money. They have to build quickly,” Trump said at the Mar-a-Lago event on Monday
“And we’re going to be also discussing dividends. We want the dividends to go into the creation of production facilities.”
Experts Are Skeptical
When the return of battleships has been brought up in the past, experts have been skeptical. And they continued to be, once the Journal story appeared on Monday.
Iowa-Class Battleship. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Battleships are fairly obsolete and not really a great fit for modern warfare. The countries that the U.S. could potentially fight wars against don’t use those sorts of weapons.
“The problem is that passive systems need to protect a ship from a wide range of different attacks, including cruise missiles, torpedoes, ballistic missiles, and long-range guns. Keeping a ship well-protected from these threats, all of which it could anticipate facing in an anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) situation, would likely prove cost-prohibitive,” 19FortyFive contributor Robert Farley wrote in 2024.
In the WSJ story, Retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery called the investment in new battleships “exactly what we don’t need.”
The battleship USS Missouri (BB-63) stands moored to a pier at Naval Station Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Missouri is in Hawaii to take part in the observance of the 50th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
“We do not need ships that are not optimized to provide lethality against the Chinese threat,” Montgomery added.
“That is not what these are focused on—they are focused on the president’s visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship.”
About the Author: Stephen Silver
Stephen Silver is an award-winning journalist, essayist, and film critic, and contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review, and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. For over a decade, Stephen has authored thousands of articles that focus on politics, national security, technology, and the economy. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @StephenSilver, and subscribe to his Substack newsletter.
